Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

137 Consequently, the livelihoods of people in the MRD will be vulnerable if measures are not undertaken to cope with and adapt to future flooding. Fig. 1. The highest water levels during different flood years in the MRD (1929-2007). Source: Tuan et al. 2007. Resilience has become a useful concept in the study of environmental hazards. The term “resilience” first originated from the ecological discipline. Holling (1973:17) defines resilience as “a measure of the ability of these systems to absorb change of state variables, driving variables and parameters and still persist”. This concept focuses on the capacity of an ecological system to absorb changes but still maintain its core function. Flood risk managers define resilience as “the ability of the system to recover from floods” (Bruijn 2004:199). In a social system, Adger et al. (2002:358) define social resilience as “the ability of a system to absorb external changes and stress, while maintaining the sustainability of their livelihoods”. A system in this context may be a region, a community, a household, an economic sector, a business, a population group, or an ecological system (Brooks 2003). Buckle (2006:91) refers to resilience as the “capacity to withstand loss”. Norris et al. (2008:130) define resilience as “a process linking a set of adaptive capacities to a positive trajectory of functioning and adaptation after a disturbance”. Recently, the concept of resilience has been seen in a linked social and ecological system (Folke et al. 1998, Adger 2000, Folke 2006). The resilience concept is concerned with the capacity for renewal, reorganization and development (Folke 2006); creativity (Adger 2000, Maguire and Hagan 2007), and transformation in a social-ecological system (Walker et al. 2004) and capacity to maintain its identity (Cumming et al. 2005). Although there are various definitions of resilience from different disciplines, three common properties of resilience dominate in resilience literature (Carpenter et al. 2001). The first property is about the speed of recovery at which a system can recover after disturbance. So natural hazard researchers attempt to observe the speed of recovery after disasters as a measure of resilience (Bruijn 2004). The second is the magnitude of a disturbance relative to a threshold that can be absorbed before a system changes its structure by changing the processes and variables that control it (Colding et al. 2003). The final property is about the capacity to learn from and to create new things from disturbance, and to transform (Folke et al. 2002, Berkes and Seixas 2005). Therefore, the conventional approach to measure resilience as the speed of recovery may not capture its full dimensions. Resilience of the system is dependent on several factors such as demographic, social, cultural, economic, political, type of natural hazards, and geographical setting of the place (Gaillard 2007). However, these factors may vary at different levels of analysis (Buckle 2006). At the household level, access to agricultural land, diversity of income sources, and good housing quality create essential resources for households to cope with annual flood events in Bangladesh and climate change in the coastal province of Vietnam (Adger 1999, Brouwer et al. 2007). Learning to live with change and uncertainty, nurturing learning and adapting, and creating opportunities for self-organization were found as the important factors for enhancing household resilience in the Cambodian context (Marschke and Berkes 2006). Marshall and Marshall (2007) identified four perceived factors that contribute to conceptualizing resilience at the individual level: (1) perception of risk associated with change, (2) perception of ability to learn, plan and self-organize, (3) perception of the ability to cope, and (4) level of interest in changes in an Australian context.