Strengthening the resilience of community and society is a key strategy to deal with climate change and reduce natural disaster risk. But the vague and confused understanding of natural disaster resilience prevents a deep research and effective application of the natural disaster resilience. This paper reviewed the theoretical background of resilience,the conceptual development and recent advances at home and abroad. We consider the natural disaster resilience as an integrated social-ecological system, which has the capacity to protect the human sub-system, namely human lives, livelihoods and utilities from the devastating impacts caused by extreme events. Moreover, the resilience also determines the ability of the human sub-system to recover from possible impacts. Then,the paper summarized nine characteristics of the disaster resilience,analyzed two concepts related closely to natural disaster resilience, i. e. vulnerability and adaption ability and sums up the main five methods for resilience assessment. Based on the above analysis, this paper proposed the possible directions and key issues for further study.