Preparedness rising from the ashes of disaster: The phoenix of transformative learning: Invited paper. Atlas of Science

Worldwide, societies and their citizens face ever-increasing risk from natural disasters. Pivotal to managing this risk is preparedness. However, consistently low levels of preparedness prompted the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) to call for new preparedness strategies, including using disaster experience to facilitate preparedness. To achieve this outcome, disaster experience must be able to challenge the beliefs that undermine preparedness and enable transformation in people’s understanding of the consequences of disasters and the importance of preparedness in ways that culminate in new and sustained disaster risk reduction (DRR) capability. To explore this issue, we first consider the beliefs that experience must challenge.