Today is the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction. The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has recently published the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2025, which estimates that the true cost of disasters is nearly $2.3 trillion. This year’s call is to “Fund Resilience, Not Disasters” as part of the international day, with the UNDRR arguing for a “decisive shift” towards funding resilience now to avoid paying for disasters later.
Understanding disasters and resilience: three challenges
This raises many questions. How are ‘disasters’ understood? And in turn how is ‘resilience’ imagined? These are questions discussed in my book ‘Navigating Uncertainty’ (open access) and in particular in the chapter on disasters. There has been a huge amount of investment in disaster risk reduction, much of which is focused on developing early warning and anticipation capacities. While there has been growing recognition that disasters are often linked as part of ‘compounding’ and ‘cascading’ effects, with ‘multi-hazard frameworks’ connecting different disasters, some problematic assumptions remain.
- First, the focus is on risk – assuming the disaster event(s) can be predicted and therefore anticipated. There is much emphasis on ‘anticipatory action’, which is all well and good if you can indeed anticipate, but in most cases, there remains much uncertainty – where we don’t know the likelihoods of outcomes – and sometimes simple ignorance – where we don’t know what we don’t know. Under these conditions, the hubristic assumptions of prediction and so management and control (for example through insurance) are fundamentally undermined. The investments in early warning, prediction and insurance therefore end up offering false promises.
- Second, disasters are often not singular events, but they unfold slowly. Unlike a sudden earthquake, for example, many disasters emerge over time and are perceived by local people in very different ways to outsiders. Pastoralists experiencing drought for example, do not see it as an event that can be predicted and managed, but as part of an unfolding experience that must be responded to incrementally in real time. Reliability – and so resilience – in the face of variable conditions is generated through a range of practices that accept uncertainty and the impossibility of control. This means that single, time-specified interventions will miss their mark and many official ‘disaster responses’ may not be compatible with local understandings and response systems.
- Third, different people experience disasters in very different ways. There are underlying patterns of vulnerability that affect such experiences and shape responses. These are differentiated by age, gender, ethnicity, class and their intersections. Vulnerabilities in turn are generated through long histories of ‘structural violence’ due to marginalisation, dispossession and colonialism for example. Failing to address these structural features underlying differentiated disaster impacts can undermine ‘sticking plaster’ responses.
Reframing approaches
The focus of UNDRR on resilience is important. But building resilience requires incorporating all three of these dimensions. Unfortunately, they are currently almost completely ignored in UNDRR recommendations, and indeed in major funding calls on disaster preparedness and response. These approaches need to be reframed, lest the same failures of the past are repeated.
This means embracing uncertainty and not reducing everything to attempts at predictive risk management and control, which so often fail. It means accepting the temporalities of understanding and response of local people, rather than assuming that a disaster is a single event that can be responded to from outside. And it means addressing differential patterns of vulnerability emerging from historical, political-economic structural conditions.
The funds that UNDRR is calling for to switch from disaster response to building resilience must not be spent on yet more failed ‘resilience projects’, however. These too often fail to incorporate the lessons highlighted above. Instead, in a reduced funding environment for disaster response, there is a need to support the building of ‘resilience from below’ and so the capacities of so-called ‘high reliability professionals’ and their networks, embedded in local communities, with resilience understood as a process rather than singular system fix.
External UN-led projects generally do not respond effectively to complex, uncertain disaster settings. There is a need instead to build on local networks and forms of mutual aid and support that can respond in real time to unfolding uncertainties, building the capacities to generate reliability in highly variable conditions. This is a very different approach to that currently suggested, but could offer a very different way forward, and perhaps can be a focus for reflection on today’s International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction.
#DRRday #ResiliencePays
This post was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland.