Research Proposal

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine the best strategies for community resilience building to minimize the impact of natural disasters. This paper seeks to answer the research question, how do the various strategies of community resilience building help minimize the impact of natural disasters. The goal is to analyze these strategies and find whether they are playing a role in community preparedness.

Introduction

Community resilience is the capability of a community to minimize the probability, endure and recuperate from disasters such as disease pandemic and economic stress. In recent years, community resilience has become a significant policy matter. Some of the institutions embracing this resilience are the homeland security department, health and human services department, local and state levels.

Community resilience is critical to the community and national health security by ensuring that there is preparedness, protection, response and recovery from incidents that may come with negative health consequences (National Health Security Strategy, 2009). During an emergency, resources are very limited and therefore communities may need to fight by themselves before getting help from the outside and therefore there is a great necessity to build resilience prior to a disaster. Resilience also means that the community must have the ability to minimize the recovery period after the emergency which requires resources and time at local, state and federal levels.

There is a common agreement that community resilience involves communities being able to survive and manage stress after a disaster occurs. However, there are lacks clarity on the detailed process of resilience building. This means that there is a limited understanding of the course of action to enable communities to recover from disasters. Some of the factors identified by existing literature include reducing vulnerabilities and having preventative measures.

Key components of community resilience building

There are major blocks for community resilience that influences the ability of a community to prevent vulnerability and its capacity to recover including psychological, social, economic, individual, and physical wellbeing. One of the building blocks in the level of social incorporation of non-governmental and governmental institutions in preparation, response, and recovery as well as the collaboration of the community. To attain community resilience, it is important to develop capabilities in areas of developing social networks, stakeholder engagement in disaster planning and preparedness, developing plans and programs and creation of opportunities community preparedness during and after a disaster.

Pre-incident prevention and population wellness

To prevent disaster incidents and enable community wellness it is necessary to create a culture where people are aware of the linkage between personal and community readiness and further understand how they should continue healthy (Norris et al., 2008). Ensuring such a culture is however dependent on how information is conveyed to the people. Benight, Ironson, Klebe, Carver, Wynings and Burnett (1999), stated that sending messages that are well framed can make people take actions to improve their psychological and physical health. Such messages can enable the community to have good psychological health by supporting the focus on health and awareness rather than having fear. Any information sent to people must be culturally appropriate since cultural barriers such as different social norms and language barriers can cause misunderstandings. People in risk population areas are majorly influenced by how information is framed and therefore cultural differences must be considered at all costs (Walker & Chestnut, 2003).

The extent to which a community is affected by disasters is depended on the wellness of the community members in terms of their social, physical and behavioral well-being at the time of the disaster. The community's well-being affects people's need for resources and time took to recover. Therefore, sustaining the overall awareness can act as individual and social resilience resources (Norris et al., 2008). Community resilience rests on the extent to which individuals in the community practices their lifestyle and how much they are aware of community-related functional needs. If these needs are ignored rendering emergency response and recovery can be very difficult.

Similarly, recovery is more difficult for communities with a low level of wellness in that they have inadequate resources to mitigate or cope with the incident (Andrulis, Sid-diqui, & Gantner, 2007). This means that existing vulnerabilities and disadvantaging conditions must be addressed especially for the high-risk populations.

Resilience and sustainable development

Community resilience has some elements that address sustainable development including social development, education, economic development, natural environment, government and institutions, and the built environment. These are various principles that must be present to create an enabling environment to attain community resilience. Natural disasters possess risks that are associated with elements of unsustainable development. Disaster risk reduction is important in achieving sustainable development by reducing the loss associated with disasters. Nations have a key responsibility for DRR hence it needs to be integrated and act as a government investment towards sustainable development. Therefore, it is necessary to link sustainable development to community vulnerability and resilience (Normandin, Therrien & Tanguay, 2009).

Developing a resilient community, communities must know that they do not exist in isolation instead they must get support externally, for example, emergency management, social economic and political linkages and administrative services (Zhou, Wang, Wan, & Jia, 2010). This external support provides an enabling environment in risk prevention which needs the collaboration of different sectors such as the government.

Role of education: Education can help in community resilience building through raising awareness and capacity building. OECD (2009) argues that natural disaster awareness and education are very important in effective disaster risk management strategies. Creating public awareness brings about changes that cause a culture of safety and resilience which involve the establishment of institutions and networks for community engagement and information dissemination. It works in developing human skills and societal infrastructures (Djalante, Thomalla, Holley, & Carnegie, 2013). Capacity development is very important in disaster risk recovery as it helps building and maintaining people’s ability to manage risks successfully.

Role of governance and institutions: UNISDR (2008) mentions that governance can provide disaster resilience and enabling the environment in two ways. First is through encouraging multi-stakeholder engagement and participation in disaster risk recovery activities. Secondly is through providing a joint framework for institutions at different levels.

Economic development: Economic development is important in reducing community vulnerability. It provides an enabling environment so that the community can become self-reliant (UNISDR, 2008). Economic development can reduce poverty which is known to increase vulnerability since the poor are the ones who bear the consequences of a disaster. A community’s ability to be prepared and to recover from a disaster is affected by the diversity of living sources and their economic strength (Berke & Campanella, 2006). To achieve community resilience people must be given capitals to make the lives of the poor (Miletti, 1999).

Physical infrastructures: Having a built-environment is important in community resilience since it reduces risks from disasters through structural and non-structural infrastructures (Berke & Campanella, 2006). This can include engineering techniques, development of physical structures to avoid the impacts of a disaster (UN/ISDR, 2009). For example, having earthquake-proof structures, building dams, dikes, and barriers can help minimize the impact of a natural disaster if it happens. All these involve applying knowledge, developing practice and agreements, policies, codes and laws.

Social development: This aims at reducing the social vulnerabilities of communities. The vulnerability involves all the social, physical, environmental and economic factors that increase the probability of a community to the consequences of the disaster (DMTP, 2004). Hence social development reduces social vulnerability and eventually increases social resilience. Vulnerability is an important concept in disaster risk recovery. Social vulnerability is influenced by literacy and education, social equity, values, beliefs, security, and peace.

Ecosystems: This involves natural resources including food and diversity. One of the things that have increased the risks of natural disasters is environmental degradation as it causes changes in climate and decreases the physical capacity of ecosystems. Ecological resilience is important in building community resilience (Walker, 1995).

Resilience and Disaster risk recovery

Disaster risk reduction plays a big role in community resilience building. This is possible through disaster preparedness, risk knowledge, response, and recovery from disasters. All these approaches provide help in identification, assessment, and reduction of disaster risks. Disaster risk recovery helps communities to see disasters as complicated challenges that need a collective response from various bodies and institutions. Disaster risk reduction is crucial in determining the features of a resilient community through prioritization and engagement in collaborations and partnerships with different bodies.

Disaster preparedness: This involves measures and activities implemented before a disaster occurrence to ensure an effective response to disasters such as giving early warnings and evacuation of people in vulnerable locations. Disaster preparedness can be made possible through prediction, giving warnings, putting in place measures and responses as well as providing a chance to communities to take actions in reducing risks and make sure people learn from experience (UNISDR, 2008). The most important factors to ensure community preparedness include community's networks, values and capacity all that ensure communities are well organized to survive disasters and recover (DMTP, 2004).

Risk knowledge: risk is the probability of an event occurrence and it’s impacts. The negative impact can be on lives, health, assets, service in a community (Djalante et al., 2013). To be able to build community resilience communities must create awareness and increase knowledge about the potential risks and vulnerability. Gaining comprehensive knowledge can encompass capacity and vulnerability assessment of potential risks to disasters that can happen in a community. With such information, communities can, therefore, design responses to eliminate the probability of occurrence and minimize the negative impacts. Such knowledge is very important for the community to recover after a disaster.

Emergency management: This includes structures, arrangements, and plans established to engage private agencies, government, and voluntary agencies in a coordinated manner to respond to emergency needs (Djalante et al., 2013). When developing emergency management plans it is important to ensure coordination of effective management. Effective emergency response plans are very helpful in helping communities to recover faster from a disaster (UN/ISDR, 2008).

Disaster recovery and reconstruction: disaster recovery involves restoring and improving the way of life including natural resources, services, and livelihoods after a community is impacted by a disaster. Recovery and reconstruction affect community resilience first in the manner in which it needs to improve living conditions to make lower vulnerability to similar disasters and secondly building a better community through better disaster risk reduction measures through considering the disaster as a way of learning and adapting (Djalante et al., 2013)

Resilience and community engagement

One of the best ways to build community resilience to minimize the impact of disasters is through community engagement. This would include activities like building values, trust, networks, capacity, and partnerships. These are important concepts in resilience and they play a big role in enabling the community to shift from vulnerabilities and needs to reinforce capacities for community resilience. The focus should be more on resilience than needs and vulnerabilities are helpful for communities to focus on what they can do to strengthen the capacity to face disasters (Berke & Campanella, 2006). In the emergency management context community is a group of people living together and exposed to similar hazards. (UN/ISDR, 2008) claims that understanding values, beliefs and perception of a community at risk is crucial since such knowledge is best in defining actions for community resilience building that are consistent with community value. When community consistent actions are put in place it becomes easy for the community to accept them sustainably.

Community involvement in designing and implementation actions is crucial to ensure the actual needs and vulnerabilities of the community are addressed (PreventionWeb, 2010). Community involvement is also vital in overcoming secondary impacts in the occurrence of a disaster. Such an approach help bring together traditional knowledge and enhance knowledge and capacity. Community engagement is also effective in decision making regarding policies and processes for institutions.

The relevance of resilience building

In places where some of the strategies are implemented in community-based resilience projects proofs, tar resilience is important as a process than an outcome. The instance of mid-term review at the international level undertaken in 2009 by HFA made it possible for countries to build a more disaster-resilient community as well as comparing the successes with those of other nations. The midterm review is an important process requiring collaboration from various stakeholders with numerous functions in resilience building (PreventionWeb, 2010). The review activities are important in gaining insights from various countries. Reporting to the midterm review is done by government bodies accountable for disaster management nationally using aggregated indicators. However, resilience-building insights are for the top levels of governance. Additionally, in-depth studies, online debates, and workshops are important in implementation by nations.

There are suggestions that a multicultural country civil society process is beneficial in enhancing accountability and opening ways for communication between policymakers and the community. Twigg (2009) also noted that community resilience strategies are vital tools. However, the learning process is more important in ensuring that implementation activities are taken seriously at the local level.

Implementing community resilience strategies enable learning in implementing resilience activities that empower communities and institutions. These programs should be implemented as an initial step to ensure continuous learning and practice (Twigg, 2009). It is however important that the strategies be tailored to the specific context to make them relevant in the participatory processes.

Some countries like Malawi and Bangladesh implemented some of the frameworks which showed that there was a need to transform the strategies into local languages and to establish specific resilience goals in the specific conditions (Dilloway & Chadburn, 2008). Bangladesh implementation report indicated that the main reason for implementing the strategy was to familiarize the principles of a disaster-resilient community to disaster management partners (Dilloway & Chadburn, 2008). Conversely, the process went beyond and allowed discussions and learning among the partners. The report also showed that there is a need to make the strategies simple to make the local community understand them effectively and identify indicators for specific situations (Dilloway & Chadburn, 2008). On the other side, in Malawi it was found out that the main reason was to assess how disaster management partners take their resilience-building capacities. The reports given indicated that the discussion was crucial in creating a platform for learning, interactions and building partnerships between organizations (Dilloway & Chadburn, 2008).

Method

To answer the proposed research question I will use databases. The databases to be sampled would include documents, reports, proposals and implementation policies by governments and other institutions responsible for disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. This would include the recent documents and most importantly those that were successful in disaster management. Some of the keywords that would be used in the search in databases include community resilience, resilience building, disaster management, community wellness, and pre-incidence prevention. All the documents provided by emergency bodies, local, federal and national governments either as proposals and implementation reports will be used in the research.

References