Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

201 The competition was followed by a planning program that is working county-by-county to identify needs for adaptation in public infrastructure, called “Adapting to Rising Tides” (http:/ www.adaptingtorisingtides.org) . The concept of using adaptation to adjust to permanent changes while building in resilience to extreme events is now embedded in planning conversations in the San Francisco Bay Area. In other parts of the U.S., political affiliation seems to affect the perceived need for adaptation in addition to resilience (Botzen, Michel-Kerjan, Kunreuther, de Moel, & Aerts, 2016). Terms like “recurrent flooding” are used instead of referring to adaptation to sea level rise in regions where climate change is not an acknowledged phenomenon (Huler, 2012). But this is a special case of language being limited by regional politics, not by the knowledge or goals of the planning discipline. Myargument that aparadigmshift isoccurring inurbanenvironmental planning relieson the conclusion that these changes in terminology for goals and conceptual frames are more than just semantic. The change from “sustainability” to “resilience” to “adaptability” reflects changes in the underlying goals of urban environmental planning, driven by a growing comprehension of the types of significant changes cities are experiencing. Pursuing the goal of “resilience” operates as a kind of halfstep between the paradigms of sustainability and adaptation, since resilience to extreme events will be needed in the future as much as it is needed today. In that sense, the change in conceptual frames is really a change from the “sustainability framework” to the “adaptation framework,” while retaining the goal of resilience (meaning, the ability to recovery quickly from a disaster event) into the new climate future. 4. CHANGES IN METHODS FOR URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING If a paradigm shift is indeed occurring in urban environmental planning in response to our awareness of global climate change, this shift should be evident in the methods of planning as well as in its goals and conceptual frameworks. In fact, some methods are changing. This is evident in several areas of planning work, from physical and social vulnerability assessments to typological design methods and statistically-based methods of sizing systems for flood protection. This section will present examples of these methodological changes. The first area of methods that are changing might be referred to broadly as vulnerability assessments (Füssel & Klein, 2006). Many communities in the United States are engaged in what is currently a somewhat chaotic effort to define the appropriate scope and analytical methods for vulnerability studies (Berke et al., 2015), sometimes assisted by guidance from state and county jurisdictions (see for example, California Coastal Commission, 2015). These may be studies of vulnerability to physical phenomena such as sea level rise and freshwater flooding, earthquake liquefaction, fire, or drought, as well as new public health hazards or social inequality drivers. Terms such as exposure, risk, vulnerability, and hazard are not standardized, nor are the timeframes that should be used in order for the assessments to reflect future conditions. Generally, only primary exposures are studied, which excludes the study of secondary network impacts such as traffic congestion caused by fire or flooding effects on roadways (Biging, Radke, & Lee, 2012). Potential changes in ecological conditions that might be considered tertiary exposures are also rarely considered in vulnerability plans, such as harmful algal blooms driven by nutrient inputs and warming temperatures that affect the use and value of coastal property, along with human health (Glibert et al., 2014). Moreover, there are new questions about the methods that are appropriate for assessing social vulnerability in vulnerability plans. The index of social vulnerability was developed in relation to events, not long-term permanent adaptation processes (Cutter, Boruff, & Shirley, 2003). This index includes variables such as income, family size, languages spoken, and race, which have been correlated with vulnerability in emergency events in the US southeast. But the current need is for methods that will allow us to predict the ability of different adaptation proposals to increase social equity, rather than maintain the status quo. The term “vulnerable” itself is becoming contested in new ways, as communities that are relatively wealthy but physically vulnerable use the term to justify new funding that could help them adapt to changes such as sea level rise (see for example the vulnerability study for affluent coastal communities that serve as vacation rental properties most of each year, in Marin, California—Marin County Community Development Agency, 2015). The second category of changing methods is the statistical methods that are deeply embedded in the epistemological assumptions of environmental planning and riskmanagement, such as calculating the statistical recurrence interval of rainfall, flood or fire events. These methods rely on the concept of stationarity, which assumes that variability in natural systems occurs within a consistent envelope or range of values over long periods of time. As one author in the recent method debates has noted, “In view of the magnitude and ubiquity of the hydroclimatic change apparently now under way, however, we assert that stationarity is dead and should no longer serve as a central, default assumption in waterresource risk assessment and planning. Finding a suitable successor is crucial for human adaptation to changing climate,” (Milly et al., 2008). While there is currently an active debate about what methods can be used to compensate for climate change, it is clear that methods will need to change, particularly as the statistical signal of climate change becomes stronger (Milly et al., 2015; Stedinger &Griffis, 2011; Stroup, 2011). If stationarity is “dead,” the loss of its associatedmethodological assumptions represents a very significant shift from past methods in urban environmental planning as well as ecosystem management, water resources and civil engineering. The third area of change is in the development of socalled “early warning systems.” New methods are emerging that attempt to track the statistical dynamics of system behavior in order to identify and eventually to predict abrupt changes in state. Some researchers are looking for so-called regime shifts using moving-window calculations as an analytical tool with large datasets, tracking the range of variability in those data over time, among other variables (Dakos, Carpenter, van Nes, & Scheffer, 2014). These new methods are