Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

71 awareness, fostering collaboration and teamwork, and providing bilingual communication. 4. DISCUSSION While this analysis does not explore how professionals themselves define resilience, the findings provide crucial insights on the applications and definitions of climate change resilience being used by guidance documents for the building sector. Based on the findings above, resilience practice in the building sector is driven by engineering-related resilience. Consequently, the focus on the ability of buildings to bounce-back after a disaster to an equilibrium state has reduced resilience building efforts to the development of emergency responses, or disaster risk reduction. In addition, the building sector emphasizes strategies that reduce the time scale of recovery after a disaster or shock. Specifically, resilience strategies on the ground and at the local level represent strategies that reinforce building stability and emergency responses. Current resilience tools reflect a focus on the physical resilience of buildings with minimal attention to underlying inequities facing building users and community residents. This finding aligns with current literature on the predominance of engineering resilience in practice [2,23], and the need to explore the factors that shape how individuals and communities respond to climate change hazards and risks [19]. In addition to its narrow implementation, resilience is often employed to address specified hazards, leaving the responsibility to address other hazards to other disciplines. However, increasing the resilience of one component of a system to one specific shock may leave it vulnerable to other types of disturbances. As such, resilience efforts must recognize the importance of addressing the interrelation of all system components and they system’s response to varying climate change impacts. Generally, the buildings’ resilience tools draw on no clear empirical evidence to efficiently validate the development of climate change resilience strategies. While some employ case studies, community knowledge through participatory techniques, and/or stakeholder consultation, discussions on the theoretical background of resilience in the built environment were not evident. In response to current limitations, we find that newalliances and fields have emerged that providemore holistic framing of resilience. The Resilience Alliance was established to provide an interdisciplinary “Resilience Thinking” framework for understanding transformation in socio-ecological systems. The Resilience Engineering Association has introduced a subspecialty of engineering, resilience engineering, as a new way of thinking about safety. Additionally, the American Society of Adaptation Professionals was recently established to support and connect climate adaptation professionals working to improve the climate change adaptation and resilience of cities and communities across the country. These new fields reflect an increasing awareness of the challenges professionals faces in conceptualizing and implementing climate change resilience in the built environment. Diversity is a key theme in resilience; diversity of impacts, of system components, of measurement, and as explored in this paper, of definitions and applications. As a multifaceted concept, current discourse on climate change resilience in the building sector requires more critical and constructive action. Having insights on the different conceptualizations of resilience and the associated building strategies helps stakeholders select appropriate approaches and make informed decisions. Specifically, stakeholders can identify the limitations and opportunities provided within different conceptualizations of resilience and develop context- and system-sensitive climate change resilience strategies for their own buildings. 5. CONCLUSIONS The goal of this paper was to examine how resilience is translated into practice within the building sector by examining existing climate change resilience tools for buildings. The findings highlight the need for new approaches that addresses the variability of resilience definitions. While each academic domain brings unique contributions to the practice of resilience in the building sector, it is important to acknowledge that each body of literature alone cannot comprehensively address all aspects of resilience. As a complex challenge for the building sector, addressing climate change and resilience will require integrative and transdisciplinary efforts. This may be achieved by providing platforms for authentic dialogue and stakeholder engagement to build a deep understanding of impacts, hazards and risks across sectors, and facilitating cross-disciplinary collaboration and co-development of new resilience guidance, strategies, and standards. Further research on the barriers to collaboration among domains and professionals, and how resilience is approached on individual projects is a critical next step. Finally, this research also shows that adopting climate change resilience strategies is not as simple as selecting an existing resilience guidance document produced by others. At this early stage of climate resilience practice, building professionals must acknowledge the limitations of existing literature, guidance, codes, and standards to avoid maladaptation and undermining of long-term climate-related resilience.