Strengthening resilience capacities through academia, case study: Leadership and Disaster Resilience Program, Honduras 2019

Abstract

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, resilience is defined as: “the capacity of social, economic and environmental systems to face a dangerous event, trend or disturbance, responding or reorganizing in such a way that they maintain their essential function, identity and structure, and at the same time preserving the capacity for adaptation, learning and transformation” (IPCC,2018). On the other hand, leadership is defined by Hunter (1996:38) as the “art” of influencing people to work with enthusiasm in the achievement of a goal for the common good; Thus, this Program is conceived with the objective of fostering leadership for resilience in the face of disasters, given that in times of attention to emergencies, as in all recovery processes, it is evident that leaders should seek that enthusiasm in communities that allow them to recover and build resilience. This article seeks to summarize the actions developed and the results achieved through the execution of the Leadership and Disaster Resilience Program that was promoted by the George Washington University and the Institute for Disaster & Fragility Resilience (IDFR) through the Honduran Institute of earth Sciences; in it, you will find in detail the objectives that were set, the methodology developed for their scope and the results obtained. It is worth mentioning that this Program is an example of the linkage actions from the academy to society, making contributions in capacity building through non-educational and supporting the process of curricular redesign of the Postgraduate Program in Risk Management and Disaster Management at UNAH.