Community resilience is the sustained ability of a community to use available resources (energy, communication, transportation, food, etc.) to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations (e.g. economic collapse to global catastrophic risks).[1] This allows for the adaptation and growth of a community after disaster strikes.[2] Communities that are resilient are able to minimize any disaster, making the return to normal life as effortless as possible. By implementing a community resilience plan, a community can come together and overcome any disaster, while rebuilding physically and economically.[3][4]

Due to its high complexity the discussion on resilient societies has increasingly been considered from an inter- and transdisciplinary scope.

Around 2010 the French-speaking discourse coined the notion of collapsology (collapse science), discussing the resilience of societal systems and possible scenarios for societal transformations in the face of a variety of factors, such as dependence on fossil fuels, overpopulation, loss of biodiversity, and instability of the financial system. The controversial term was created by Pablo Servigne (an agricultural engineer) who, with Raphaël Stevens, wrote the book Comment tout peut s'effondrer (literally, "How everything can collapse").[5] Another, decidedly transdisciplinary approach which has been coined in late 2010s by German researcher Karim Fathi is the concept of "multiresilience" taking into account the fact that crises in the 21st century are interconnected, multi-dimensional and occurring on multiple system levels. Challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic (individuals, organisations, societies alike) occur simultaneously, often even in interconnected and clustered forms.[6][7] From a cross-disciplinary perspective, Karim Fathi outlines five systemic principles contributing to increased collective intelligence, responsiveness and creativity of societies in the face of multiple crises occurring simultaneously.[8][9] Multiresilience is regarded as complementary to already established concepts for assessing and promoting societal resilience potentials. At the same time it criticises the fact that societal resilience has so far always been discussed from a mono-crisis persperctive. According to Karim Fathi, this onesided perspective" proves to be inadequate in terms of complexity, as societies in the 21st century have to deal with many global challenges - so-called „crisis-bundles“ - in the same time. Multiresilience aims to build up "basic robustness" in the sense of higher collective intelligence, which makes societies more capable of anticipating, reacting and solving problems in different crisis contexts.[10]

Community resilience planning

A community resilience plan is an action plan that allows for a community to rebuild after disaster. The plan should entail specific guidelines that will aid the community to rebuild both the economy and the ecosystem that the community thrives on. This typically means there are measures in place that a community will follow, such as the distribution of volunteers, and the access to knowledge and resources necessary to rebuild. Adaptability is a key attribute which means prevention can occur in response or before disaster strikes. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has a Community Resilience department tasked with solving this problem.[11] This agency has created a Community Resilience Planning Guide, and its aim is to assist communities with anticipating challenges through a practical application that takes into account the social needs of the community as well as dependencies on the "built environment" - buildings and infrastructure systems.[12] The outline of the six step process is shown below:

Classification of hazards

The scope of community resilience extends beyond natural disasters and include manmade events.[13] Below are an example of disasters communities face on a daily basis:

  1. Wind (hurricane, tornados)
  2. Earthquake (landslides, liquefaction)
  3. Inundation (flooding, coastal erosion)
  4. Fire (natural, manmade)
  5. Snow or rain (blizzards, tsunami)
  6. Technological or human-caused (cyberwarfare, nuclear weapons)
Hazard events that occur regularly and are typically less consequential events in terms of damage and recovery.
Hazard events that structures must be designed to withstand and often includes many natural disasters.
Hazard events may also found in building codes for some hazards; however, they are likely to cause significant and often irreparable damage.

Dependencies and cascading failures

Infrastructure systems such as buildings, water, electric power, transportation, and communication are all interconnected and interdependent networks or systems.[14] This means that a failure in one network can have catastrophic impact on another system. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, LA on August 23, 2005, it caused network outages in transportation and power networks which led to system failure and impedance in others such communication and emergency services.

For specific issues

Climate change

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".[15]: 7  For example, climate resilience can be the ability to recover from climate-related shocks such as floods and droughts.[16] 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.[16] It influences theory and practice across all sectors globally.[16] 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.[17] 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.[16]

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).[18][19] 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).[20]

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

See also

References

  1. ^ Bosher, Lee; Chmutina, Ksenia (April 3, 2017). Disaster Risk Reduction for the Built Environment. 111 River Street. Hoboken, NJ 07030: John Wiley & Sons. p. 32. ISBN 9781118921500.((cite book)): CS1 maint: location (link)
  2. ^ Fran H., Norris; Susan P., Stevens (March 2008). "Community Resilience as a Metaphor, Theory, Set of Capacities, and Strategy for Disaster Readiness". American Journal of Community Psychology. 41 (1–2): 127–150. doi:10.1007/s10464-007-9156-6. PMID 18157631. S2CID 45612103.
  3. ^ Sharifi, Ayyoob (October 2016). "A critical review of selected tools for assessing community resilience". Ecological Indicators. 69: 629–647. doi:10.1016/j.ecolind.2016.05.023.
  4. ^ Sharifi, Ayyoob; Yamagata, Yoshiki (September 2016). "On the suitability of assessment tools for guiding communities towards disaster resilience". International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. 18: 115–124. Bibcode:2016IJDRR..18..115S. doi:10.1016/j.ijdrr.2016.06.006.
  5. ^ "Pablo Servigne: "Je défends un catastrophisme positif"". Usbek & Rica (in French). 2016-08-10. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  6. ^ Karim Fathi: Die multi-resiliente Gesellschaft: Ansatzpunkte für die Corona-Krise und darüber hinaus. In: Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, Vol. 33, Issue 1, 2020.[1]
  7. ^ Fathi, K. (2022): Multi-Resilience – Development – Sustainability: Requirements for Securing the Future of Societies in the 21st Century. Springer
  8. ^ Karim Fathi: Resilienz im Spannungsfeld zwischen Nachhaltigkeit und Entwicklung - gesellschaftliche Zukunftssicherung im 21. Jahrhundert. Springer, 2019
  9. ^ Fathi, K. (2022): Multi-Resilience – Development – Sustainability: Requirements for Securing the Future of Societies in the 21st Century. Springer
  10. ^ Fathi, K. (2022): Multi-Resilience – Development – Sustainability: Requirements for Securing the Future of Societies in the 21st Century. Springer
  11. ^ "Topics | NIST". www.nist.gov. Archived from the original on 2017-11-10.
  12. ^ "Topics | NIST". www.nist.gov. Archived from the original on 2017-11-10.
  13. ^ Patel, Sonny S.; Rogers, M. Brooke; Amlôt, Richard; Rubin, G. James (February 2017). "What Do We Mean by 'Community Resilience'? A Systematic Literature Review of How It Is Defined in the Literature". PLOS Currents: Disasters. 1. PMC 5693357. PMID 29188132.
  14. ^ Guidotti, Roberto; Chmielewski, Hana (September 2016). "Modeling the resilience of critical infrastructure: the role of network dependencies". Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure. 1 (3–4): 153–159. doi:10.1080/23789689.2016.1254999. PMC 5557302. PMID 28825037.
  15. ^ IPCC, 2022: Summary for Policymakers [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, M. Tignor, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem (eds.)]. In: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA, pp. 3–33, doi:10.1017/9781009325844.001.
  16. ^ a b c d Grasham, Catherine Fallon; Calow, Roger; Casey, Vincent; Charles, Katrina J.; de Wit, Sara; Dyer, Ellen; Fullwood-Thomas, Jess; Hirons, Mark; Hope, Robert; Hoque, Sonia Ferdous; Jepson, Wendy; Korzenevica, Marina; Murphy, Rebecca; Plastow, John; Ross, Ian (2021). "Engaging with the politics of climate resilience towards clean water and sanitation for all". npj Clean Water. 4 (1): 42. Bibcode:2021npjCW...4...42G. doi:10.1038/s41545-021-00133-2. ISSN 2059-7037. Text was copied from this source, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
  17. ^ Charles, Katrina J.; Howard, Guy; Villalobos Prats, Elena; Gruber, Joshua; Alam, Sadekul; Alamgir, A.S.M.; Baidya, Manish; Flora, Meerjady Sabrina; Haque, Farhana; Hassan, S.M. Quamrul; Islam, Saiful (2022). "Infrastructure alone cannot ensure resilience to weather events in drinking water supplies". Science of the Total Environment. 813: 151876. Bibcode:2022ScTEn.813o1876C. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.151876. hdl:1983/92cc5791-168b-457a-93c7-458890f1bf26. PMID 34826465.
  18. ^ FAO (2016). "Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis - II" (PDF).
  19. ^ FSIN (2014). "A Common Analytical Model for Resilience Measurement" (PDF). Food Security Information Network.
  20. ^ Jones, Lindsey; D'Errico (2019). "Resilient, but from whose perspective? Like-for-like comparisons of objective and subjective measures of resilience" (PDF). London School of Economics and Political Science.

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