Building Community Capacity for Disaster Resilience in Taiwan

In the face of large-scale, high intensity, and continuously occurring disasters, the concept of community resilience in disaster management has gradually developed and drawn significant attention. This paper focuses on how to build community disaster resilience, based on practical experiences of disaster recovery in Taiwan, for the purpose of increasing community resilience. In order to build community disaster resilience, the Taiwanese central government has designed a community-based process for disaster adaptation. Since 2004, the process has been applied to more than one hundred communities in Taiwan, not only by our research team but also by the Taiwanese government. Two successful cases are used to illustrate our framework for community disaster resilience, which should include the two major components of emergency adjustment and long-term adaptive capacity. Significant factors for making the process operational are clarified so as to form a long-term framework for building community disaster resilience.