Can you help shape our future priorities? Take a five minute survey now. Survey closes on 8 July.

Working Paper

34

Reducing People’s Vulnerability to Natural Hazards: Communities and Resilience

Published on 1 April 2008

The concepts vulnerability, resilience and community are widely used and abused in the literature on natural hazards and disaster risk reduction. This paper seeks to bring greater rigour in their use. In particular, vulnerability must be understood as a set of socioeconomic conditions that are identifiable in relation to particular hazard risks, and therefore perform a predictive role that can assist in risk reduction. Resilience is often confused as a concept, sometimes seen as the inverse of vulnerability, and by others as an independent quality. These confusions may be especially relevant in the context of §policy for disaster risk reduction at the scale of community. Here there is often an idealized notion of community as undifferentiated and unproblematic.

Authors

Terry Cannon

Emeritus Fellow

Publication details

published by
UNU-WIDER
authors
Cannon, T.
journal
WIDER Research Paper, volume 34

Share

Related content

Working Paper

Mining Legitimacy: Governing the Politics of Resource-Based Green Industrial Policy

IDS Working Paper 623

3 July 2025

Working Paper

Fragmented Power, Access and Legitimacy: The Politics of Social Assistance in Yemen’s Conflict (2014–24)

BASIC Research Working Paper 38

30 June 2025

Opinion

The power of communities during civic space closure in Central America

Rocío Elizabeth Ramírez Argueta, Oficial de programas y proyectos, COMCAVIS TRANS

& 3 others

24 June 2025

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.