Factors behind local communities resilience to extreme weather events

Abstract

<p>In recent years one may notice an increasing number of extreme weather events occurrence, as well as their rising intensity. This becomes a threat for local communities and brings challenges for institutions responsible for risk management. Larger towns seem to have a different potential to deal with these risk, due to their resources (material, institutional, human). Large cities are also researched more often because of their larger exposure. On the other hand a research focus on extreme weather events resilience in small communities is lacking. Smaller towns also experience the effects of extreme meteorological events, and even if losses are not as high as in larger towns, on the local level they are they are very severe.</p><p>In this paper we analyze the issue of extreme weather events resilience in eight small municipalities from the Wielkopolska region in Poland. Main aim of this research is to study how local resilience arrangements formed in the studied municipalities acts during an another significant extreme meteorological event. Municipalities focus mostly on emergency services actions, but they differ in case of the second component of local resilience arrangements. These municipalities that were strongly affected by extremes concentrate more on structural – hard measures. Municipalities that have not faced so severe extreme weather events in the past, built resilience with a strong component of creativity resilience, where soft solutions related to education, training, organization of local risk management system complement emergency services activities.</p><p>This research is based on 40 in-depth interviews with local stakeholders, meteorological data, as well as information on firefighters operations since 2010, municipal budgets information. In order to analyze which factors affect resilience of local communities to extreme weather events based on analyzed case studies and which influence is rather limited qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) approach has been applied.</p><p><strong>Acknowledgements: </strong>This research has been funded by the National Science Center of Poland under the grant number: 2018/31/B/HS4/03223</p>