Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

74 Comparing Conceptualizations of Urban Climate Resilience in Theory and Practice by Sara Meerow & Melissa Stults This article was originally published in Sustainability , 8(7), 2016. https://doi.org/10.3390/su8070701 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license ABSTRACT Abstract: In the face of climate change, scholars and policymakers are increasingly concerned with fostering “urban resilience”. This paper seeks to contribute towards a better understanding of synergies and differences in how academics and local decision-makers think about resilience in the context of climate change. We compare definitions and characteristics of urban climate resilience in the academic literature with a survey of 134 local government representatives from across the U.S. Our analysis shows discrepancies in how academics and practitioners define and characterize urban climate resilience, most notably in their focus on either “bouncing back” or “bouncing forward” after a disturbance. Practitioners have diverse understandings of the concept, but tend to favor potentially problematic “bouncing back” or engineering-based definitions of resilience. While local government respondents confirm the importance of all 16 resilience characteristics we identified in the academic literature, coding practitioners’ free response definitions reveals that they rarely mention qualities commonly associated with resilience in the scholarly literature such as diversity, flexibility, and redundancy. These inconsistencies need to be resolved to ensure both the usability of climate resilience research and the effectiveness of resilience policy. Keywords: climate change; resilience; urban resilience; resilient city; climate resilience; adaptation 1. INTRODUCTION There is a critical relationship between cities and climate change. On the one hand, urban areas are major contributors to climate change, being responsible for the majority of global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, densely populated urban areas are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts including sea-level rise, storm surge, heat waves, droughts, and shifting diseases, with vulnerable populations in cities likely to be disproportionately impacted [1,2]. Moreover, due to the heat island effect, urban areas are already experiencing amplified warming effects [3], which will probably continue as the climate warms [4]. In short, climate change is likely to exacerbate existing urban problems and vulnerabilities, placing additional pressure on already strained municipal capacities [5,6]. Confronted with these challenges, cities cannot simply sustain the status quo [7]. This realization has led academics and policymakers to look for new ways to frame development and operations in a manner that helps cities build the capacities needed to effectively and efficiently prepare for climate change impacts [8]. Increasingly, these conversations are turning to the concept of resilience [9]. This ‘resilience turn’ in urban policy is evident in both the academic literature (Figure 1) and in major policy initiatives like the Rockefeller Foundation’s “100 Resilient Cities”. Figure 1. The rise of resilience in climate change research: graph shows the number of citations in Web of Science for each year with the terms “urban resilience” and “climate change” in the title, keywords, or abstract.