Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) is a systematic approach to identifying, assessing, and reducing the risks of disaster. It aims to reduce socio-economic vulnerabilities to disaster as well as deal with the environmental and other hazards that trigger them. Community resilience is the sustained ability of a community to use available resources (energy, communication, transportation, food, etc.) to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations. This allows for the adaptation and growth of a community after disaster strikes. The scope of community resilience extends beyond natural disasters and includes man made ones too.

Role Of Community Resilience In Drr

1. Communities are getting increasingly complex, and so are the challenges they face. Human-caused and natural disasters are more frequent now and costly too. Factors like climate change, globalization, and increased urbanization can bring disaster related risks to greater numbers of people.
2. In this backdrop community resilience becomes crucial. Developing community resilience benefits disaster planners and community members alike. It expands the traditional preparedness approach by encouraging actions that build preparedness while also promoting strong community systems.
3. In disaster risk reduction key preparedness activities such as continuity of operations plans for organizations, compiling disaster kits etc continue to be essential. A resilience approach adds features like building social connectedness and improving everyday health, wellness, and community systems.
4. Earlier, the approach to Disaster Management (DM) was primarily reactive and relief-centric. However, disaster response alone is not sufficient as it yields only temporary results at a very high cost.
5. Community resilience allows better planning for disasters to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward.
6. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.
7. The emphasis on community resilience has emerged from the need to identify principles and measures to protect development gains from shocks and stresses. Thus the aim here is to engage the community to ensure that shocks and stresses do not lead to a long-term downturn in development progress.

Community Resilience Is Not Enough

Communities do not exist in isolation. The level of a community’s resilience is also influenced by capacities outside the community, in particular by emergency management services but also by other social and administrative services, public infrastructure, and a web of socio-economic and political linkages with the wider world. Apart from community resilience we need:

1. Understanding Disaster Risk by promoting the collection, analysis, management, and use of relevant data and practical information and ensuring its dissemination.
2. Strengthening disaster risk governance by establishing and strengthening government coordination forums composed of relevant stakeholders at the national and local levels, and having a designated national focal point for implementing the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030.
3. Enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response and to “Build Back Better” in recovery, rehabilitation, and reconstruction.
4. To enhance international mechanisms, such as the International Recovery Platform, for the sharing of experience and learning among countries and all relevant stakeholders.

Disaster Management has to be a multi-disciplinary and proactive approach. Besides various measures for putting in place institutional and policy framework, disaster prevention, mitigation, community resilience, and preparedness have a key role to play in achieving our goal of moving together, towards a safer India.