Natural Disaster Resilience and Recovery – towards Sustainable and Equitable Resilience

Dear Colleagues,

In recent decades and worldwide, we have seen an increased impact from natural disasters such as floods, wildfires, heatwaves, drought, storms, cyclones and earthquakes, with devastating consequences and long-term financial and social impacts on communities and individuals.

Climate change is expected to worsen extreme weather, resulting in more frequent and intense impacts. In addition, urban expansion in high-risk areas prone to natural disasters has dramatically increased the economic, social, and environmental costs of recovering from such disasters. Not surprisingly, the cost associated with response and recovery from these disasters has risen. Some regions have experienced multiple disasters either concurrently or in short succession, amplifying population vulnerability and making recovery more challenging.

Disaster resilience encompasses the process of enabling a community to prepare, resist, absorb and recover from disaster. The concept has been widely adopted to reduce the impact of natural disasters and is central to the Sendai framework and sustainable development goals.

Building and increasing the resilience in communities, infrastructure and the natural environment is a responsibility shared between government, individuals and communities, and the private sector. It requires an up-to-date and shared informed understanding of hazards, exposure and vulnerability.

It is appropriate to consider the broad scope of what defines vulnerability, ensuring that it considers physical, social and economic aspects. Some communities are disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of disaster and access to knowledge and resources required to respond and recover. There is a need to understand and model the complex interactions and effectiveness of community resilience influences and values. The main purpose of this issue is to explore factors that influence resilience and their complex dependencies while achieving a more sustainable approach to coexist with natural hazards.

In this Special Issue, we are looking to publish research from the following areas:

• Disaster resilience definitions, frameworks
• Climate and disaster resilience
• Resilience and compound hazards
• Approaches to building resilient communities
• Understanding the role of community knowledge and capacity to learn
• Understanding hazard, exposure and risk
• Educational role in resilience
• Disaster resilience from the perspective of children
• Equitable resilience
• Social vulnerability and resilience
• Factors influencing community resilience
• Health resilience, mental health and well being
• Recovery approaches to improve resilience
• Other topics relevant to natural disaster resilience

Dr. Raphaele Blanchi
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• resilience
• vulnerability
• recovery
• sustainability and resilience
• climate change adaptation
• disaster risk reduction
• education
• children resilience
• community adaption