Resilience in historical disaster studies: Pitfalls and opportunities

Abstract

While resilience only became a pervasive concept in disaster studies shortly before and after 2000, its potential to understand natural hazards and disasters, and improve the capacity of societies to deal with such hazards and disasters, was already explored at a much earlier stage. In fact, shortly after the pioneering publications of Holling on ‘resilience’ as the ability of ecosystems to ‘absorb perturbation (Holling 1973), the concept migrated from the study of ecosystems to the study of natural hazards (Burton et al. 1978; Timmerman 1981). At the World Climate Conference of Geneva in February 1979, resilience was mainly discussed from an agro-climatic perspective: namely the resilience of both individual crops and agricultural systems to withstand extreme meteorological conditions (WCC 1979, p. 391, 572, 703).