Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

223 with climate change (Baker 2012). In some cases, ongoing urbanization will exacerbate the effects of climate change by increasing temperatures through heat island effects and boosting energy demands (Timmerman and White 1997). The vulnerability, i.e., the “propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected” (Field et al. 2012:32), of urban populations to the effects of climate change will vary within a given city. People’s income and assets are themost consistent indicators of their vulnerability and are used as the two factors characterizing vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. Most disaster-related injuries and deaths in cities occur among low-income groups (Moser and Satterthwaite 2008, United Nations Habitat 2011). Poverty places populations in a position of greater risk, with fewer resources and options to draw on (Hardoy and Pandiella 2009). Climate change will exacerbate the existing vulnerabilities of the urban poor and create new risks as more areas in a city are exposed to climate related hazards. Inequities in the provision of services and access to resources can hinder the ability of cities to effectively adapt to climate change (Romero Lankao 2010). Cities around the world are developing plans to adapt to climate change, and these plans will have consequences for the availability and distribution of resources and opportunities. Urban adaptation can result in changes to the built environment, land use patterns, decision making processes, development planning, exposure to hazards, and access to services (Carmin et al. 2009, Ford et al. 2011). For example, cities can incentivize water conservation, fund energy efficient transportation, and improve flood mitigation structures. Although many of these actions intersect with mitigation efforts, e.g., increasing energy-use efficiency, adaptation also requires reducing people’s exposure and vulnerability and increasing people’s resilience to extreme events (Field et al. 2012). The infrastructure investments required can create spaces of inaccessibility in a city by excluding certain groups and connecting select urban places (Graham and Marvin 2001). Adaptation plans and programs are also likely to be embedded within existing decision making frameworks, priorities, and processes that determine a city’s broader socioeconomic development trends. Adaptation, therefore, has the potential to contribute to the reproduction of inequalities and differential environmental burdens in cities and to include or exclude the needs of the most vulnerable, that is, those urban populations that lack wealth and assets. Adaptation actions should therefore be evaluated, at least in part, based on justice criteria to ensure decision making processes and the distribution of costs and benefits include and benefit urban populations that lack wealth and assets. However, a recent review has shown that our understanding of the consequences of urban climate change governance for justice concerns is lacking (Bulkeley 2010), and most cities do not include justice criteria in their climate change planning efforts (Zeemering 2009, Finn and McCormick 2011). This gap is hindering efforts to improve the environmental performance of cities because “the greatest challenge...is not necessarily the lack of environmental services and infrastructure, but the societal structures reproducing unequal distribution and malfunctioning of these services” (Myllylä and Kuvaja 2005:224). Previous studies of urban climate change policy have focused on the motivations behind planning processes and their outcomes, primarily in developed countries (Robinson and Gore 2005, Engel and Orbach 2008, Zahran et al. 2008, Amundsen et al. 2010, Ford et al. 2011, Krause 2011, Sharp et al. 2011). Climate change justice research has largely focused on rural areas and resource dependent communities, or conflicts in the global arena (Brown 2003, Adger et al. 2006, Dellink et al. 2009, Füssel 2010, Okereke and Dooley 2010, Marino and Ribot 2012, Yates 2012). The use of participation and collaboration processes in cities, and the political struggles these processes necessarily engage, are only starting to be considered by the IPCC and the broader urban climate change community (Few et al. 2007, van Aalst et al. 2008, Aylett 2010). A more holistic and empirical approach to evaluating justice in urban climate change planning, and, more specifically, plans for adaptation, is a necessary next step. WHAT IS JUSTICE IN URBAN ADAPTATION? Identifying justice in urban adaptation requires clear criteria for evaluating decision making processes and outcomes; at the same time, justice is a contested and normative concept. John Rawls, a prominent political philosopher, saw justice as fairness, meaning that the terms of allocating benefits and burdens are such that a reasonable person would accept them and expect others to do the same (Rawls 1971). He argued that even if all people were given equal liberties and opportunities at birth, differences in position and power would still arise. These social and economic inequalities are just, Rawls claims, only if they work to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society, what is referred to as the “maximin” criterion (Cohen 1989, Rawls 2001). Rawls’ definition is commonly used to evaluate existing institutional arrangements against the ideal system that is able to allocate opportunities and burdens fairly, or what is commonly referred to as a means-based approach to justice. Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen later shifted discussions of justice away from Rawls’s interest in designing just institutions to an approach that relies on identifying outcomes or options that are more just than the status quo. Sen referred to his approach as “focusing more on the extents of freedoms, rather than on the means ” (Sen 1992:xi, emphasis in original), which is often considered an ends- based approach to justice. He argued that policy options that produce enhanced basic freedoms and opportunities for well-being are more just than the status quo (Sen 2009). Although Sen did not specify what freedoms should be enhanced by these just alternatives, Martha Nussbaum proposed the following: life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses imagination and thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, and control over one’s environment (Nussbaum 2003). This approach to justice is often referred to as the capability approach because “in contrast with the utility-based or resource-based lines of thinking, individual advantage is