This opening chapter to Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience introduces readers to the increasing importance of disasters in the context of climate change. The chapter draws upon examples of various disasters to illustrate the topical importance and to motivate the specific analyses to follow. The discussion articulates the necessity of governments at all scales to cope with preparing for extreme events and provides an overview of what governments go through after a disaster. In particular, whether governments learn lessons in the aftermath of disaster can determine how they choose to rebuild. These decisions can lead to greater resilience for communities, but prior studies have rarely found this observed outcome. This chapter ends by motivating the question that structures the rest of the book – what factors lead a community to learn, make changes, and move towards a more resilient state after it is struck by a disaster?