17 Facts About Climate resilience

Climate resilience is defined as the "capacity of social, economic and ecosystems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance".

The key focus of increasing climate resilience is to reduce the climate vulnerability that communities, states, and countries currently have with regards to the many effects 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.

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.

The definition of climate resilience is heavily debated, in both conceptual and practical terms.

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.

Currently, the majority of work regarding climate resilience has focused on actions taken to maintain existing systems and structures.

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.

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.

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.

Secondly, climate resilience has played a critical role in emphasizing the importance of preventive action when assessing the effects of climate change.

Finally, a climate resilience perspective encourages greater cross-scale connectedness of systems.

Part of the reason Climate 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 Climate resilience were deployed to challenge traditional ideals of cultural dynamics.

Not only was it now applicable to social-ecological systems, but more importantly, Climate resilience now incorporated and emphasized ideas of management, integration, and utilization of change rather than simply describing reactions to change.

Climate resilience is the ability to recover from, or to mitigate vulnerability to, climate-related shocks such as floods and droughts.