Under the threats of global environmental change, resilience and vulnerability research have gradually become a key issue in fields such as climate change, disaster management, sustainable development, and environmental governance. Scholars have examined the capability of societies to face disasters through the lens of resilience and vulnerability in various spatial and temporal scales. In the past four decades, in the vulnerability approach to hazard research, “resilience” has stood out in disaster discourses and has been one of the most important approaches in modern environmental change and disaster governance research. Although resilience has a deep theoretical foundation and an evolutionary process, many Taiwanese scholars only focus on its engineering aspect. Further, many practitioners use its literal meaning instead of understanding and making use of its root, core meaning. Reviews of resilience studies are limited in Chinese literature, especially in terms of discussions on the evolution of resilience studies and its relation with vulnerability and hazard research. This paper systematically reviews the evolution of resilience studies to explore the revolution it has caused within global environmental change and hazard research, and broadly examines thoughts from several schools, namely ecology, engineering, humanities, and social sciences in Taiwan. In addition, it discusses current issues and future contribution of resilience studies in Taiwan. It attempts to not only explore the different meanings of the concept of resilience and clarify the differences in its applications in academia but also consider the role of resilience in future hazard research and in disaster prevention policies and offer policy implications for future research and practice.