Self-Help Resilience and Disaster Risk Reduction Model: The Case of Village Tibba Malhanas, Muzaffargarh District in Pakistan
Salman Danish*
The devastating floods in 2010 eroded the support structures and livelihoods of vulnerable communities in southern Punjab, Pakistan impeding their resilience and weakening development. This presentation looks at the resilient development at community levels in the aftermath of the post-2010 floods.

The incumbent buzzword or approach ‘build back better’ (UNISDR 2015), strengthened by the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR), holds the key to the future now and whatever efforts are being made to respond to disasters or disaster risk reduction primarily focus on resilience building. Since 2005, the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) had been providing guidance to nations across the world on how to build resilience of their communities against disasters (UNISDR 2005). Now the Sendai Framework which replaced HFA in 2015 has come up with a better alternate in terms of a clear focus on saving lives, reducing losses and protecting structures by ‘building back better’ to achieve the goal of resilient development in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Both SFDRR and SDGs will remain the benchmarks for resilient development for the next 15 years.

UNISDR (2009) defines ‘resilience as the ability of a system, community, or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to, and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner.’ The analytical proposition developed for this study from the literature on resilience looks at resilience in the context of communities, and provides new understanding on how to manage hazards and community development. It finds that resilience in this context means empowering communities to decide their own development needs and access resources individually and collectively to make their development and rebuilding efforts more resilient to future floods. 

References
UNISDR 2015, ‘Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030’, The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, Geneva, Switzerland, <http://www.wcdrr.org/uploads/Sendai_Framework_for_Disaster_Risk_Reduction_2015-2030.pdf>.

UNISDR 2009, ‘2009 UNISDR Terminology on Disaster Risk Reduction’, The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, Geneva, Switzerland, <http://www.unisdr.org/we/inform/terminology>, accessed 10 Oct. 2016.

UNISDR 2005, ‘Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters’, Extract from the final report of the World Conference on Disaster Reduction (A/CONF. 206/6), held at Kobe, Hyogo, Japan, 18-22 January 2005, The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, Geneva, Switzerland. 

* Mr Salman Danish is a Research Associate at the Journalists for Democracy and Human Rights (JDHR), a media think tank based in Islamabad, Pakistan. He has a Master’s Degree from the University of Northumbria (Newcastle, UK) with a focus on Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilient Development.