Disaster Resilience and Sustainability: Chapter 1 - Toward sustainable development: Risk-informed and disaster-resilient development in Asia

It has been observed that a single disaster can destroy the investment and years of work led by communities, governments, and development organizations. Therefore, to achieve the goals of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda’s central focus should lie on disaster resilience. Increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters in Asia have become a huge challenge to achieve sustainable development. Disasters undermine societal well-being by causing loss of lives, injuries, damaging social and economic infrastructure, and disrupting livelihoods. Journey toward disaster risk reduction and resilience requires the participation of a wide array of stakeholders ranging from academicians to policy makers to disaster managers. Given the multifactorial and interdependent nature of disasters, disaster risk reduction and resilience require multidisciplinary problem-solving and evidence-based techniques from natural, social, engineering, and other relevant sciences. In this regard, the main purpose of this chapter is to capture the multidisciplinary and multisectoral aspects of disaster resilience, adaptation strategy, and sustainability, and connect existing data, research, conceptual work, and practical cases on disaster risk management and its linkage with sustainable development under a common umbrella.