Building resilience – the practice of ‘making people, communities and systems better prepared to withstand catastrophic events (both natural and manmade) and able to bounce back more quickly and emerge stronger from these shocks and stresses’ – increasingly features in international development discourse and practice. The topic cuts across sectors, scales and contexts, helping people prepare for, cope with and respond to a host of different shocks and stresses, from social, economic and cultural, to physical, environmental and political.
This report uses infographics to identify the key themes and emerging trends in resilience thinking and practice. The report includes sections on:
- the rise in the use of the term ‘resilience’ in books, scholarly journals and scientific research across a range of disciplines
- the salience of different themes within resilience thinking
- identification of geographies of resilience: by pinpointing the countries of author affiliation, and the regions studied in resilience literature
- examination of resilience on Twitter: looking at key themes and trends most frequently used in relation to ‘resilience’
- analysis of the characteristics of resilience: looking at the way in which academic and grey literature explore awareness, diversity, self-regulation, integration and adaptiveness
- inclusion of resilience in the post-2015 agenda, including the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 (SFDRR), the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the UNFCCC COP21 Paris Agreement on climate change