Overemphasis on recovery inhibits community transformation and creates resilience traps

Benjamin Rachunok,Roshanak Nateghi

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-27359-5

Benjamin Rachunok, Roshanak Nateghi

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27359-5

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Abstract

Building community resilience in the face of climate disasters is critical to achieving a sustainable future. Operational approaches to resilience favor systems’ agile return to the status quo following a disruption. Here, we show that an overemphasis on recovery without accounting for transformation entrenches ‘resilience traps’–risk factors within a community that are predictive of recovery, but inhibit transformation. By quantifying resilience including both recovery and transformation, we identify risk factors which catalyze or inhibit transformation in a case study of community resilience in Florida during Hurricane Michael in 2018. We find that risk factors such as housing tenure, income inequality, and internet access have the capability to trigger transformation. Additionally, we find that 55% of key predictors of recovery are potential resilience traps, including factors related to poverty, ethnicity and mobility. Finally, we discuss maladaptation which could occur as a result of disaster policies which emphasize resilience traps.

Highlights

Building community resilience in the face of climate disasters is critical to achieving a sustainable future
The aim is to jointly identify the risk factors within a community which are conducive to triggering transformation, and determine the degree of change needed in these risk factors for transformation to occur
Transformation thresholds provide a relative comparison of the importance of risk factors as they contribute to transformation, such that county-level risk factors with lower thresholds are more conducive to transformation

Summary

Introduction

Building community resilience in the face of climate disasters is critical to achieving a sustainable future. The focus on recovery is referred to as ‘engineering resilience’[26,27], and this paradigm has served as the foundation for decision and policymaking frameworks aimed at building resilient and sustainable systems and communities[19,28,29,30,31,32,33,34] At their core, the engineering resilience frameworks quantify how communities are disrupted and recover—typically through measuring reliable access to critical infrastructure such as the electric power grid—and seek to identify risk factors within communities and/or systems which promote a rapid return to pre-disruption states. The engineering resilience frameworks quantify how communities are disrupted and recover—typically through measuring reliable access to critical infrastructure such as the electric power grid—and seek to identify risk factors within communities and/or systems which promote a rapid return to pre-disruption states While these approaches are beneficial for prioritizing relief and recovery efforts, they fall short in fully operationalizing resilience in a way which promotes mitigation, adaptation, and transformation. Operationalizing resilience paradigms that incentivize recovery and transformation will enable designing disaster policies and interventions which do not exacerbate vulnerabilities and inequities

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