Disaster resilience: What it is and how it can engender a meaningful change in development policy

Disasters pose a growing threat to sustainable development. Disaster risk management efforts have largely failed to arrest the underlying drivers of growing risk globally: uncontrolled urbanization and proliferation of assets in hazardous areas. Resilience provides an opportunity to confront the social-ecological foundations of risk and development; yet it has been vaguely conceptualized, without offering a concrete approach to operationalization. We propose a conceptualization of disaster resilience centred on wellbeing: ‘The ability of a system, community or society to pursue its social, ecological and economic development objectives, while managing its disaster risk over time in a mutually reinforcing way.’ We present a conceptual framework for understanding the interconnections between disasters and development, and outline how it is being operationalized in practice

How to increase earthquake and home fire preparedness: the fix-it intervention

Published, evaluated community intervention studies concerning natural hazard preparedness are rare. Most lack a rigorous methodology, thereby hampering the development of evidence-based interventions. This paper describes the rationale and methodology of a cross-cultural, longitudinal intervention study on earthquake and home fire preparedness, termed fix-it. The aim is to evaluate whether and how the intervention brings about behaviour change in the targeted communities in two coastal cities with high seismic risk: Seattle, USA and Izmir, Turkey. Participants are adult residents of these cities. The intervention group attends a 6-h workshop, which focuses on securing items in the household. The control group does not attend the workshop. All participants complete baseline and post-intervention, as well as 3- and 12-month follow-up assessments. The primary outcome measure is an observational measure of nine preparedness items for earthquake and fire in participants’ homes. This is evaluated alongside participants’ self-reports concerning their preparedness levels. Secondary outcomes are changes in levels of self-efficacy, perceived outcome, trust, corruption, empowerment, anxiety and social cohesion. Results from the first of the studies, conducted in Seattle in September 2015, indicate that while the fix-it intervention is effective, in the longer term, multi-hazard preparedness is increased by the mere act of going into people’s homes to observe their preparedness levels along with assessing self-reported preparedness and sociopsychological orientation towards natural hazards. This protocol and study aim to augment the empirical literature on natural hazard preparedness, informing national and international policy on delivery of evidence-based community interventions to promote multi-hazard preparedness in households