Transforming resilience-building today for sustainable futures tomorrow

Addressing increasingly profound vulnerabilities and risks requires a step change away from piecemeal fixes often focused around preparedness and post-disaster recovery towards transformational interventions and measures that focus on creating systemic shifts that challenge underlying vulnerabilities and governance gaps from the design phase itself. IIASA and ISET in the project “Transformation and Resilience” conducted with the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance and other initiatives respond to the evident need to reform climate and disaster risk management towards transformational approaches. In this working paper, we reviewed efforts to respond to this evident need, drawing on key findings from the forthcoming book “Transformation and Disaster Resilience” (Springer, forthcoming) to provide a practical stock-take of what transformational risk management (adaptation) is, deep dive into examples of transformational interventions and uncover barriers and enablers for getting transformational resilience-building underway in diverse contexts.