Environmental Hazards and Resilience

Theory and Evidence

Dennis J. Parker, Edmund C. Penning-Rowsell, Dennis J. Parker, Edmund C. Penning-Rowsell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000437485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Building resilience to the world's increasingly damaging environmental hazards has become a priority. This book considers the scientific advances which have been made around the world to enhance this resilience.

Although resilience is not new, it is through the idea of resilience that governments, organisations, and communities around the world are now seeking to address the rapidly increasing losses that environmental hazards cause so that fewer lives are lost, and damage is reduced. Alternative ideas and approaches have been helpful in reducing loss, but resilience offers a fresh and potentially effective means of reducing it further. Adopting a scientific approach and scientific evidence is important in applying the resilience idea in hazard mitigation. However, the science of resilience is at an immature stage of development with much discussion about the concept and how it should be understood and interpreted. Building useful theories remains a challenge although some of the building blocks of theory have been developed. More attention has been given to developing indicators and frameworks of resilience which are subsequently applied to measure resilience to hazards such as flooding, earthquake, and climate change.

Environmental Hazards and Resilience: Theory and Evidence considers the scientific and theoretical challenges of making progress in applying resilience to environmental hazard mitigation and provides examples from around the world – including the USA, New Zealand, China, Bangladesh and elsewhere.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the Environmental Hazards.

Using vulnerability and resilience concepts to advance climate change adaptation

Erin P. Joakim, Linda Mortsch and Greg Oulahen

Adaptation is necessary if we are to minimize risks associated with climate change impacts. Vulnerability and resilience are two important concepts in the literature on hazards and climate change but have been used in a variety of ways to investigate human interaction with a hazardous environment. The result is widespread adoption of the terms but confusion about their relationship and how best they can advance work on climate change adaptation. This paper critically reviews the different understandings of the concepts and how they relate, and then proposes a framework that integrates vulnerability and resilience in order to advance adaptation thinking, planning and implementation. The paper concludes with a description of how the framework will apply findings on unequal social vulnerability to inform adaptation options that increase resilience in coastal cities.

1. Introduction

Climate change adaptation refers to the discrete actions taken to adjust to actual or expected climate and its effects, and seeks to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities in human systems (Agard et al., 2014). Along with mitigation, adaptation is a cornerstone of responding to the issue of climate change. It is a fundamental and necessary response if we are to ameliorate the impacts associated with a changing climate and a future that is likely to have increasingly frequent and severe climate-related hazards. The overall aim of adaptation is ‘ … to maintain and increase the resilience and reduce the vulnerability of ecosystems and people in the face of the adverse effects of climate change’ (Agard et al., 2014, p. 11). From this perspective, adaptation actions contribute to reducing vulnerability and building resilience within the context of a changing climate (IPCC, 2014).

While there is a significant amount of planning being conducted to develop and mainstream adaptation policy, an emerging challenge is that this planning can often be considered incremental, primarily local and lacking a broader strategic approach and consideration of ideas of transformation and change (IPCC, 2014). While the concepts of vulnerability and resilience may be considered during adaptation planning, an overarching framework to guide adaptation thinking is often neglected. Although resilience may be used to describe or frame adaptation activities (i.e. that the adaptation option helps move the system toward resilience), a description of what resilience means and what it entails is often lacking. At a time when there is increasingly popular use of the term resilience, it is important to critically examine how this concept can be incorporated in a framework to advance climate change adaptation thinking and help make it a powerful agent for change. While there is a strong definitional, methodological and empirical understanding of vulnerability, the relationship between vulnerability and resilience, and how it contributes to framing adaptation, is unclear (Cannon & Müller-Mahn, 2010). Furthermore, there is often confusion about what these terms mean; this may stem from the fact that the terms have been defined and used across disciplines and stakeholders, leading to ambiguity about what they represent and how they can be applied (Cardona et al., 2012; Hewitson et al., 2014).

This paper critically examines how integrating the concepts of vulnerability and resilience may be useful for developing a framework for guiding climate change adaptation activities. To begin, the paper reviews how vulnerability and resilience have been interpreted in both the hazards and climate change literature, followed by an exploration of the nature of the relationship between the two concepts. The paper then moves on to a discussion of how these concepts can frame adaptation thinking, planning and implementation. The overall argument of the paper is to suggest that incorporating both concepts of vulnerability and resilience can be useful for framing adaptation; vulnerability concepts are useful for defining existing political–economic structural problems that contribute to unequal risk, whereas resilience offers the potential to identify and clarify solutions and move adaptation forward.

2. Vulnerability to climate-related hazards and stressors

The concept of vulnerability has been used in a variety of disciplines; thus there are different understandings and approaches that have been used over the past 40 years (Birkmann, 2006). The term was historically used by the Romans to describe a wounded soldier on the battlefield – indicating that the soldier was at risk for future attack (Adger, 2000). This implies that the vulnerable person is defined by their existent state, regardless of any future threat they may face or any adaptations they may take. While this may have been the historical meaning, in the context of climate change hazards and adaptation, the term vulnerability has not always been used in this way. Various disciplines have used and understood the concept in different ways; due to the various uses and understandings of the term, Füssel and Klein (2006, p. 305) have identified several ambiguities that have arisen from epistemic and semantic differences, including:

(1) Whether vulnerability is the starting point, intermediate element or outcome when conducting an assessment;

(2) Whether vulnerability should be defined in relation to an external stressor or to an undesirable outcome;

(3) Whether vulnerability is an inherent property of a system or dependent upon a specific circumstance, scenario and responses;

(4) Whether vulnerability is a static or dynamic concept.

A number of academics have reviewed the vulnerability literature and outlined a variety of approaches. Villágran's (2006) review organized vulnerability conceptualizations into three categories: physical exposure, pre-existing condition and benchmark vulnerability. Eakin and Luers (2006) similarly highlighted three categories of vulnerability conceptualizations, focusing on disciplinary approaches: the risk/hazard perspective, the political economy/ecology approach and the ecological resilience approach. Füssel (2007) divides vulnerability approaches into five categories, including the risk hazard perspective, political economy approaches, the pressure-and-release (PAR) model, the integrated approach and the resilience perspective. More simplistically, Kelly and Adger (2000) divided approaches into starting point and end point understandings of vulnerability. This is similar to O'Brien, Eriksen, Nygaard, and Schjolden's (2007) dual approach of outcome and contextual vulnerability categorizations.

Each of these reviews focuses on a different approach for categorizing the diverse ways in which vulnerability has been defined and used, with some authors reviewing vulnerability conceptualizations from a broad disciplinary perspective, while others focus almost exclusively on the climate change literature. While each of these pieces offers important understanding and synthesis of the vulnerability literature, the discussion in this paper provides a bridge among these different reviews. As vulnerability conceptualizations in the climate change literature have been influenced by other disciplines, this review includes a broad approach for classifying vulnerability approaches, including disciplinary perspectives from the climate change, hazards and other related literatures. The vulnerability categorizations mentioned above are organized into four main groups in order to synthesize the variety of vulnerability reviews. This synthesized review will then be useful for outlining how vulnerability concepts link to climate change and can be used to frame adaptation thinking.

2.1. Vulnerability as a threshold

The first understanding of vulnerability explores the concept as the probability of a person, community or system reaching or surpassing a certain benchmark or threshold, more commonly found in the food security literature (Villagrán, 2006). This approach is also commonly found in the engineering sciences, with vulnerability viewed as the threshold at which physical structures are likely to fail (e.g. dike failure and building collapse) or protective measures exceeded (e.g. overtopping of flood protective measures). This approach is less-often used within the climate change community, although there is a relation to concepts of tipping points; tipping points are defined as the threshold at which abrupt and irreversible harm occurs and is more commonly associated with natural as opposed to human systems (Agard et al., 2014).

2.2. Vulnerability as exposure to hazards

The second approach defines vulnerability in relation to exposure to particular hazards or stressors. This is highlighted as the traditional risk and hazards approach identified by both Eakin and Luers (2006) and Füssel (2007). In this approach, hazards and disasters, including climate-related hazards and stressors, are viewed as purely physical events, where impacted populations are seen as passive actors in the risk process. Vulnerability is defined specifically as a direct consequence of exposure, and there is often little differentiation between the social and spatial characteristics of impacted areas (Villágran, 2006). Within this approach, emphasis is predominantly related to physical systems, such as the built environment (Füssel, 2007). Furthermore, this approach tends to focus on the immediate impact of the hazard or stress, as opposed to issues that may arise after exposure. Cannon (2000) further argues that this approach has a tendency toward technocratic, ‘hard science’ strategies for responding and adapting to hazards and climate-related stressors, with a focus on engineering or management solutions. As this understanding of vulnerability relates only to exposure, there is limited recognition of the role of socio-economic systems that differentially allocate risk and contribute to populations that have a lowered ability to cope and respond.

2.3. Vulnerability as pre-existing condition

The third approach conceptualizes vulnerability as a particular condition or state of a system before a hazard or climate-related stressor occurs, often described in terms of criteria such as susceptibility, limitations, incapacities or deficiencies, for example, the incapacity to resist the impact of a hazard or climate change (resistance) and the incapacity to cope (coping capacity) (Villagran, 2006). This approach is the closest in line with the historical meaning of the word identified by Kelly and Adger (2000) above, whereby vulnerability is seen as a pre-existing condition.

This understanding of vulnerability is defined b...