Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

37 people to change deep values and identity (Walker et al. 2009)? Table 1. Glossary of resilience terms. SPECIFIED AND GENERAL RESILIENCE In practice, resilience is sometimes applied to problems relating to particular aspects of a system that might arise from a particular set of sources or shocks. We refer to this as specified resilience. In other cases, the manager is concerned more about resilience to all kinds of shocks, including completely novel ones. We refer to this as general resilience. In social–ecological systems, specified resilience arises in response to the question “resilience of what, to what?” (Carpenter et al. 2001). However, there is a danger in becoming too focused on specified resilience because increasing resilience of particular parts of a system to specific disturbances may cause the system to lose resilience in other ways (Cifdaloz et al. 2010). This is illustrated by the HOT (highly optimized tolerance) theory (Carson and Doyle 2000), which shows how systems that become very robust to frequent kinds of disturbance necessarily become fragile in relation to infrequent kinds. For example, international travel in Europe became increasingly focused on improving and elaborating air travel, with less emphasis on international ground and water transportation. The Icelandic volcano of 2010 exposed the low resilience of this travel system to an extensive cloud of airborne ash that interfered with the operation of passenger jets. General resilience, in contrast, does not define either the part of the system that might cross a threshold, or the kinds of shocks the system has to endure. It is about coping with uncertainty in all ways. The distinction is important, because our experience in