What is Resilience?

Resilience is the ability to withstand, recover from, and adapt to periodic shocks and major disruptions. Strengthening resilience across all levels requires fostering a culture of preparedness and adaptability amid growing uncertainty. It is an urgent imperative, not only for managing human-made and natural disasters more effectively, but also for maintaining public trust in the core systems that sustain democratic societies and open, competitive economies.

At the individual level, resilience means developing the capacity to cope with life’s inevitable stresses. At the societal level, it involves equipping governments, regions, communities, and private-sector actors to better understand and manage increasingly interconnected systems, where stress in one area can trigger cascading failures across many others.

The Global Resilience Institute strives to overcome the five major barriers to achieving greater resilience.

  1. There is widespread risk illiteracy and limited understanding of the new dependencies and interdependencies that pervade our increasingly connected lives;
  2. There are inadequate designs for embedding resilience into key systems, networks, and infrastructure;
  3. There are inadequate economic incentives for investing in proven resilience measures;
  4. There are inadequate governance frameworks and policy guidance to foster resilience;
  5. There is a lack of adequate interdisciplinary training and education programs to support the development and implementation of comprehensive capabilities for advancing resilience.

GRI is committed to organizing and leading partnerships with the world’s top universities, research centers, organizations, and professionals who share a common commitment to undertaking resilience-related research, in collaboration with national laboratories, public agencies, foundations, corporations, and non-governmental organizations.