“The proliferation of disasters has gotten a lot of people talking about resilience, about how we can lessen our risk, and how we can recover more quickly from disasters of all kinds,” says Laurie Mazur in this week’s podcast.

Mazur describes the qualities of communities that can weather adversity, including social cohesion and the ability to make decisions for themselves. Above all, she reiterates that “humans are nothing if not resilient,” and the governance structures and disaster mitigation schemes we employ should capitalize on that native resilience, rather than infringe upon it.

“We believe that if you want to respond to critical development issues like climate change, that you need to address the social dimensions of resilience,” says Roger-Mark De Souza of Population Action International (PAI) in this week’s podcast.

“If you want to address climate change and you only look at mitigation, you are missing some of the important components,” he said. PAI, which advocates for better access to family planning in developing countries, starts from the standpoint that allowing couples to decide how many children they have leads to “investments in education and technology, providing opportunities for additional economic growth, enhanced development, and ultimately helping to build resilience and adaptive capacity.”.

“Building resilience should help address the root causes of vulnerability, creating increased capacity to be able to adapt to a range of possible climate futures, not just cope with… specific climate impacts,” says International Alert’s Janani Vivekananda. Otherwise, if the specific impacts don’t play out, “in a fragile context that could be quite destabilizing and seen as a wasted opportunity.”