Guidelines for planning equitable disaster resilient development

The guidelines propose a dual approach to planning for disaster resilience: examining trade-offs and implementing equitable resilience. The first approach identifies five dimensions of trade-offs—aggregation, participation, equity, time, and risk—that can inadvertently create new vulnerabilities if not addressed. The second approach, equitable resilience, focuses on four elements: recognizing subjectivities, ensuring inclusion and representation, working across multiple scales, and allowing for systemic transformation. The document emphasizes that sustainable development requires confronting power imbalances and prioritizing the needs of marginalized groups to avoid the cycle where development efforts exacerbate disaster risk.

• Development and disaster risk reduction (DRR) are often misaligned, where unsustainable development models can create new risks or exacerbate existing ones, and post-disaster recovery often prioritizes short-term risks over long-term resilience.
• Decision-makers must analyze five key trade-off dimensions to avoid creating new risks: aggregation (overall gains vs. losses), participation (who is included in governing), equity (distribution of risks and benefits), time (short-term vs. long-term priorities), and risk (how interlinked risks are addressed).
• Equitable resilience is defined as a human-environmental resilience approach that accounts for social vulnerability and differential access to power, knowledge, and resources, starting from the perceptions of the people affected.
• Achieving equitable resilience requires four specific interventions: recognizing subjectivities (how social contexts and power relations marginalize groups), ensuring inclusion and representation, working across administrative, geographical, and temporal scales, and promoting systemic transformation.
• Standard financial calculations for allocating resources—such as focusing on post-disaster asset losses—often favor wealthy areas and fail to account for the limited capacity of low-income or vulnerable groups to recover.
• The 'time dimension' in planning is often compromised by political and financial cycles that prioritize immediate gains, which can shift the burden of long-term risks to future generations or other actors.

APA

Tuhkanen, H., Johnson, K., & Ensor, J. (n.d.). Guidelines for planning equitable disaster resilient development. Stockholm Environment Institute. https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/guidelines-for-planning-equitable-disaster-resilient-development.pdf

Chicago

Tuhkanen, Heidi, Karlee Johnson, and Jon Ensor. Guidelines for planning equitable disaster resilient development. Stockholm Environment Institute, n.d. https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/guidelines-for-planning-equitable-disaster-resilient-development.pdf.

Wikipedia

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BibTeX

@techreport{tuhkanenndguidelines, author = {Tuhkanen, Heidi and Johnson, Karlee and Ensor, Jon}, title = {{Guidelines for planning equitable disaster resilient development}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, url = {https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/guidelines-for-planning-equitable-disaster-resilient-development.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }