DESPITE the many calamities that we have experienced as a nation such as the recent flooding in Negros Occidental, many might still ask why we should promote resilience.
Resilience is the ability of a system or community to spring back or to bounce forward from a shock or an impact of a hazard, while preserving and restoring its essential basic structures and functions. It aims to ensure that shocks and stresses do not lead to a long-term downturn in development progress.
We do not build resilience through relief efforts. Instead, we have to lessen the need for disaster relief. As a fundamental development strategy, building resilience would help our government sustain the country’s socioeconomic gains, make a difference in poverty reduction, and eventually ensure the achievement of sustainable development goals. As an agenda shared by all concerned with financial, political, disaster, conflict and climate threats to development, advancing resilience promotes unity of purpose and action among various development stakeholders across all sectors.
As a country exposed to flooding, typhoons, landslides, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, we should now be experts in preparing for them; we should now be typhoon-resilient at the very least. When disaster strikes a part of our nation, it does not only affect that particular city, it also impacts the economy, which in turn affects everyone in the country. For example, losses due to 2013’s super typhoon “Yolanda” were estimated at $15 billion, which represented close to five percent of the Philippines’ annual Gross Domestic Product.
We thus need to advance most especially economic and business resilience. We can ensure our economic resilience by reducing disaster risk, let investors be aware of it, and let business investments take into account disaster risk reduction measures. Initiatives could include promoting green infrastructure, such as buildings with roof gardens and rainwater collection facility; risk financing, risk reduction incentives, business continuity planning, among others.
Tragedies such floods create the context for learning and growing. It is these disasters that make us resilient. It is our shared memory of death, loss and survival that should drive us to build a resilient future.
