A resilience manifesto

With Typhoons “Rolly” and “Ulysses” exacerbating the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming poor lives anew after the onslaught of severe flooding in many parts of the country, and emotions still running high because of the supposed glamorization of people’s resilience and the eschewing of accountability by the government, let me put out a manifesto in defense of resilience.

The Philippines’ high exposure to multiple hazards, the extreme vulnerability of most of our people, the staggering risks of disasters to our society—these make it imperative to know and understand well what resilience is all about if we are to do the necessary actions to make things better.Resilience is having the capacity to withstand the negative effects and impacts of destabilizing events due to various disasters and even day-to-day interruptions that affect us.

Risk and resilience are a function of human exposure and behavior, prevention and response systems and policy processes of the government, and environmental changes.

While the real cause of the deadly floods cannot be determined with certainty—release of water from dams, swelling of rivers after continuous raining, deforestation, plain topography of catch basin areas, lack of early warning, failure of evacuation, poorly executed response, etc.—resilience should have saved the lives of people, but only if capacities to prevent, anticipate, prepare, and respond have been developed. Furthermore, capacities to build back better and bounce forward can help a lot during recovery.

Resilience-building should aim at enhancing three levels of capacities.

First, resilience entails improving the capacity of the communities for self-organization so they are empowered to do collective action. This includes enabling them to tap available resources within their reach and to harness their social capital so they are guided by shared values that can serve as impetus for purpose-driven initiatives.

Second, resilience means bolstering the capacity of the government for leadership and governance. This should generate effective strategies for disaster risk reduction and management to make sure people are out of harm’s way and shielded from the impacts of any disaster. Public accountability is a crucial element in this area.

Finally, resilience should spur the development of capacities to facilitate use of scientific evidence to educate and mobilize people and to aid in evidence-informed decision-making by leaders. This can also be catalyzed by efforts to institutionalize resilience in the curriculum and to embed it in our culture and way of life.

Evidence continues to come to the fore about resilient good practices, waiting to be learned and relearned. The opportunities and possibilities to live and thrive in the new normal, with resilience as guide and compass, are opening up. If resilience can teach us just a thing or two about how to go about our lives, these days and in the next generations to come, even in the most unforgiving of storms, then it would really make a big difference.

Let us build resilience in our communities. Let us demand resilience in governance. And let us drive resilience through science and education.

—————-

Ronald Law is a physician-public health practitioner with expertise in health emergency and disaster risk management. A public health professor and academic, he is a former Australian leadership fellow and Fulbright scholar.