Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

178 Ensuring Resilience of Natural Resources under Exposure to Extreme Climate Events by Brent Jacobs, Louise Boronyak-Vasco, Kristy Moyle and Peat Leith This article was originally published in Resources, 5(2), 2016. https://doi.org/10.3390/resources5020020 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license ABSTRACT Natural resources directly support rural livelihoods and underpin much of the wealth of rural and regional Australia. Climate change manifesting as increasing frequency and or severity of extreme weather events poses a threat to sustainable management of natural resources because the recurrence of events may exceed the resilience of natural systems or the coping capacity of social systems. We report the findings of a series of participatory workshops with communities in eight discrete landscapes in South East New South Wales, Australia. The workshops focused on how natural resource management (NRM) is considered in the Prevent-Prepare-Respond- Recover emergency management cycle. We found that NRM is generally considered only in relation to the protection of life and property and not for the intrinsic value of ecosystem services that support communities. We make three recommendations to improve NRM under extreme climate events. Firstly, the support to communities offered by emergency management agencies could be bolstered by guidance material co-produced with government NR agencies. Secondly, financial assistance from government should specifically target the restoration and maintenance of green infrastructure to avoid loss of social-ecological resilience. Thirdly, action by natural resource dependent communities should be encouraged and supported to better protect ecosystem services in preparation for future extreme events. Keywords: natural resource management; extreme climate events; emergency management 1. INTRODUCTION Natural resources directly support the livelihoods of rural society and underpin much of the economic activity of rural and regional areas globally [1,2,3]. Australia’s natural resource base is in decline and climate change poses an additional threat to the sustainable management of land, water and biodiversity [4]. The impact of extreme climate events such as bushfire, floods and drought in rural and regional areas can be devastating and disruptive to social and economic activity [5]. If the events result in a step-change in the supply of ecosystem services through, for example, top-soil erosion, surface water pollution or local plant and animal extinctions, the consequences for rural and regional communities can be a permanent loss of natural capital and flow on impacts to social cohesion and accelerated rural decline [6]. Projections of future climate suggest that changes to the frequency and/or severity of extreme climate events are likely to occur [7]. Attempts to define extreme events can be made difficult because of a shifting baseline. Taleb’s discussion of Black Swan events emphasises society’s blindness with respect to randomness, particularly in relation to large deviations [8]. Easterling et al. categorise climate extremes into two broad groups: (i) those based on simple climate statistics, which include extremes such as heavy daily or monthly rainfall volumes or very low or very high daily temperatures, that occur annually; and (ii) more complex event-driven extremes, examples of which include severe drought, storms and floods, which do not necessarily occur every year at a given location [9]. Smith defines an extreme event for ecological systems as “an occurrence inwhich a statistically rare or unusual climate period alters ecosystem structure and or function well outside the bounds of what is considered typical or normal variability” [10] (p. 658). She suggests that in response to an extreme climate event, ecosystems surpass an extreme response threshold with two possible outcomes. Either, an ecosystem over time will recover its “normal” function, or it can undergo a change of state likely accompanied by species loss and invasion [9]. Under climate change, the severity and frequency of events will likely combine to determine the interval required for recovery of social-ecological systems. If the frequency of recurrence is greater than the rate at which the system recovers its pre-event level of function then the socio-ecological system can be pushed beyond certain thresholds (leading to a potential state change), most likely resulting in a loss of resilience in the natural system and/or the coping capacity of the social system [5]. While the potential exists for an extreme climate event that causes local ecosystems to change state, the consequences of such an occurrence would be highly unpredictable and likely beyond the coping capacity of local emergency services and NR managers with lasting consequences for the environment and ecosystem services. Instead, in this paper we consider the case of an event of lesser intensity where the social system responds effectively through management intervention to avoid thresholds, enhance recovery of ecosystems and increase resilience to repeat events [11].