Building Disaster Resilience: Steps toward Sustainability

Journal Title: Challenges in Sustainability - Year 2013, Vol 1, Issue 2

Abstract

Disaster losses continue to escalate globally and in many regions human losses (death, injury, permanent displacement) often exceed the economic toll. Current disaster policies are reactive with a short-term focus―respond and rebuild as quickly as possible and in the same way after the event. Such policies ignore the longer-term approach of building disaster-resilient communities, in which investments made now show financial and social returns later by reducing the impact of disasters. This article provides a vision for resilient nations in 2030 based on three recent policy reports. It highlights the necessary steps to wards achieving sustainability using the lens of disaster resilience as the pathway towards strengthening communities' ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, respond to, and recover from present and future disasters.

Authors and Affiliations

Susan Cutter

Keywords

Related Articles

Alternative Perspectives on Sustainability: Indigenous Knowledge and Methodologies

Indigenous knowledge (IK) is now recognized as being critical to the development of effective, equitable and meaningful strategies to address socio-ecological crises. However efforts to integrate IK and Western science f...

Sustainability Challenges in an Urban Century: Can We Change Urbanization Paths to Make Cities the Solutions for Rather than the Drivers of Global Problems?

Is urbanization a danger or a solution to global sustainability? What institutions need to change to make urban areas more sustainable? In examining urbanization rates in countries over time, we see that they are often m...

A Review of 'Energy and Transport in Green Transition: Perspectives on Ecomodernity'

The book “Energy and Transport in Green Transitions – Perspectives on Ecomodernity” deals with the societally and scientifically crucial topic of energy and climate change mitigation. The book starts by setting high ambi...

Towards the Evaluation of the Ecological Effectiveness of the Principles, Criteria and Indicators (PCI) of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC): Case study in the Arkhangelsk Region in the Russian Federation

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is a voluntary sustainability standard with global reach that has been developed to encourage responsible and sustainable forest management. Despite its broad appeal, there is little...

Identifying Context-Specific Categories for Visualizing Livability of Cities—a Case Study of Malmö

Livability is a concept being applied to cities, even though it is vague. Worldwide, there are several livable city ranking schemes in use, which compare the livability of cities by making use of standardized indicator s...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP196662
  • DOI 10.12924/cis2013.01020072
  • Views 187
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Susan Cutter (2013). Building Disaster Resilience: Steps toward Sustainability. Challenges in Sustainability, 1(2), 72-79. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-196662