Climate resilience

Climate resilience is a concept to describe how well people or ecosystems are prepared to bounce back from certain climate hazard events. The formal definition of the term is the "capacity of social, economic and ecosystems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance". For example, climate resilience can be the ability to recover from climate-related shocks such as floods and droughts. Methods of coping include suitable responses to maintain relevant functions of societies and ecosystems. To increase climate resilience means one has to reduce the climate vulnerability of people and countries. Efforts to increase climate resilience include a range of social, economic, technological, and political strategies. They have to be implemented at all scales of society, from local community action all the way to global treaties.

To make societies more climate resistant, politicians can encourage more climate resilient development. This kind of development has become the new paradigm for sustainable development. It influences theory and practice across all sectors globally. Two approaches that fall under this kind of development are climate resilient infrastructure and climate-smart agriculture. Another example are climate-resilient water services. These are services that provide access to high quality drinking water during all seasons and even during extreme weather events. On every continent, governments are now adopting policies for climate resilient economies. International frameworks such as the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals are drivers for such initiatives.

Tools exist to measure climate resilience. They allow for comparisons of different groups of people through standardized metrics. Objective tools use fixed and transparent definitions of resilience. Two examples for objective tools are the Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis (RIMA) and the Livelihoods Change Over Time (LCOT). Subjective approaches on the other hand use people's feelings of what constitutes resilience. People then self-evaluate accordingly. An example is the Subjectively-Evaluated Resilience Score (SERS).

Climate resilience is closely related to climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and to the concept of climate justice.

Definition
Climate resilience is generally considered to be the ability to recover from, or to mitigate vulnerability to, climate-related shocks such as floods and droughts. It is a political process that strengthens the ability of all to mitigate vulnerability to risks from, and adapt to changing patterns in, climate hazards and variability.

The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report defines climate resilience as follows: "Resilience [...] is defined as the capacity of social, economic and ecosystems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance, responding or reorganising in ways that maintain their essential function, identity and structure as well as biodiversity in case of ecosystems while also maintaining the capacity for adaptation, learning and transformation."

Resilience is a useful concept because it speaks across sectors and disciplines but this also makes it open to interpretation resulting in differing, and at times competing, definitions. The definition of climate resilience is heavily debated, in both conceptual and practical terms.

Components
Currently, the majority of work regarding climate resilience has focused on actions taken to maintain existing systems and structures. This largely relates to the capacity of 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 the academic literature that actions taken to induce structural changes must also be recognized within the definition of resilience. The three basic capacities that are understood under the common definition are absorptive, adaptive, and transformative, each of which contributes different factors to the efforts of resilience work. This includes the capacity of 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.

Key aspects include: how resilience relates 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.

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, 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 gross domestic product (GDP).

Development
"Climate resilient development" has become a new (albeit contested) paradigm for sustainable development, influencing theory and practice across all sectors globally. This is particularly true in the water sector, since water security is intimately connected to climate change. On every continent, governments are adopting policies for climate resilient economies, driven in part by international frameworks such as the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Climate resilient development "integrates adaptation measures and their enabling conditions with mitigation to advance sustainable development for all". It involves questions of equity and system transitions, and includes adaptations for human, ecosystem and planetary health. Climate resilient development is facilitated by developing partnerships with traditionally marginalised groups, including women, youth, Indigenous Peoples, local communities and ethnic minorities.

To achieve climate resilient development, the following actions are needed: increasing climate information, and financing and technical capacity for flexible and dynamic systems. This needs to be coupled with greater consideration of the socio-ecological resilience and context-specific values of marginalised communities and meaningful engagement with the most vulnerable in decision making. Consequently, resilience produces a range of challenges and opportunities when applied to sustainable development.

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. Such manuals can offer 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. One example is the "Climate Resiliency Design Guidelines" by New York City.

Climate resilience framework
A climate resilience framework can 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 (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 climate change impacts before they happen. Finally, a climate resilience perspective encourages greater cross-scale connectedness of systems. 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.

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.

Measurements
Governments and development agencies are spending increasing amounts of finance to support resilience-building interventions. Resilience measurement can make valuable contributions in guiding resource allocations towards resilience-building. This includes targeted identification of vulnerability hotspots, a better understanding of the drivers of resilience, and tools to infer the impact and effectiveness of resilience-building interventions. In recent years, a large number of resilience measurement tools have emerged, offering ways to track and measure resilience at a range of scales - from individuals and households to communities and nations.

Efforts to measure climate resilience currently face several technical challenges. Firstly, the definition of resilience is heavily contested, making it difficult to choose appropriate characteristics and indicators to track. Secondly, the resilience or households or communities cannot be measured using a single observable metric. Resilience is made up of a range of processes and characteristics, many of which are intangible and difficult to observe (such as social capital). As a result, many resilience toolkits resort to using large lists of proxy indicators.

Most of the recent initiatives to measure resilience in rural development contexts share two shortcomings: complexity and high cost. USAID published a field guide for assessing climate resilience in smallholder supply chains.

Most objective approaches use fixed and transparent definitions of resilience and allow for different groups of people to be compared through standardized metrics. However, as many resilience processes and capacities are intangible, objective approaches are heavily reliant on crude proxies. Examples of commonly used objective measures include the Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis (RIMA) and the Livelihoods Change Over Time (LCOT).

Subjective approaches to resilience measurement take a contrasting view. They assume that people have a valid understanding of their resilience and seek to factor perceptions into the measurement process. They challenge the notion that experts are best placed to evaluate other people's lives. Subjective approaches use people's menu of what constitutes resilience and allow them to self-evaluate accordingly. An example is the Subjectively-Evaluated Resilience Score (SERS).