The Resilience Paradigm: Facts for Transformation, Resilience Specificity

Development work has traditionally been centered on poverty reduction/ alleviation strategies, with attention on developing livelihood opportunities at the community level for the most disadvantaged. With climate change and the increasing frequency of natural hazards - including typhoons, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions - the progress of poverty alleviation strategies has been severely compromised.

The rise of disasters and number of people affected has tripled over the past three decades. Costs of disaster relief and recovery are draining away resources that should have been invested in development.

The devastating impact of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013 has become a constant reminder of how human life is at high risk to hazards, and also of the disproportionate effect they have on poor people. Unless more determined efforts address the loss of lives, livelihoods, deterioration of environment, and infrastructure, such human incapacity will become an increasingly serious obstacle to the achievement of any form of sustainable development.

This book provides a paradigm shift from poverty reduction to building resilience of each element at risk in the community. This will offer a new thinking of framing our work from the specific hazard perspective, how we will address the hazard and how to build resilience of the specific element at risk that would be hit by the specific hazard. It will introduce the resilience framework as the starting point to organize our work so that disasters will be avoided.