What can emergency planners learn from research on human resilience?

Richard Amlôt, Holly Carter
Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response, Health Protection Agency, UK, richard.amlot@hpa.org.uk and
holly.carter@hpa.org.uk

African Health Sciences 2008; 8(S):  Resilience is a concept that is widely used in emergency planning and preparedness activities (e.g.
www.ukresilience.gov.uk). Working definitions of resilience in infrastructure, systems and communities exist for the purposes establishing benchmarks for effective emergency response, however it is not clear to what extent these initiatives are informed by the broad and well-established research literature on human resilience.

Efforts to define, measure and promote physical and psychological resilience can be identified in a number of diverse fields, including developmental and clinical psychology, anthropology, disaster management and the study of social-ecological systems.

Resilience is often defined in studies of positive responses and coping in the face of challenging or traumatic events, or in the ability of communities to survive and thrive following disasters or emergencies. Recent research points to the importance of considering resilience in these terms, rather than simply as the absence of trauma in the face of tragedy.