Gender inclusive planning for disasters: Strategic planning to build adaptive capacity and resilience

How can gender and empowerment drive the development of a community's adaptive capacity to disasters? Disaster plans can be used to allocate resources, instill processes, and reach goals; however, once in place, these plans can also be a determining factor to either empower or exclude. One of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), SDG 5, targets gender equality and empowerment for all women and girls. Under the lens of SDG 5, working toward this goal of equality and empowerment as part of disaster preparedness will improve the capacity of a community to respond and recover, ultimately reducing vulnerability for everyone. Intentionally building disaster management plans toward gender equality can be one of the key strategies that improves community resilience for all. In order to identify challenges and opportunities linking policy and practice, this paper shares a case study of disaster planning in Peru to understand mitigation strategies and explore gender equality as a tool to expand adaptive capacity.