Climate resilience can be generally defined as the capacity for a socio-ecological system to: (1) absorb stresses and maintain function in the face of external stresses imposed upon it by climate change and (2) adapt, reorganize, and evolve into more desirable configurations that improve the sustainability of the system, leaving it better prepared for future climate change impacts.
With the rising awareness of climate change impacts by both national and international bodies, building climate resilience has become a major goal for these institutions. The key focus of climate resilience efforts is to address the vulnerability that communities, states, and countries currently have with regards to the environmental consequences of climate change. Currently, climate resilience efforts encompass social, economic, technological, and political strategies that are being implemented at all scales of society. From local community action to global treaties, addressing climate resilience is becoming a priority, although it could be argued that a significant amount of the theory has yet to be translated into practice. Despite this, there is a robust and ever-growing movement fueled by local and national bodies alike geared towards building and improving climate resilience.
With the rising awareness of climate change impacts by both national and international bodies, building climate resilience has become a major goal for these institutions. The key focus of climate resilience efforts is to address the vulnerability that communities, states, and countries currently have with regards to the environmental consequences of climate change. Currently, climate resilience efforts encompass social, economic, technological, and political strategies that are being implemented at all scales of society. From local community action to global treaties, addressing climate resilience is becoming a priority, although it could be argued that a significant amount of the theory has yet to be translated into practice. Despite this, there is a robust and ever-growing movement fueled by local and national bodies alike geared towards building and improving climate resilience.
Overview
Definition of climate resilience
In
actuality, there is still a great deal of abstract discussion and
debate regarding a number of subtle nuances associated with the precise
definition of the climate resilience perspective, such as its relation
to climate change adaptation,
the extent to which it should encompass actor-based versus
systems-based approaches to improving stability, and its relationship
with the balance of nature theory or homeostatic equilibrium view of ecological systems.
Currently, the majority of work regarding climate resilience has
been centered around examining the capacity for social-ecological
systems to sustain shocks and maintain the integrity of functional
relationships in the face of external forces. However, there is a
growing consensus in academic literature which argues that greater
attention needs to be focused on investigating the other critical aspect
of climate resilience, which is the capacity for social-ecological
systems to renew and develop, and to utilize disturbances as
opportunities for innovation and evolution of new pathways that improve
the system's ability to adapt to macroscopic changes.
Climate resilience vs. climate adaptation
The
fact that climate resilience encompasses a dual function, to absorb
shock as well as to self-renew, is the primary means by which it can be
differentiated from the concept of climate adaptation. In general, adaptation
is viewed as a group of processes and actions that help a system absorb
changes that have already occurred, or may be predicted to occur in the
future. For the specific case of environmental change and climate
adaptation, it is argued by many that adaptation should be defined
strictly as encompassing only active decision-making processes and
actions - in other words, deliberate changes made in response to climate
change.
Of course, this characterization is highly debatable: after all,
adaptation can also be used to describe natural, involuntary processes
by which organisms, populations, ecosystems
and perhaps even social-ecological systems evolve after the application
of certain external stresses. However, for the purposes of
differentiating climate adaptation and climate resilience from a
policymaking standpoint, we can contrast the active, actor-centric
notion of adaptation with resilience, which would be a more
systems-based approach to building social-ecological networks that are
inherently capable of not only absorbing change, but utilizing those
changes to develop into more efficient configurations.
Inter-connectivity between climate resilience, climate change, adaptability, and vulnerability
A graphic displaying the inter-connectivity between climate change, adaptability, vulnerability, and resilience.
A conversation about climate resilience is incomplete without also
incorporating the concepts of adaptations, vulnerability, and climate change.
If the definition of resiliency is the ability to recover from a
negative event, in this case climate change, then talking about
preparations beforehand and strategies for recovery (aka adaptations),
as well as populations that are more less capable of developing and
implementing a resiliency strategy (aka vulnerable populations) are
essential. This is framed under the assumed detrimental impacts of
climate change to ecosystems and ecosystem services.
Historical overview of climate resilience
Climate
resilience is a relatively novel concept that is still in the process
of being established by academia and policymaking institutions. However,
the theoretical basis for many of the ideas central to climate
resilience have actually existed since the 1960s. Originally an idea
defined for strictly ecological systems, resilience
was initially outlined by C.S. Holling as the capacity for ecological
systems and relationships within those systems to persist and absorb
changes to “state variables, driving variables, and parameters.” This definition helped form the foundation for the notion of ecological equilibrium:
the idea that the behavior of natural ecosystems is dictated by a
homeostatic drive towards some stable set point. Under this school of
thought (which maintained quite a dominant status during this time
period), ecosystems were perceived to respond to disturbances largely
through negative feedback
systems – if there is a change, the ecosystem would act to mitigate
that change as much as possible and attempt to return to its prior
state. However, the idea of resilience began evolving relatively quickly
in the coming years.
As greater amounts of scientific research in ecological
adaptation and natural resource management was conducted, it became
clear that oftentimes, natural systems were subjected to dynamic,
transient behaviors that changed how they reacted to significant changes
in state variables: rather than work back towards a predetermined
equilibrium, the absorbed change was harnessed to establish a new
baseline to operate under. Rather than minimizes imposed changes,
ecosystems could integrate and manage those changes, and use them fuel
the evolution of novel characteristics. This new perspective of
resilience as a concept that inherently works synergistically with
elements of uncertainty and entropy first began to facilitate changes in the field of adaptive management and environmental resources, through work whose basis was built by Holling and colleagues yet again.
By the mid 1970s, resilience began gaining momentum as an idea in anthropology, culture theory, and other social sciences.
Even more compelling is the fact that there was significant work in
these relatively non-traditional fields that helped facilitate the
evolution of the resilience perspective as a whole. Part of the reason
resilience began moving away from an equilibrium-centric view and
towards a more flexible, malleable description of social-ecological
systems was due to work such as that of Andrew Vayda and Bonnie McCay
in the field of social anthropology, where more modern versions of
resilience were deployed to challenge traditional ideals of cultural
dynamics.
Eventually by the late 1980s and early 1990s, resilience had
fundamentally changed as a theoretical framework. Not only was it now
applicable to social-ecological systems, but more importantly,
resilience now incorporated and emphasized ideas of management,
integration, and utilization of change rather than simply describing
reactions to change. Resilience was no longer just about absorbing
shocks, but also about harnessing the changes triggered by external
stresses to catalyze the evolution the social-ecological system in
question.
As the issues of global warming
and climate change have gained traction and become more prominent since
the early 1990s, the question of climate resilience has also emerged.
Considering the global implications of the impacts induced by climate
change, climate resilience has become a critical concept that scientific
institutions, policymakers, governments, and international
organizations have begun to rally around as a framework for designing
the solutions that will be needed to address the effects of global warming.
Climate resilience and environmental justice
Applications of a resilience framework: addressing vulnerability
A
climate resilience framework offers a rich plethora of contributions
that can improve our understanding of environmental processes, and
better equip governments and policymakers to develop sustainable
solutions that combat the effects of climate change. To begin with,
climate resilience establishes the idea of multi-stable socio-ecological
systems. As discussed earlier, resilience originally began as an idea
that extended from the stable equilibrium view – systems only acted to
return to their pre-existing states when exposed to a disturbance. But
with modern interpretations of resilience, it is now established that
socio-ecological systems can actually stabilize around a multitude of
possible states. Secondly, climate resilience has played a critical role
in emphasizing the importance of preventive action
when assessing the effects of climate change. Although adaptation is
always going to be a key consideration, making changes after the fact
has a limited capability to help communities and nations deal with
climate change. By working to build climate resilience, policymakers and
governments can take a more comprehensive stance that works to mitigate
the harms of global warming impacts before they happen.
Finally, a climate resilience perspective encourages greater cross-scale
connectedness of systems. Climate change scholars have argued that
solely relying on theories of adaptation is also limiting because
inherently, this perspective does not necessitate as much full-system
cohesion as a resilience perspective would. Creating mechanisms of
adaptation that occur in isolation at local, state, or national levels
may leave the overall social-ecological system vulnerable. A
resilience-based framework would require far more cross-talk, and the
creation of environmental protections that are more holistically
generated and implemented.
Vulnerability
Negative
impacts of climate change are those that are least capable of
developing robust and comprehensive climate resiliency infrastructure
and response systems. However what exactly constitutes a vulnerable
community is still open to debate.
The International Panel on Climate Change has defined vulnerability
using three characteristics: the “adaptive capacity, sensitivity, and
exposure” to the effects of climate change. The adaptive capacity
refers to a community's capacity to create resiliency infrastructure,
while the sensitivity and exposure elements are both tied to economic
and geographic elements that vary widely in differing communities. There
are, however, many commonalities between vulnerable communities.
Vulnerability can mainly be broken down into 2 major categories, economic vulnerability, based on socioeconomic factors, and geographic vulnerability. Neither are mutually exclusive.
Economic vulnerability
World gross national income per capita.
At its basic level, a community that is economically vulnerable is
one that is ill-prepared for the effects of climate change because it
lacks the needed financial resources. Preparing a climate resilient
society will require huge investments in infrastructure, city planning,
engineering sustainable energy sources, and preparedness systems. From a
global perspective, it is more likely that people living at or below
poverty will be affected the most by climate change and are thus the
most vulnerable, because they will have the least amount of resource
dollars to invest in resiliency infrastructure. They will also have
the least amount of resource dollars for cleanup efforts after more
frequently occurring natural climate change related disasters.
Geographic vulnerability
A
second definition of vulnerability relates to geographic vulnerability.
The most geographically vulnerable locations to climate change are
those that will be impacted by side effects of natural hazards, such as
rising sea levels and by dramatic changes in ecosystem services,
including access to food. Island nations are usually noted as more
vulnerable but communities that rely heavily on a sustenance based
lifestyle are also at greater risk.
Abaco
Islands- An example of a low elevation island community likely to be
impacted by rising sea level associated with changing climate.
Roger E. Kasperson and Jeanne X. Kasperson of the Stockholm
Environmental Institute compiled a list of vulnerable communities as
having one or more of these characteristics.
- food insecure
- water scarce
- delicate marine ecosystem
- fish dependent
- small island community
Vulnerability and equity: environmental justice and climate justice
Equity is another essential component of vulnerability and is closely tied to issues of environmental justice and climate justice.
Who participates in and who has access to climate resiliency services
and infrastructure are more than likely going to fall along
historically unequitable patterns of distribution. As the most
vulnerable communities are likely to be the most heavily impacted, a climate justice
movement is coalescing in response. There are many aspects of climate
justice that relate to resiliency and many climate justice advocates
argue that justice should be an essential component of resiliency
strategies.
Similar frameworks that have been applied to the Climate Justice
movement can be utilized to address some of these equity issues. The
frameworks are similar to other types of justice movements and include-
contractariansim which attempts to allocate the most benefits for the
poor, utilitarianism which seeks to find the most benefits for the most
people, egalitarianism which attempts to reduce inequality, and
libertarianism which emphasizes a fair share of burden but also
individual freedoms.
The Act for Climate Justice Campaign has defined climate justice as “a vision to dissolve and alleviate the
unequal burdens created by climate change. As a form of environmental
justice, climate justice is the fair treatment of all people and freedom
from discrimination with the creation of policies and projects that
address climate change and the systems that create climate change and
perpetuate discrimination”.
Climate Justice can incorporate both grassroots as well as international and national level organizing movements.
Local level issues of equity
Many
indigenous peoples live sustenance based lifestyles, relying heavily on
local ecosystem services for their livelihoods. According to some
definitions, indigenous peoples are often some of the most vulnerable to
the impacts of climate change and advocating for participation of
marginalized groups is one goal of the indigenous people's climate
justice movement. Climate change will likely dramatically alter local
food production capacity, which will impact those people who are more
dependent on local food sources and less dependent on global or regional
food supplies. The greatest injustice is that people living this type
of lifestyle are least likely to have contributed to the causes of
global climate change in the first place. Indigenous peoples movements
often involve protests and calling on action from world leaders to
address climate change concerns.
Another local level climate justice movement is the adaptation
finance approach which has been found in some studies to be a positive
solution by providing resource dollars directly to communities in need.
International and national climate justice
The carbon market
approach is one international and national concept proposed that tries
to solve the issue by using market forces to make carbon use less
affordable, but vulnerable host communities that are the intended
beneficiaries have been found to receive little to no benefit.
One problem noted with the carbon market approach is the inherent
conflict of interest embedded between developed and sustenance based
communities. Developed nations that have often prioritized growth of
their own gross national product over implementing changes that would address climate change concerns by taxing carbon which might damage GDP.
In addition the pace of change necessary to implement a carbon market
approach is too slow to be effective at most international and national
policy levels.
Alternatively, a study by V.N Mather, et al. proposes a
multi-level approach that focuses on addressing some primary issues
concerning climate justice at local and international levels. The
approach includes:
- developing the capacity for a carbon market approach
- focusing on power dynamics within local and regional government
- managing businesses in regard to carbon practices
- special attention given to developing countries
Climate justice, environmental justice, and the United States
The issue of environmental justice and climate justice
is relevant within the United States because historically communities
of color and low socioeconomic communities have been under served and
underrepresented in terms of distribution and participation. The question of “by and for whom” resiliency strategies are targeted and implemented is of great concern. Inadequate response and resiliency strategies to recent natural disasters in communities of color, such as Hurricane Katrina, are examples of environmental injustices and inadequate resilience strategies in already vulnerable communities.
New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina levee damage.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has recently begun a Climate Justice campaign
in response to events such as Hurricane Katrina and in preparation for
future climate change related natural disasters. The goal of this
campaign is to address the 3 R's of climate justice: resilience,
resistance, and revisioning. The NAACP's climate justice initiative
will address climate resilience through advocacy, outreach, political
actions, research and education.
Climate gap
Another concept important for understanding vulnerability in the United States is the climate gap.
The climate gap is the inequitably negative impact on poor people and
people of color due to the effects of climate change. Some of these
negative impacts include higher cost of living expenses, higher
incidences of heat related health consequences in urban areas that are
likely to experience urban heat island
effects, increased pollution in urban areas, and decreases in available
jobs for poor people and people of color. Some suggested solutions to
close the climate gap include suggesting legislative policies that would
reduce the impact of climate change by reducing carbon emissions with the emphasis of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and toxic air pollution
in neighborhoods that are already heavily impacted, usually urban
centers. Other solutions include increasing access to quality health
care for poor people and people of color, preparedness planning for
urban heat island effects, identifying neighborhoods that are most
likely to be impacted, investing in alternative fuel and energy
research, and measuring the results of policy impacts.
Theoretical foundations for building climate resilience
As the threat of environmental disturbances due to climate change
becomes more and more relevant, so does the need for strategies to
build a more resilient society. As climate resiliency literature has
revealed, there are different strategies and suggestions that all work
towards the overarching goal of building and maintaining societal
resiliency.
Urban resilience
There is increasing concern on an international level with regards to addressing and combating the impending implications of climate change
for urban areas, where populations of these cities around the world are
growing disproportionately high. There is even more concern for the
rapidly growing urban centers in developing countries, where the
majority of urban inhabitants are poor or “otherwise vulnerable to
climate-related disturbances.”
Urban centers around the world house important societal and economic
sectors, so resiliency framework has been augmented to specifically
include and focus on protecting these urban systems.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) defines resilience as “the ability of a social or ecological
system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure
and ways of functioning, the capacity of self-organization, and the
capacity to adapt to stress and change.”
One of the most important notions emphasized in urban resiliency
theory is the need for urban systems to increase their capacity to
absorb environmental disturbances. By focusing on three generalizable
elements of the resiliency movement, Tyler and Moench's urban resiliency
framework serves as a model that can be implemented for local planning
on an international scale.
The first element of urban climate resiliency focuses on
“systems’ or the physical infrastructure embedded in urban systems. A
critical concern of urban resiliency is linked to the idea of
maintaining support systems that in turn enable the networks of
provisioning and exchange for populations in urban areas.
These systems concern both physical infrastructure in the city and
ecosystems within or surrounding the urban center; while working to
provide essential services like food production, flood control, or
runoff management.
For example, city electricity, a necessity of urban life, depends on
the performance of generators, grids, and distant reservoirs. The
failure of these core systems jeopardizes human well-being in these
urban areas, with that being said, it is crucial to maintain them in the
face of impending environmental disturbances. Societies need to build
resiliency into these systems in order to achieve such a feat. Resilient
systems work to “ensure that functionality is retained and can be
re-instated through system linkages”
despite some failures or operational disturbances. Ensuring the
functionality of these important systems is achieved through instilling
and maintaining flexibility in the presence of a “safe failure.”
Resilient systems achieve flexibility by making sure that key
functions are distributed in a way that they would not all be affected
by a given event at one time, what is often referred to as spatial
diversity, and has multiple methods for meeting a given need, what is
often referred to as functional diversity.
The presence of safe failures also plays a critical role in
maintaining these systems, which work by absorbing sudden shocks that
may even exceed design thresholds.
Environmental disturbances are certainly expected to challenge the
dexterity of these systems, so the presence of safe failures almost
certainly appears to be a necessity.
Further, another important component of these systems is
bounce-back ability. In the instance where dangerous climatic events
affect these urban centers, recovering or "bouncing-back" is of great
importance. In fact, in most disaster studies, urban resilience is often
defined as "the capacity of a city to rebound from destruction." This
idea of bounce-back for urban systems is also engrained in governmental
literature of the same topic. For example, the former government's first
Intelligence and Security Coordinator of the United States described
urban resilience as "the capacity to absorb shocks and to bounce back
into functioning shape, or at the least, sufficient resilience to
prevent...system collapse." Keeping these quotations in mind,
bounce-back discourse has been and should continue to be an important
part of urban climate resiliency framework.
Other theorists have critiqued this idea of bounce-back, citing this as
privileging the status quo, rather advocating the notion of ‘bouncing
forward’, permitting system evolution and improvement.
The next element of urban climate resiliency focuses on the
social agents (also described as social actors) present in urban
centers. Many of these agents depend on the urban centers for their very
existence, so they share a common interest of working towards
protecting and maintaining their urban surroundings.
Agents in urban centers have the capacity to deliberate and rationally
make decisions, which plays an important role in climate resiliency
theory. One cannot overlook the role of local governments and community
organizations, which will be forced to make key decisions with regards
to organizing and delivering key services and plans for combating the
impending effects of climate change.
Perhaps most importantly, these social agents must increase their
capacities with regards to the notions of “resourcefulness and
responsiveness.
Responsiveness refers to the capacity of social actors and groups to
organize and re-organize, as well as the ability to anticipate and plan
for disruptive events. Resourcefulness refers to the capacity of social
actors in urban centers to mobilize varying assets and resources in
order to take action.
Urban centers will be able to better fend for themselves in the heat
of climatic disturbances when responsiveness and resourcefulness is
collectively achieved in an effective manner.
The final component of urban climate resiliency concerns the
social and political institutions present in urban environments.
Governance, the process of decision making, is a critical element
affecting climate resiliency. As climate justice has revealed, the
individual areas and countries that are least responsible for the
phenomenon of climate change are also the ones who are going to be most
negatively affected by future environmental disturbances.
The same is true in urban centers. Those who are most responsible for
climate change are going to disproportionately feel the negative effects
of climatic disturbances when compared to their poorer, more vulnerable
counterparts in society. Just like the wealthier countries have worked
to create the most pollution, the wealthier subpopulations of society
who can afford carbon-emitting luxuries like cars and homes undoubtedly
produce a much more significant carbon footprint. It is also important
to note that these more vulnerable populations, because of their
inferior social statuses, are unable to participate in the
decision-making processes with regards to these issues. Decision-making
processes must be augmented to be more participatory and inclusive,
allowing those individuals and groups most affected by environmental
disturbances to play an active role in determining how to best avoid
them.
Another important role of these social and political institutions will
concern the dissemination of public information. Individual communities
who have access to timely information with regards to hazards are
better able to respond to these threats.
Human resilience
Global
climate change is going to increase the probability of extreme weather
events and environmental disturbances around the world, needless to say,
future human populations are going to have to confront this issue.
Every society around the world differs in its capacity with regards to
combating climate change because of certain pre-existing factors such as
having the proper monetary and institutional mechanisms in place to
execute preparedness and recovery plans. Despite these differences,
communities around the world are on a level-playing field with regards
to building and maintaining at least some degree “human resilience”.
Resilience has two components: that provided by nature, and that
provided through human action and interaction. An example of climate
resilience provided by nature is the manner in which porous soil more
effectively allows for the drainage of flood water than more compact
soil. An example of human action that affects climate resilience would
be the facilitation of response and recovery procedures by social
institutions or organizations. This theory of human resilience largely
focuses on the human populations and calls for building towards the
overall goal of decreasing human vulnerability in the face of climate
change and extreme weather events. Vulnerability to climatic
disturbances has two sides: the first deals with the degree of exposure
to dangerous hazards, which one can effectively identify as
susceptibility. The second side deals with the capacity to recover from
disaster consequences, or resilience in other words.
The looming threat of environmental disturbances and extreme weather
events certainly calls for some action, and human resiliency theory
seeks to solve the issue by largely focusing on decreasing the
vulnerability of human populations.
How do human populations work to decrease their vulnerability to
impending and dangerous climatic events? Up until recently, the
international approach to environmental emergencies focused largely on
post-impact activities such as reconstruction and recovery.
However, the international approach is changing to a more
comprehensive risk assessment that includes “pre-impact disaster risk
reduction - prevention, preparedness, and mitigation.”
In the case of human resiliency, preparedness can largely be defined
as the measures taken in advance to ensure an effective response to the
impact of environmental hazards.
Mitigation, when viewed in this context, refers to the structural and
nonstructural measures undertaken to limit the adverse impacts of
climatic disturbances.
This is not to be confused to mitigation with regards to the overall
topic of climate change, which refers to reduction of carbon or
greenhouse emissions. By accounting for these impending climate
disasters both before and after the occur, human populations are able to
decrease their vulnerability to these disturbances.
A major element of building and maintaining human resilience is public health.
The institution of public health as a whole is uniquely placed at the
community level to foster human resilience to climate-related
disturbances. As an institution, public health can play an active part
in reducing human vulnerability by promoting “healthy people and healthy
homes.”)
Healthy people are less likely to suffer from disaster-related
mortality and are therefore viewed as more disaster-resilient. Healthy
homes are designed and built to maintain its structure and withstand
extreme climate events. By merely focusing on the individual health of
populations and assuring the durability of the homes that house these
populations, at least some degree human resiliency towards climate
change can be achieved.
Climate resilience in practice
The
building of climate resilience is a highly comprehensive undertaking
that involves of an eclectic array of actors and agents: individuals, community organizations, micropolitical bodies, corporations, governments at local, state, and national levels as well as international organizations.
In essence, actions that bolster climate resilience are ones that will
enhance the adaptive capacity of social, industrial, and environmental
infrastructures that can mitigate the effects of climate change.
Currently, research indicates that the strongest indicator of
successful climate resilience efforts at all scales is a well-developed,
pre-existing network of social, political, economic and financial
institutions that is already positioned to effectively take on the work
of identifying and addressing the risks posed by climate change. Cities,
states, and nations that have already developed such networks are, as
expected, to generally have far higher net incomes and GDP.
Therefore, it can be seen that embedded within the task of
building climate resilience at any scale will be the overcoming of
macroscopic socioeconomic
inequities: in many ways, truly facilitating the construction of
climate resilient communities worldwide will require national and
international agencies to address issues of global poverty, industrial development, and food justice.
However, this does not mean that actions to improve climate resilience
cannot be taken in real time at all levels, although evidence suggests
that the most climate resilient cities and nations have accumulated this
resilience through their responses to previous weather-based disasters.
Perhaps even more importantly, empirical evidence suggests that the
creation of the climate resilient structures is dependent upon an array
of social and environmental reforms that were only successfully passed
due to the presence of certain sociopolitical structures such as democracy, activist movements, and decentralization of government.
Thus it can be seen that to build climate resilience one must
work within a network of related social and economic decisions that can
have adverse effects on the success of a resilience effort given the
competing interests participating in the discussion. Given this, it is
clear that the social and economic scale play a vital role in shaping
the feasibility, costs, empirical success, and efficiency
of climate resilience initiatives. There is a wide variety of actions
that can be pursued to improve climate resilience at multiple scales –
the following subsections we will review a series of illustrative case
studies and strategies from a broad diversity of societal contexts that
are currently being implemented to strengthen climate resilience.
Local and community level
Housing and workplace conditions
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Improving housing conditions in Kenya is a prime target for local climate resilience efforts
Housing inequality
is directly related to the ability for individuals and communities to
sustain adverse impacts brought on by extreme weather events that are
triggered by climate change, such as severe winds, storms, and flooding.
Especially for communities in developing nations and the Third World,
the integrity of housing structures is one of the most significant
sources of vulnerability currently.
However, even in more developed nations such as the US, there are still
multitudes of socioeconomically disadvantaged areas where outdated
housing infrastructure is estimated to provide poor climate resilience
at best, as well as numerous negative health outcomes.
Efforts to improve the resiliency of housing and workplace
buildings involves not only fortifying these buildings through use of
updated materials and foundation, but also establishing better standards
that ensure safer and health conditions for occupants. Better housing
standards are in the course of being established through calls for
sufficient space, natural lighting, provision for heating or cooling,
insulation, and ventilation. Another major issue faced more commonly by
communities in the Third World are highly disorganized and inconsistently enforced housing rights systems. In countries such as Kenya and Nicaragua, local militias
or corrupted government bodies that have reserved the right to seizure
of any housing properties as needed: the end result is the degradation
of any ability for citizens to develop climate resilient housing –
without property rights for their own homes, the people are powerless to
make changes to their housing situation without facing potentially
harmful consequences.
Grassroots community organizing and micropolitical action
Modern
climate resilience scholars have noted that contrary to conventional
beliefs, the communities that have been most effective in establishing
high levels of climate resilience have actually done so through
“bottom-up” political pressures. “Top-down” approaches involving state
or federal level decisions have empirically been marred with dysfunction
across different levels of government due to internal mismanagement and
political gridlock.
As a result, in many ways it is being found that the most efficient
responses to climate change have actually been initiated and mobilized
at local levels. Particularly compelling has been the ability of
bottom-up pressures from local civil society to fuel the creation of
micropolitical institutions that have compartmentalized the tasks
necessary for building climate resilience. For example, the city of Tokyo, Japan has developed a robust network of micropolitical agencies all dedicated to building resilience in specific industrial sectors: transportation, workplace conditions, emergency shelters, and more. Due to their compact size, local level micropolitical bodies can act
quickly without much stagnation and resistance from larger special
interests that can generate bureaucratic dysfunction at higher levels of
government.
Low-cost engineering solutions
Equally
important to building climate resilience has been the wide array of
basic technological solutions have been developed and implemented at
community levels. In developing countries such as Mozambique and Tanzania, the construction of concrete
“breaker” walls and concentrated use of sandbags in key areas such as
housing entrances and doorways has improved the ability of communities
to sustain the damages yielded by extreme weather events. Additional
strategies have included digging homemade drainage systems to protect
local infrastructure of extensive water damage and flooding.
An
aerial view of Dehli, India where urban forests are being developed to
improve the weather resistance and climate resilience of the city
In more urban areas, construction of a “green belt”
on the peripheries of cities has become increasingly common. Green
belts are being used as means of improving climate resilience – in
addition to provide natural air filtering, these belts of trees have
proven to be a healthier and sustainable means of mitigating the damages
created by heavy winds and storms.
State and national level
Climate-resilient infrastructure
Infrastructure
failures can have broad-reaching consequences extending away from the
site of the original event, and for a considerable duration after the
immediate failure. Furthermore, increasing reliance infrastructure
system interdependence, in combination with the effects of climate
change and population growth all contribute to increasing vulnerability
and exposure, and greater probability of catastrophic failures.
To reduce this vulnerability, and in recognition of limited resources
and future uncertainty about climate projections, new and existing
long-lasting infrastructure must undergo a risk-based engineering and
economic analyses to properly allocate resources and design for climate
resilience.
Incorporating climate projections into building and
infrastructure design standards, investment and appraisal criteria, and
model building codes is currently not common. Some resilience guidelines and risk-informed frameworks have been developed by public entities. For instance, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency,
New York City Transit Authority and Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey have each developed independent design guidelines for the
resiliency of critical infrastructure.
To address the need for consistent methodologies across
infrastructure sectors and to support development of standards for
adaptive design and risk management owing to climate change, the American Society of Civil Engineers
has published a Manual of Practice on Climate-Resilient
Infrastructure. The manual offers guidance for adaptive design methods,
characterization of extremes, development of flood design criteria,
flood load calculation and the application of adaptive risk management
principals account for more severe climate/weather extremes.
Infrastructural development disaster preparedness protocols
At larger governmental levels, general programs to improve climate resiliency through greater disaster preparedness are being implemented. For example, in cases such as Norway,
this includes the development of more sensitive and far-reaching early
warning systems for extreme weather events, creation of emergency electricity power sources, enhanced public transportation systems, and more.
To examine another case study, the state California
in the US has been pursuing more comprehensive federal financial aid
systems for communities afflicted by natural disaster, spurred in part
by the large amounts of criticism that was placed on the US federal
government after what was perceived by many to be a mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy relief.
Additionally, a key focus of action at state and federal levels
is in improving water management infrastructure and access. Strategies
include the creation of emergency drinking water supplies, stronger sanitation technology and standards, as well as more extensive and efficient networks of water delivery.
Social services
Climate
resilience literature has also noted that one of the more indirect
sources of resilience actually lies in the strength of the social services and social safety net
that is provided for citizens by public institutions. This is an
especially critical aspect of climate resilience in more
socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, cities, and nations. It has
been empirically found that places with stronger systems of social security and pensions oftentimes have better climate resiliency. This is reasoning in the following manner: first of all, better social services for citizens translates to better access to healthcare, education, life insurance,
and emergency services. Secondly, stronger systems of social services
also generally increase the overall ownership of relevant economic
assets that are correlated with better quality of life such as savings,
house ownership, and more. Nations where residents are on more stable
economic footing are in situations where there is a far higher incentive
for private investment into climate resilience efforts.
Global level
International treaties
At
the global level, most action towards climate resilience has been
manifested in the signing of international agreements that set up
guidelines and frameworks to address the impacts of climate change.
Notable examples include the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC, and the 2010 Cancun Agreement.
In some cases, as is the case with the Kyoto Protocol for example, these
international treaties involve placing legally binding requirements on
participant nations to reduce processes that contribute to global
warming such as greenhouse gas emissions.
In other cases, such as the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference
in Cancun, proposals for the creation of international funding pools to
assist developing nations in combating climate change are seen.
However, that enforcement of any of the requirements or principles that
are established in such international treaties has ambiguous: for
example, although the 2010 Cancun conference called for the creation of a
100 billion dollar “Green Climate Fund” for developing nations, if and
how this fund will actually be created still remains unclear.
Case studies
As the looming threat of climate change
and environmental disturbances becomes more and more immediate, so does
the need for policy to combat the issue. As a relatively new
phenomenon, climate change has yet to receive the political attention it
deserves. However, the climate justice and climate change
movements are gaining momentum on an international scale as both grass
roots campaigns and supranational organizations begin to gain influence.
However, the most significant and impacting changes come from national
and state governments around the world, as they have the political and
monetary power to more effectively enforce their proposals.
United States (as a country)
As
it stands today, there is no country-wide legislation with regards to
the topic of climate resiliency in the United States. However, in mid
February 2014, President Barack Obama announced his plan to propose a $1 billion “Climate Resilience Fund”.
The details of exactly what the fund will seek to accomplish are vague
since the fund is only in the stage of being proposed for Congress's
approval in 2015. However, in the speech given the day of the
announcement of this proposal, Obama claimed he will request “...new
funding for new technologies to help communities prepare for a changing
climate, set up incentives to build smarter, more resilient
infrastructure. And finally, my administration will work with tech
innovators and launch new challenges under our Climate Data Initiative,
focused initially on rising sea levels and their impact on the coasts,
but ultimately focused on how all these changes in weather patterns are
going to have an impact up and down the United States - not just on the
coast but inland as well - and how do we start preparing for that.”
Obama's fund incorporates facets of both urban resiliency and human
resiliency theories, by necessarily improving communal infrastructure
and by focusing on societal preparation to decrease the country's
vulnerability to the impacts of climate change.
Phoenix, Arizona
Phoenix's large population and extremely dry climate make the city
particularly vulnerable to the threats of drought and extreme heat.
However, the city has recently incorporated climate change into current
(and future) water management and urban design. And by doing so, Phoenix
has taken steps to ensure sustainable water supplies and to protect
populations that are vulnerable to extreme heat, largely through
improving the sustainability and efficiency of communal infrastructure.
For example, Phoenix uses renewable surface water supplies and reserves
groundwater for use during the instance when extended droughts arise.
The city is also creating a task force to redesign the downtown core to
minimize the way buildings trap heat and increase local temperatures.
The
outdated infrastructure pictured here in the Phoenix downtown will be
undergoing drastic changes geared towards improvements in efficiency.
Denver, Colorado
The city of Denver
has made recent strides to combat the threat of extreme wildfires and
precipitation events. In the year 1996, a fire burned nearly 12,000
acres around Buffalo Creek,
which serves as the main source of the city's water supply. Two months
following this devastating wildfire, heavy thunderstorms caused flash
floods in the burned area, having the effect of washing sediment into
the city's reservoir. In fact, this event washed more sediment into the
reservoir than had accumulated in the 13 years prior. Water treatment
costs were estimated to be $20 million over the next decade following
the event. Denver needed a plan to make sure that the city would not be
devastated by future wildfire and flash flood events. DenverWater and
the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Region are working together to
restore more than 40,000 acres of National Forests lands through processes like reforestation, erosion control, and the decommissioning of roads. Further, Denver
has installed sensors in the reservoirs in order to monitor the quality
of the water and quantity of debris or sediment. These accomplishments
will have the effect of building a more resilient Denver, Colorado
towards the impending increase of extreme weather events such as
wildfire and flooding.
China
Pictured
here is the conversion of three large rivers in Ningbo, China. The
country is taking substantial measures to combat the flash floods
predicted to intensify in the future.
China has been rapidly emerging as a new superpower, rivaling the United States.
As the most populated country in the world, and one of the leaders of
the global economy, China's response to the impending effects of climate
change is of great concern for the entire world. A number of
significant changes are expected to affect China as the looming threat
of climate change
becomes more and more imminent. Here's just one example; China has
experienced a seven-fold increase in the frequency of floods since the
1950s, rising every decade. The frequency of extreme rainfall has
increased and is predicted to continue to increase in the western and
southern parts of China. The country is currently undertaking efforts to
reduce the threat of these floods (which have the potential effect of
completely destroying vulnerable communities), largely focusing on
improving the infrastructure responsible for tracking and maintaining
adequate water levels. That being said, the country is promoting the
extension of technologies for water allocation and water-saving
mechanisms. In the country's National Climate Change Policy Program,
one of the goals specifically set out is to enhance the ability to bear
the impacts of climate change, as well as to raise the public awareness
on climate change. China's National Climate Change Policy states that
it will integrate climate change policies into the national development
strategy. In China, this national policy comes in the form of its "Five
Year Plans for Economic and Social Development". China's Five Year Plans
serve as the strategic road maps for the country's development. The
goals spelled out in the Five Year Plans are mandatory as government
officials are held responsible for meeting the targets.
India
As the world's second most populous country, India is taking action on a number of fronts in order to address poverty, natural resource management, as well as preparing for the inevitable effects of climate change.
India has made significant strides in the energy sector and the country
is now a global leader in renewable energy. In 2011 India achieved a
record $10.3 billion (USD) in clean energy investments, which the
country is now using to fund solar, wind, and hydropower projects around
the country. In 2008, India published its National Action Plan on
Climate Change (NAPCC), which contains several goals for the country.
These goals include but are not limited to: covering one third of the
country with forests and trees, increasing renewable energy supply to 6%
of total energy mix by 2022, and the further maintenance of disaster
management. All of the actions work to improve the resiliency of the
country as a whole, and this proves to be important because India has an
economy closely tied to its natural resource base and climate-sensitive
sectors such as agriculture, water, and forestry.
