What is disaster resilience? How is it determined? Describe various elements of a resilience framework. Also mention the global targets of Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030).

Meaning and determination

Disaster resilience is the ability of people, infrastructure and institutions to anticipate, resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from a hazard, in time and in a way that preserves essential identity and function. It is determined by a mix of risk knowledge (hazard maps, climate data), exposure (who lives on the floodplain), vulnerability (poverty, caste, disability, housing quality), coping capacity (savings, social networks), and institutional capacity (codes, drills, insurance, a working NDMA–SDMA–DDMA chain). Engineers measure some of it in building codes and redundancy. Economists measure how fast GDP and livelihoods return. Communities measure whether the poorest still eat. A high-rise with no fire stair is not resilient because it is new. A mangrove belt can be more resilient than a concrete wall that fails once.

• Peg: Resilience is capacity before impact, not only relief after impact.
• Peg: Determination is multi-layer: hazard × exposure × vulnerability ÷ capacity.

Elements of a resilience framework

A usable framework has risk assessment (what can happen, to whom). It has risk reduction: land-use, building norms, ecosystem buffers, retrofits. It has preparedness: early warning, drills, stockpiles, last-mile communication in local languages. It has response: incident command, search and rescue, medical surge. It has recovery and “build back better”: not reconstructing the same death-trap. It has governance: who decides, how finance flows, how the disabled and women are not an afterthought. It has finance: contingency funds, insurance, social protection that scales on a shock. It has learning: post-disaster reviews that change the next map. India’s official architecture (NDMA guidelines, SDMAs, the Disaster Management Act, 2005) is one national version of that framework.

• Peg: Anticipate, absorb, adapt, transform: four verbs that should appear as budget lines, not posters.
• Peg: Early warning without a last-mile volunteer is an element missing its pair.

Sendai global targets (2015–2030)

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, adopted at Sendai, Japan, in 2015, sets seven global targets for 2030: (a) substantially reduce global disaster mortality by 2030, relative to 2005–2015; (b) substantially reduce the number of affected people; (c) reduce direct economic loss as a proportion of global GDP; (d) substantially reduce disaster damage to critical infrastructure and disruption of basic services, including health and educational facilities; (e) substantially increase the number of countries with national and local disaster risk reduction strategies by 2020 (a date now passed, used as a process target); (f) substantially enhance international cooperation to developing countries; (g) substantially increase the availability of and access to multi-hazard early warning systems and disaster risk information. Those seven sit on four priorities: understanding risk, strengthening governance, investing in resilience, and enhancing preparedness for better recovery.

• Peg: Sendai shifted the global script from disaster response toward risk reduction, with countable 2030 targets.
• Peg: India is a Sendai party; NDMA planning is meant to map onto those targets, not only onto relief norms.