This year’s International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, marked on 13 October during Urban October, has the theme "Resilience Starts at Home", drawing attention to where and how we live. "Resilience Starts at Home" highlights the home as both the place where disaster impacts are experienced most directly and where people can anticipate, withstand and recover from risk.
Yet, returning to previous conditions is not enough when those conditions already expose people to risk. In this sense, resilience is more than the capacity to recover. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, or UNDRR, defines it as the ability to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from the effects of hazards. This future-oriented understanding recognizes that everyday decisions can not only reduce risk but also transform the conditions that create it.
Households already integrate what institutions keep apart
When a family decides whether to reinforce a roof, stay on a plot or relocate, it decides about disaster risk, climate adaptation and livelihoods all at once. These decisions show how connected such concerns are in people’s lives.
Institutions, however, do not usually work this way. Disaster risk reduction, climate action, housing provision and social protection often sit in separate departments, each with its own resources and timelines. The integration that policy struggles to achieve already happens, implicitly, in the home.
Deciding, however, is not the same as being able to act. Insecure tenure, unreliable income and other overlapping vulnerabilities limit what households can do. These conditions tend to attract less attention than the disasters that follow, yet they help determine who is most exposed and who has the resources to respond, which contributes significantly to making disasters deadly.
Resilience may seem to begin on “day zero,” the point at which intentional change begins. Yet, there is rarely a true day zero. Every household and neighbourhood already holds knowledge, relationships and capacities that can contribute to evidence that inform policies for transformation.
Resilience does not start from scratch
As researchers, when we walk through a neighbourhood with the people who live there, it is evident that building resilience starts before any project arrives. It rests on earlier decisions about urban infrastructure and services, on the experience of those most exposed to risk and on the values that shaped how the place developed and how the wider city grew.
Urban transformation research helps make these existing capacities visible and represented when informing policy. It examines how social, environmental and technological systems interact, identifies the conditions that may enable or limit action and considers which interventions could contribute to fundamental and lasting change. It also helps us understand whether individual actions, although sometimes incremental, are collectively moving towards deeper transformation. Connecting research to practice and policy is therefore essential for moving beyond the dynamics that maintain the status quo.
At UNU-EHS, this perspective informs our work on urban sustainability transformations. We generate evidence, co-develop approaches in practice and inform policy regarding the levers for deliberate, systemic change towards more just and climate-resilient cities. This work brings together disaster risk reduction, climate adaptation and mitigation, development and justice.
Capacities: learning that travels
Capacity development is usually measured by the number of workshops held and people trained. Yet, what matters more is whether learning travels: from needs to solutions, from one household to another, from one community to another, between cities and upward into the rules and budgets that govern them.
Whether learning is mobilized depends on the quality of the knowledge, as well as on the relationships, resources and institutional positions of those who hold it. It also depends on whose knowledge shapes decisions and whose is left out. This is where coalitions come in. When residents, grassroots organizations, governments and researchers work together, what one household, team or department has learned can reach the others, increasing their awareness on the different perspectives.
Doing urban transformation research entails reflecting on the assumptions and approaches that shape our understanding of the possibilities for systemic change. It means ensuring that research and capacity development help decision makers recognize the value of subnational and local perspectives, and that those building coalitions across sectors and organizations have conceptual approaches and practical tools to draw on.
From neighbourhoods to national policy
Transformative urban coalitions begin by recognizing capacities that are already present, then create spaces for sharing, experimentation and joint learning. For example, in Barrio 20, Buenos Aires, building resilience has extended beyond individual homes to the spaces between them. Together with government, academia and other actors, residents collectively designed, built and now maintain green public spaces that cool the streets they use every day and offer shelter during heatwaves. These lessons are captured in a manual on climate adaptation in low-income neighbourhoods, carrying those strategies to other settlements.
The same principle can reach national policy. In Brazil, the guide for Community Plans for Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation, published by the Ministry of Cities in cooperation with UNU-EHS, starts with participatory risk mapping, in which residents’ local knowledge informs the technical assessment from the outset. The resulting place-based solutions and community structures are designed to complement government-led risk management. In this instrument, the integration that starts at home is scaled up.
Where people come in
Resilience starts at home, but it grows through the relationships connecting homes with neighbourhoods, institutions and policy. Strengthening these relationships is how local capacities can become the foundation for wider urban transformations based on evidence.
With four years remaining under the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 and the persistent implementation challenges, the focus of this International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction on resilient housing is timely. Still, in urban areas, housing policy must go hand in hand with land-use planning that is both risk-sensitive and socially just. Land use and urban planning decisions are critical where constraints such as insecure tenure are eased or entrenched. What must change is the point at which people come in. When residents’ knowledge and capacities are recognized as part of the system, households are no longer the last stop for decisions made elsewhere. They help produce the evidence behind those decisions and shape the form they take. Urban transformation research can facilitate dialogues with policymakers to understand their needs and share relevant evidence. That is what it means for resilience to start at home.
