What Contributes to Community Resilience in the Face of Climate Change?
Local communities are most affected by the increased threat of adverse weather events. Addressing that threat requires nations and communities to prepare for and mitigate the effects of climate change. A recently published working paper from the Evidence Project, “Resilience and Community Response to Climate-related Events,” contributes to the understanding of how vulnerable local communities respond to climate change, and how governments, aid organizations, and researchers can help those communities to strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity. In this paper my colleague Aviva Klein Meyers from Stanford University and I review definitions of resilience and present four case studies of community response to extreme weather events to illustrate community resilience in action: drought in Ethiopia, flood in Mozambique, cyclone in the Philippines, and forest fire in Indonesia.
photo credit: DFAT photo library