Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

125 surveys to date and the datasets are available at http:/ www.twaweza.org/go/sauti-za-wananchi-english) . In the round associatedwith this paper’s results, the survey focused on assessments of political leadership. Resilience-related questions were included in an add-on module.[3] Respondents were contacted in July 2015 to take part in the survey through a computer aided telephonic interview (CATI) operated via an Ipsos Synovate managed call center in Dar es Salaam. A total of 1335 respondents out of the potential 2000 from the initial baseline completed this wave of the survey.[4] Questions were administered in Swahili and English, with a small financial incentive provided to respondents for their participation (US$0.5 mobile airtime credit). For full details of the sampling procedure, weighting, and data collection see (Twaweza [date unknown]). For 1334 of the respondents, a wide array of socio- demographic data from the 2012 baseline are available, as well as responses to the resilience questions listed above.[5] We removed an additional 40 of these respondents from the dataset because it was not certain that the same person replied as in the baseline, leaving 1294 matched observations.[6] In the analysis, we describe the characteristics of our sample and then present descriptive statistics on their reported resilience-related capacities, followed by multivariate analysis. Because the ordinal variables measuring resilience-related capacities are not normally distributed, we test the equality of proportions rather than means.[7] In the multivariate analysis, we used ordinal logistic models in which we regressed resilience-related scores—the extent to which respondents reported it was likely they could prepare for, adapt to, or transform their livelihoods in the event of severe flooding—on a range of objective controls to test whether these individual variables were independently able to predict levels of perceived household resilience. Independent variables included the age, gender, education, and household size of respondents, whether they were occupied in farming and whether they lived in an urban or rural area;[8] the wealth quintile of the household (using an asset index); and whether the household had previous experience of a flood, believed flooding to be a serious problem for their community, and whether they had known about the last flood that affected them (within the previous two years) in advance.[9] Given the regressors are the same across these models, we use a seemingly unrelated estimation technique to account for the correlation in the error terms (Weesie 1999, StataCorp 2013). Sample characteristics Our respondents to the survey were primarily household heads (98%), the majority of whom were male (57%).[10] They were primarily rural (65%) and occupied in farming (also 65%). We defined household wealth status according to an asset index that places households into quintiles.[11] Some 93% of households in the poorest asset quintile were in rural areas compared with about 16% of households in the richest asset quintile. Most respondents had a completed primary education (61%) whereas around 13% had at least some secondary education, 3% had a higher education, and just under 10% had no formal education. The mean age of respondents in our sample was 40 years, 37 for females and 42 for men, with a range of between 18 and 89 years old. RESULTS Experience of floods and perception of risk Respondents were asked to report their previous experience of extreme flooding (see Table A1.1.[12]). Overall, 32% reported having experienced at least one such event in the past two years. Among respondents with recent experience of severe flooding, 26% reported having had advancewarning before the flood. Respondentswere also asked howserious a problemextreme floodingwas, independently of whether they had recently experienced a flood. Most did not report flooding as a serious concern either for their households (86%) or for their communities (71%; Fig. A1.1). However, respondents from households that had experienced a flood in the previous two years were far more likely to perceive flooding as problematic; close to 40% of the exposed population reported flooding as a serious problem or the most serious problem for their household and over half (54%) reported it as serious or most serious for their community, compared with 2% and 17% of those who had not been exposed to a recent flood, respectively. This is in line with previous studies finding experience of past flooding as a strong contributing factor to risk perception (Mills et al. 2016). There were no other socio-demographic cleavages, except that respondents from asset poor households were more likely to believe flooding was serious for their communities. Among respondents with recent flood exposure, those who had early warning of that flood were more likely to perceive it as a serious problem, both for their households and their communities, than those who had not (Fig. A1.2). Some 57% and 67% of the population who had received advance warning of a previous flood perceived flooding to be a serious threat to their households and communities respectively, compared with 33% and 49% of those that did not have an early warning. Perceptions of resilience and association with experience and perception of risk Respondents assessed their perceived capacities to prepare for, recover from, and change their livelihood strategy in response to an extreme flood event. Most respondents reported a low perceived ability to prepare, recover, or change. Just one-third of the population reported that their households would be prepared in the event of a flood, one-quarter felt their households were capable of recovering fully within a six-month period, and 4 in 10 people felt their households could change their source of income/livelihood, if needed (Fig. 1).