Abstract
Abstract. In this era of rapid climate change there is an urgent need for interdisciplinary collaboration and understanding in the study of what determines resistance to disasters and recovery speed. This paper is an economist's contribution to that effort. It traces the entrance of the word "resilience" from ecology into the social science literature on disasters, provides a formal economic definition of resilience that can be used in mathematical modeling, incorporates this definition into a multilevel model that suggests appropriate policy roles and targets at each level, and draws on the recent empirical literature on the economics of disaster, searching for policy handles that can stimulate higher resilience. On the whole it provides a framework for simulations and for formulating disaster resilience policies.
Highlights
The paper is organized in the following manner
The third finding of this paper is that the literature on the economics of disasters has produced a myriad of significant empirical results on why disaster resilience differs
Holling felt that ecology had focused too narrowly on stability, which he defines as the ability of an ecological system to return to its pre-shock equilibrium after an external disturbance
Summary
Resilience is a term with many connotations and definitions in the disaster literature. The ability of materials to absorb energy from a strictly external stimulus, store it as potential energy, and release that same energy later is central to the definition of resilience in physics This word has never had that connotation in ecology. Holling felt that ecology had focused too narrowly on stability, which he defines as the ability of an ecological system to return to its pre-shock equilibrium after an external disturbance He contrasted stability to the persistence of interspecies relationships within a system that has multiple equilibria and called this contrasting mechanism resilience. His definition describes a mechanism that leads to a lower probability of species extinction but does not require the system to return to its pre-stimulus state. It took a long time for ecologists to agree on what resilience means for their discipline; many years may pass before disaster analysis agrees
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