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Disaster Management: Enabling Resilience
Today we see unprecedented interconnectedness and interdependencies at the local
and global scale. As described by Sambharya and Rasheed [3] ‘risks are rarely
confined to a nation, an industry, or a firm. Instead, today’s risks are systemic,
their contagion rapid, and their consequences devastating and unpredictable. This
calls for new approaches to understand measure and respond to risks’. The con-
cept of resilience, in particular associated with disaster risk reduction, has gained
significant interest and attention. Within the context of such threats as pandemics,
climate change, financial crisis, natural hazards, and technological disasters, resil-
ience thinking has emerged as a concept that recognizes the complex, nonlinear
and dynamic properties of interdependent systems (social, political, economic,
ecological). “Resilience thinking” supports a systems view of the disaster manage-
ment domain to reveal new ways of understanding the world and a new approach
to managing disasters. The systems lens that supports resilience thinking embraces
network analysis to reveal insights into politics, governance, and power relation-
ships that permeate the system as described in Masys [4]. It embraces human,
technical, and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through
cycles of change. A resilience thinking approach examines how these interacting
systems of people, technology, and nature can be managed to facilitate safety and
security.
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