Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

200 interrelated environmental patterns in space and time. They also represent shifts in the goals and rationales for planning. Ian McHarg’s lectures andwriting in the 1970s strongly emphasized the need to restrict negative human impacts on the environment (see for example his lecture titled, Man, Planetary Disease, [McHarg, 1971]). In contrast, the Brundtland Report emphasized the potential for human cities and expanding resource uses to be successfully integrated into the natural systems of the planet (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). Shortly after, symposia were held that recognized global climate trends as a challenge to sustainable resource use, although optimism was still high that global climate change could be avoided through careful planning (DeFries & Malone, 1989). Since the late 1980s, the concept of sustainable development has been used widely in urban environmental planning (Wheeler & Beatley, 2014). In North America, it has often been applied by adopting the goal of sustaining pre-development processes (particularly hydrological flow regimes and species movement patterns) and the biodiversity that is characteristic of a geographic region (Bixler et al., 2016). This overall goal of sustaining pre-development processes and biodiversity led to the development of a set of concepts and methods within the patchwork of local land-use and infrastructure authorities that limit the scope of U.S. urban planning. Together, the goal itself and the concepts and methods associated with it might be called the “sustainable development conceptual framework” in American urban environmental planning. As it developed in the U. S., sustainable development relied on the ability of planners and ecologists to describe historical ecological relationships, inferred from soil patterns and other markers of past processes, and track the effects of contemporary resource uses on the health of those historical relationships (Kerans & Karr, 1994; Rapport et al., 1998). Similarly, the concept of a “native species” in North America relies on a determination that a species has been present in a region over thousands of years, and implies an assumption of relative stability in species distributions (Goodenough, 2010). The concept of “native” is fundamentally historical and ignores the scientific knowledge that species have moved as climates have changed throughout the Holocene. The concept doesn’t consider whether or not a species is well suited to a particular region as its climate changes. This makes the central concept of “native species” vulnerable to becoming completely outdated in the next few decades (Baker et al., 2013; Sorte, 2013). It also points out limitations in the way that the concept of sustainable development has been applied in U.S. urban environments, because of its conceptual dependency on the idea of sustaining pre-development processes (Hobbs et al., 2014; Palmer & Ruhl, 2015). The concepts of a “reference condition” and a “native species” both need significant re-consideration, along with the assumption that the scale of processes that underlie both biodiversity patterns and cultural landscapes, such as hydrologic flows, will continue to resemble the patterns of the last 1,000–3,000 years (Rockström et al., 2014). To the extentthat the concept of sustainable development in North American urban regions became synonymous with the goals of sustaining native species and pre-development hydrologic processes, the concept is not robust in an era of rapid climate change. The newer term that has already replaced “sustainable development” as a goal and framework in North American cities, particularly coastal cities, is “resilience” (Coaffee & Lee, 2016). This goal refers to the ability of a system to recover its functions quickly after a major disturbance. The very frequent use of this term in the last decade reflects a heightened awareness of the potential for extreme weather to produce destructive events in North American cities. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (2005) and Superstorm Sandy in the New York region (2012) were important events that drove the adoption of resilience as the highest-priority goal of these coastal cities (Weisz, Blumberg, & Keenan, 2015). In post-hurricane New Orleans, a series of workshops sponsored by the Dutch Embassy brought Dutch engineers and urban planners to the U.S., working alongside American planners and engineers (Waggonner & Meyer, 2010). These workshops eventually led to the development of a new water management strategy for the New Orleans region (Waggonner and Ball Architects, 2013) which emphasizes strategies for managing stormwater runoff from an extreme rainfall event. In New York, federal agencies sponsored a design/planning competition called “Rebuild by Design” that emphasized strategies for that region to recover from the types of storm surges and extreme rainfall related to large hurricane events (Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, 2013). “Resilience” was used frequently to describe the desired capacity to recover more quickly from a disastrous event. Yet it is important to note that the shift in goals and framework from “sustainable development” to “resilience” occurred because of a focus on disastrous single events, not on the incremental trends (such as higher sea levels) that are expected as a result of climate change (Shi, Chu, &Debats, 2015). Initially, the use of the term “resilience” could be seen as an extension of the sustainable development framework, because it marks planners’ recognition that sustaining cities requires that those cities must be prepared for major disaster events—from hurricanes to terrorist attacks. But as media news sources, academics and professional planners in some regions of the United States have converged on a general level of acceptance that climate change is happening, the term “sustainable” has frequently been replaced by the term “resilience” as public agencies present their planning goals. This represents a significant shift, and often implies an unstated recognition that some of the land and infrastructure cities administer today may not be sustained into the future (Wang, Tang, &Wang, 2014). The poignancy of this reality is palpable in urban neighborhoods that are unlikely to ever fully recover from an extreme storm, such as the still largely depopulated Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans (Landphair, 2007). Even more recently, a framework is emerging that recognizes the goal of incremental, permanent environmental change in urban planning. This became evident in 2009, when one of the leading public agencies of the San Francisco Bay area sponsored a design competition called “Rising Tides” (King, 2009). In this competition, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) called for urban and environmental planning strategies to address the permanent sea level rise associated with climate change.