Abstract
In the last few decades, disaster risk reduction programs and climate initiatives across the globe have focused largely on the intimate connections between vulnerability, recovery, adaptation, and coping mechanisms. Recent focus, however, is increasingly paid to community resilience. Community, placed at the intersection between the household and national levels of social organization, is crucial in addressing economic, social, or environmental disturbances disrupting human security. Resilience measures a community’s capability of bouncing back—restoring the original pre-disaster state, as well as bouncing forward—the capacity to cope with emerging post-disaster situations and changes. Both the ‘bouncing back’ and ‘moving forward’ properties of a community are shaped and reshaped by internal and external shocks such as climate threats, the community’s resilience dimensions, and the intensity of economic, social, and other community capitals. This article reviews (1) the concept of resilience in relation to climate change and vulnerability; and (2) emerging perspectives on community-level impacts of climate change, resilience dimensions, and community capitals. It argues that overall resilience of a place-based community is located at the intersection of the community’s resilience dimensions, community capitals, and the level of climate disruptions.
Highlights
Over the last few decades, community resilience, as one of the buzzwords of the time, has gained increasing academic and programmatic attention from social researchers, planners, community activists, and development practitioners [1,2,3,4]
Resilience is explored in a wide array of scholarly disciplines, including mathematics, physics, engineering, ecology, geography, economics, psychology, public health, sociology, anthropology, development studies, political science, and disaster management [7,8,9], the study of how resilience emerges in a climate-challenged community is scant
The bottom-line of the arguments is that while both approaches can be applied to rapid and gradual hazards and changes, the vulnerability framework is more appropriate for addressing rapid onset events, like cyclones or earthquakes, whereas the resilience perspective is more suitable for addressing slow onset transformations like drought, famine, long-term temperature shifts, and sea-level rise
Summary
Over the last few decades, community resilience, as one of the buzzwords of the time, has gained increasing academic and programmatic attention from social researchers, planners, community activists, and development practitioners [1,2,3,4]. Resilience is explored in a wide array of scholarly disciplines, including mathematics, physics, engineering, ecology, geography, economics, psychology, public health, sociology, anthropology, development studies, political science, and disaster management [7,8,9], the study of how resilience emerges in a climate-challenged community is scant. This article aims to contribute to the climate change and resilience literature through an in-depth and critical conceptual discussion of the exact mechanisms on how collective action and community capitals shape the degree of resilience of a geographically-bounded community facing both gradual and sudden changes in climate. Mapping the intersections between climate change, community resilience, and community capitals could provide essential information for policymakers in helping communities to avoid or withstand losses from climate hazards
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