Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

76 The survey included a total of 24 questions, but for the purposes of this study, we were primarily interested in the two questions that focus on conceptualizations of resilience. The first of these was a free response question asking respondents, “What do you think it would mean for your local jurisdiction to be resilient to climate change?” A total of 134 respondents provided a response to this question. The second question asked, “In your opinion, how important are each of the following characteristics in making your local jurisdiction more resilient” and then asked respondents to rate the importance of 16 different characteristics on a five-point scale (1— unimportant, 2—slightly important, 3—important, 4—very important, 5—critical). A total of 199 respondents filled out this question. The characteristics were drawn from and defined based on the literature review and chosen because of their common association with resilience. Respondents were also given the opportunity to fill in and rate a self-determined “other” characteristic. We coded all responses to the question where respondents were asked to define resilience (question one), looking for the presence of the 16 resilience-based characteristics identified in the literature. We also coded the definitions for whether they focused on “bouncing back” or “bouncing forward”, explained in Section 3.1. All responses were coded independently by two researchers (inter-coder agreement was 94.27%; the inter-coder reliability percentage includes all instances where both researchers agreed that a characteristic was either present or absent in the definition), after which the discrepancies were discussed and reconciled. 3. RESULTS: DEFINITIONS OF A CLIMATE RESILIENT CITY Definitions of urban climate resilience in the scholarly literature differ, but they do have some commonalities. All definitions identified in our analysis (Table 1) are broad, defining resilience in terms of a generic capacity to deal with climate impacts and disturbances. One key distinguishing factor is the extent to which the definitions incorporate change, as opposed to resistance or recovery. This tension is also evident in the definitions provided by practitioners in the survey. Overall, we find much more variation in the practitioners’ definitions of resilience than what exists in the scholarly literature. Table 1. Definitions of urban climate resilience from the academic literature (Definitions taken from review conducted by Meerow et al. (2016) [18]).