Risk Management, Response, Relief, Recovery, Reconstruction, and Future Disaster Risk Reduction

Abstract Earthquake risk management initiatives in Nepal in the past decades have yielded good results: Earthquake awareness increased across the country as never before, the capacities of stakeholders have been enhanced tremendously, and the policy environment has also changed positively. Fatalism gradually gave way to scientific believe across the layers of the society. The positive impact was observed during the 2015 earthquake. However, this change has not yet reached the desired critical proportion to sustain the change process independently. Efforts of disaster risk reduction in Nepal should now transgress its emphasis from raising awareness to implementation of vulnerability reduction initiatives, including stopping the creation of vulnerability. Now is the time to enhance risk perception by demonstrating the benefits of risk reduction by actually implementing risk reduction methodologies—Nepal has enough success stories; the need is to scale up the successes.