Does community resilience mitigate loss and damage from climaterelated disasters? Evidence based on survey data

Abstract

Policy-makers view community resilience as fundamental to mitigating loss and damage from climate-related disasters. Although energy has been devoted to defining resilience, less effort has been devoted to analysing the effects of resilience on loss and damage, which is critical in places with limited capacity for adaptation. We use survey data to develop a composite index of community resilience in Fiji and then evaluate the extent to which community resilience mitigates loss and damage. We find that community resilience is negatively correlated with damages over which human intervention may be effective, but not with damages over which intervention is less effective, suggesting that community resilience may limit impacts. We further find that this result holds for a cyclone (about which communities had substantial advance warning) but not for river flooding (for which communities had little advanced warning), suggesting that early warning is necessary for community resilience to become responsive.