Building community resilience

Planning for emergencies often follows a three-stepped process – response, recovery and building future resilience. Based on recent UK flooding experience, this paper argues that communities can do a considerable amount themselves to build resilience to mitigate effects of future emergencies – and that the response and recovery stages can and should be concurrent. Recommendations are made as to how community resilience can be enhanced in advance of any emergency event and the roles for the various stakeholders are outlined. While emergencies such as flooding cannot be prevented from happening, communities that work closely together can significantly reduce the effects.