Abstract
Extreme weather and climate events research needs concepts to analytically capture processes that describe how extreme they are: depth of impact but mainly also temporal aspects such as length, speed and quality of recovery. This paper analyses resilience as a concept to provide these dimensions. The use of the term resilience proliferates in many contexts and disciplines. Interpretations may overlap or even contradict each other. This paper seeks to make a case for a more nuanced understanding of resilience, including the use of “qualifier adjectives” to emphasize differences. Starting from the original etymological meaning of resilience as “bouncing back” the paper aims an innovative (re)conceptualization to facilitate the practical use of resilience in disaster risk management. It is recommended to distinguish between resilience as ability, being a hazard independent pre-disposition for recovery, and resilience as a process, describing different bouncing back and bouncing forward mechanisms inherent in the different recovery phases. This proposed distinction would enable the assessment of recovery abilities before calamities occur and hence could serve as guide to disaster preparedness programmes. The suggested analysis of resilience as a process would open opportunities to use the concept describing preemptive resilience response (presilience), recovery as bouncing back towards a state preceding the hazard event, as well as progressive resilience (prosilience) as bouncing forward and transition of the disaster recovery phase into adaptation and further development.
Highlights
What Is Resilience?Extreme events research on weather and climate needs concepts to analytically capture processes that describe how extreme they are: depth of impact but mainly temporal aspects such as length, speed and quality of recovery
Starting from the original etymological meaning of resilience as “bouncing back” the paper aims an innovativeconceptualization to facilitate the practical use of resilience in disaster risk management
While the scrutiny of resilience by its terminological fuzziness is not novel, this paper seeks to make a case for a nuanced understanding of resilience, very much in the sense of its original etymological meaning of “bouncing back”, or “bouncing forward” [4] in order to facilitate its practical applicability at least in the area of disaster risk preparedness and research
Summary
What Is Resilience?Extreme events research on weather and climate needs concepts to analytically capture processes that describe how extreme they are: depth of impact but mainly temporal aspects such as length, speed and quality of recovery. In addition to the aspects of the extreme event itself, it is the social response to extremes, which at least determines whether extreme events lead to disasters, or not This conjunction may become a more pressing topic as climate change extreme events continue to impact societies. Resilience is a term that has gained cross-disciplinary attention in recent years. It already flourishes in certain disciplines while ever more other disciplines are beginning to discover it [1] [2] [3]. The adjective “resilient” can be found in many conference titles, irrespective of the subject of the event In some fields such as Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) or Climate Change Adaptation (CCA), its overuse is already debated. This paper aims at analyzing resilience both as (inherent) ability of potentially hazard impacted referent(s) and as a process dominating the recovery phase once a hazard event hits
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