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Many policy makers today accept that climate change poses substantial risks to human and natural systems and that effective adaptation is essential. An important element of adaptation policy making and disaster risk management is how to best combine individual with communitarian approaches to resilience building. The difficulty for effective leadership in this effort resides in comprehending various understandings of, and approaches to, resilience and their real-life consequences for affected populations to deal with disasters induced by climate change. Here, we conduct a comparative analysis of 89 influential disaster management leaders in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. We examine the extent to which their perspectives on resilience and vulnerability are framed by either communitarian or individual-focused notions. Our quantitative analysis of an initial questionnaire and subsequent content analysis of interview transcripts indicate three core findings. Firstly, a tendency towards a communitarian understanding of resilience emerging from the questionnaire was replaced by a more diverse picture during the interviews, including a stronger focus on individual resilience. Secondly, most leaders asserted it was reasonable to expect citizens to be resilient to climate change, particularly when feeling overwhelmed by their responsibility for providing protection during extreme events. Finally, world views among leaders that encourage individual responsibility occluded systemic or reflexive thinking and action to minimize loss. Our study highlights the need for a relational leadership framework underpinned by an ethic of compassion that supports leaders pursuing and implementing policies that reduce harm and suffering in the face of disasters influenced by climate change. Key policy insights Communitarian approaches to resilience and vulnerability provide opportunities for disaster management leaders to better appreciate human suffering and improve their policy advice and decision making to minimize it. Conversely, individualistic approaches drive disaster management leaders' narrow world views that downplay vulnerability whilst shifting responsibility for resilience too far towards individuals. Governments would be well advised to specifically address the root causes of socio-economic vulnerability in resilience policy frameworks. Disaster management leaders would benefit from an ethic of compassion supported by a relational leadership framework that guides their resilience policy advice and decision making to further minimize suffering from disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change, extreme events, and related disasters pose significant challenges not only for the poorest and most vulnerable populations, but also for leaders in disaster and emergency management. Effective leadership entails preparing for and responding to increasing intensities and frequencies of extreme natural hazard events while managing and justifying suffering and loss that communities and individuals experience in case of failed protection. Insight is provided into this double challenge and how it is compounded by the concomitant ways modern societies engage with risk and construct vulnerability and resilience. A conceptual framework is used to show how the rise of modernity, today's risk society, neoliberalism, and governmentality as found in many western democracies, converge to constrain disaster leadership and management, illustrating how interpretations of responsibility and potential loss and suffering have shifted from organizations to individual actors, exacerbating the leadership dilemma in managing hazard‐driven crises. This includes ways that neoliberal governmentality warp understandings of vulnerability and resilience by understating one and overstating the other. Through a heuristic, we explain mounting leadership challenges with increasing levels of disaster intensity and consequence, drawing upon natural hazard examples from Australia. Although recent literature on ethical and responsible leadership in disasters points toward tangible ways to overcome aspects of the leadership dilemma, preparing for and responding to increasing disaster intensity require additional leadership qualities. This review ends by outlining relevant aspects from relational leadership ethics, feminist care ethics, and the philosophy and ethics of compassion to advance knowledge toward an ethics of disaster leadership. This article is categorized under:Policy and Governance > Private Governance of Climate ChangeClimate, Nature, and Ethics > Ethics and Climate Change [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]