Building resilience and reducing risk from natural disasters: Essentials of 21st century sustainable development

As a contribution to the Rio+20 process this Issue Brief highlights resilience and sustainable development by drawing on the knowledge on natural hazards and disasters gained from governments, researchers and other stakeholders. The terms resilience, vulnerability and adaptive capacity are used daily, but take on specific definitions and functions within the social and natural sciences. Our approach in this Issue Brief is to cast "resilience" in a socio-political light within the context of sustainable development, as in the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015 (the only international agreement on disasters and risk):