Disaster Risk Reduction and 'built-in' resilience: towards overarching principles for construction practice

This paper examines the role and position of the construction sector in addressing disaster risk reduction. It summarises some of the cross-cutting themes that emerge from a diverse body of literature that has considered various facets of the resiliency agenda. It also examines the ways in which construction practitioners might adapt their modus operandi to respond better to threats to the built environment.

The report notes that everyone interacts with, and is affected by, the built environment. However, the impacts of disasters have on the built environment can be so profound as to wipe out years of development and investment. It further notes that the scale of the threats facing the built environment have clearly escalated in recent years as a result of demographic, economic and socio-political phenomena, including increasing global population, urbanisation, climate change and terrorist threats.

The paper argues that there is a clear need to move away from instrumentally rational solutions and to recognise that building in resilience is largely contingent on context. By drawing upon multiple insights and contexts, it identifies a range of principles that have the potential to address or circumvent the social, structural, economic and process-related barriers to achieving built-in resilience.

It provides the following guiding principles:

• adopt a more holistic perspective for disaster risk management to ensure that responses reach out to the most affected people
• develop and appropriately apply resilient technologies
• engage a wide range of stakeholders (including local communities) in resilience efforts
• utilise existing guidance and frameworks when appropriate
• exploit opportunities to build-in resiliency measures post-disaster
• integrate built environment and emergency management professionals into the disaster risk management process
• mainstream resilience into the built environment curricula.

The report recommends that for these principles to be achieved, governments, the commercial sector and civil society will need to prioritise disaster risk reduction as a critical development challenge and make concerted efforts to develop related policies, capabilities, and legislative and institutional arrangements.