The main elements of resilience include strong governance at all levels
The United Nations defines resilience as the ability of individuals, communities, and nations to anticipate and adapt to risks, absorb, respond, and recover from the shock in a timely and effective manner without interfering with their long term goals and objectives. Resilience is achieved in a system that is made up of different relationships, activities, and interactions. Nations and communities are becoming increasingly complex, and so are the problems they are experiencing. Both man-made and natural disasters are becoming more frequent and expensive for countries to handle. Issue such as climate change, globalization, and high rates of urbanization can cause hazards which may affect a significant number of people. The main elements of resilience include strong governance at all levels.
Leadership
Effective leadership is required to drive toward resilience. Leadership should be taken seriously by all partners involved within the sphere of influence in an organized manner; this helps maximize the benefits from the limited resources. By utilizing the whole government’s strategy to broaden the circle of responsibility, collaboration should be done more firmly within the government to prevent disaster, preparations, response, and recovery. Selected leaders in the government, businesses, and the non-profit sector and the community generally strive to identify and understand the risks disaster poses to their community’s interest. Effective leaders should take responsibility for mitigating the risks and apply them in disaster resilience to the strategic planning process, and within the roles, they exercise their influence.
Leaders ensure the development of partners and networks necessary for building on resilience in the government, community, and business levels. The partnerships made are based on a sense of shared responsibility and acknowledging the requirement of a well-planned and coordinated response. The government supports the business and the non-profit leaders in preparing and offering guidelines, information, and additional resources to support the community efforts in resilience-based planning.
Understand the risks
Different and diverse regions, different landscapes mean that risks will always be expected, especially for the impacts of disasters. The most important underpinning disaster in a resilient community is through Knowledge and comprehending the local disaster risk. Everyone has the responsibility of understanding the risks involved and how they may affect the community. When people understand the nature and extent of the dangers people can know in different ways to control their impacts, we can also know how to prepare and recover from them.
Assessments on risks should be taken as a priority, especially for the communities at risk, the decision-makers, and the shareholders. These assessments consider the threats, capabilities, and vulnerabilities across different social, economic, and natural environments. Different methodologies and frameworks should be applied to the risk and disaster assessment to enable information sharing and accurate interpretation. Strong relationships and networks across different sectors will help fill gaps of information and the understanding in all the levels. Risk prevention and reduction information should be included in education and different training programs, for example, the enterprise training programs, professional educational packages, schools, and other institutions in higher education.
Communication
Communicating and educating people on the different risks helps reduce the threats brought by disasters. Different risks within a nation and community should be discussed publicly to ensure that people can anticipate and manage them. Knowledge is essential in allowing everyone within the community setting to identify their hazards and risks, Knowledge ensures that everyone is informed on preparation and mitigation measures. While communicating, it’s important to communicate the relevant and available information during the response and the recovery stages of a disaster. Sharing of information, including learning from previous events, is also crucial in promoting innovation and best practice in resilience.
Partnering with those in the effect of change
Working as a unit while drawing expertise from different partners produces more significant results than having individual efforts. Partnerships in the governmental, private, business, and non-governmental sectors and the communities create a well-informed, coordinated strategy, increasing disaster resilience; thus, this will lead towards a resilient nation. Building on networks with the private sector should be a priority; this is because the private sector controls a majority of infrastructure and provides services that will allow the community to function smoothly. Either large or small businesses play an essential role in preparing and handling the consequences of an event. This is key as it helps communities in their continuity after a disaster.
Communities usually eat not under any specific authority; however, they function under policies and practices that have been implemented and enforced in different government levels. It is important for the country’s operation and economy for a nation to be more resilient. The importance of policies developed for national resilience is to look at the long term community resilience and help eliminate the short term utilities, which can hinder resilience. The systems meant to improve the community and national resilience are developed and customized specifically to address the resilience issue, or in other aspects, they are designed for different reasons. Still, they, however, acknowledge the essence and the process of building on resilience. Policies, especially at the government level, are required to evaluate their effect on the long-term resilience of both the communities and the government.
Improving national resilience through specific policy measures entails addressing particular aspects of resilience. For instance, policy mechanisms usually play an important role in risk management by providing information that will help identify potential hazards. However, Knowledge alone is not enough to ensure resilience; we have aspects like leaderships and resources, which are also essential for resilience. Improvement of resilience is usually driven by the need and value propositions, and they likely to be monitored using specific indicators and tools. On a national level, the policies that improve resilience are basically disaster reduction policies. Most policies that affect the national policies are most not associated with a specific hazard and event of a disaster; this includes policies that only apply to subsystems in a community and others, which may impact the community’s essential services, for instance, education, health care.
The national policies are meant to offer laws and practices which address the national needs that address the needs of individual communities. These policies usually address matters within the national scope and importance, regardless of whether the issues are local. In an effort to improve resilience, a nation should focus on the components of resilience:
Taking responsibility for the disaster risk, address the challenges of establishing the value of resilience in communities, including the loss of information on the disaster, which fosters long term commitments on enhancing resilience. Developing and executing the tools required for monitoring the efforts towards building on resilience, Focus on the local and community capacities because the decisions on the ultimate resilience of a community and nation are made from the bottom upwards. It is also important to understand the government’s landscape on policies and practices to allow the communities to enhance resilience. Finally, communicate the specific roles and the responsibilities of individual communities and different levels of the government.
National resilience is achieved by the ability of the local communities, supported by the government’s different levels, and the private to plan, prepare, absorb, respond to, and recover from disasters and adapt to the new change. The bottom-up strategy, involving the communities in enhancing resilience is essential because the local conditions are different depending on the country. Different countries have different communities with their unique histories, cultures, and infrastructure; therefore, the risk that each community is prone to be dependent on their local hazards. Some of the steps that can help communities make improvements in resilience include:
Involving the whole community in policy planning and making
Linking the private and public infrastructure to perform towards achieving resilient goals.
Ensure to improve the private and public infrastructure and the essential services in the community such as health and education.
Communicating the risks while connecting the community network and also promoting the culture of resilience.
Arranging for the communities, families, and neighborhoods to prepare for disasters.
Therefore, the combined coalition of local leaders from both public and private sectors with support from the national government and also the input from the local citizens is essential. These coalitions are charged to evaluate the community’s exposure and the vulnerability of the nation to risk and educate and communicate risk. They also ensure they evaluate and expand the capacity of the community to deal with threats. A strong coalition should have strong leadership, and even the structure of the government matters; the people should also be informed and have the skills needed to develop and maintain relationships with all the community partners. Although the government policies are made to enhance resilience, there are some policies and practices within the government, which negatively impact resilience, especially if the systems have gaps.
Generally, there is no specific sector or entity which has the sole responsibility for enhancing national resilience. There is no particular federal agency or institution with all the authority and responsibility, the relevant skills set, and all the adequate fiscal resources to address the challenges. The important responsibility for increasing the national and community resilience is on the residents. The support from different levels of the government and also from the private sector, and non-governmental organizations are required in the ultimate process of building resilient communities.