Risk, Resilience, and Readiness: Developing an All-Hazards Perspective

This chapter discusses how readiness contributes to developing community resilience. It does so from the perspective of understanding how people interpret risk, make disaster risk reduction (DRR) choices, and implement actions to manage their risk under conditions of uncertainty. It proposes that the development of DRR strategies that facilitate sustained readiness must accommodate two issues. The first is to identify the atypical demands and challenges people need to be resilient to and/or adapt to and that change as people negotiate the impact, response, and recovery phases of disaster experience. The second issue derives from identifying how personal, community, and societal factors interact to predict whether and to what extent people and communities proactively develop sustained resilient and adaptive capacity. The chapter draws on empirical studies undertaken in Thailand (2004 Indian Ocean tsunami) and New Zealand (2011 Christchurch earthquake) to illustrate the nature of resilience. Studies of earthquake, tsunami, and wildfire readiness serve to illustrate how theory supports an all-hazards approach to increasing readiness in DRR strategies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of issues that need to be incorporated in a comprehensive theory of readiness and the need to accommodate people at different levels of readiness when developing DRR strategies.