Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

77 3.1. “Bouncing back” or “Bouncing forward”? The academic literature makes a major distinction between “engineering resilience”, which is about resisting change and returning to a prior state of equilibrium following a disturbance, and “ecological resilience”, which focuses on maintaining key functions while accepting that it is not always possible or desirable to return to previous conditions [25,26]. This division is also framed as “bouncing back” versus “bouncing forward” [27]. Prominent resilience scholars, such as the leaders of the international Resilience Alliance, advocate for the latter conceptualization. They argue that the concept of resilience, particularly ecological resilience, is better suited for complex systems that are in a constant state of flux, and must therefore adapt to change and uncertainty. Cities are certainly complex and dynamic systems [28], and indeed, Meerow et al.’s [18] review found that the majority of urban resilience definitions are more closely aligned with ecological resilience. Despite this recognition, engineering resilience continues to persist in many fields, including disaster management, economics, and public policy [29]. That said, there still seems to be some disagreement within the urban climate resilience literature as to whether resilience is about resisting impacts and change or embracing them. Looking at the definitions identified in the literature (Table 1), Henstra’s [21] seems more aligned with engineering resilience since it emphasizes the capacity to “withstand” and “recover”. In contrast, Brown et al. [20] include reorganization and even “transformational change” as part of their definition of resilience, which is more consistent with ’bounce forward’ or ecological resilience. This divide is also evident in the different definitions of resilience provided by survey respondents, with engineering, equilibrium perspectives predominating. According to our coding, 35 definitions suggested that resilience was about bouncing back, 15 indicated that it could be about improving and bouncing forward, and seven indicated that both could be important. In the remaining definitions it was impossible to determine the respondent’s position. Five respondents specifically mentioned “bouncing back”, another emphasized a “return to normalcy”, two equated resilience to stability, and several others highlighted minimal disruption or “community changes” as being key to a resilient urban system. Of the 15 that provided definitions related to bouncing forward or improving, two explicitly mentioned the ability to “bounce forward” and several others saw resilience not just in terms of persisting under changing climate conditions, but actually adapting, improving and thriving. These definitions are more closely aligned with resilience as defined in the social-ecological systems literature. 3.2. Unpacking Practitioners’ Definitions of Urban Resilience One of the most striking results of the survey was the variation in the responses practitioners provided when asked what resilience would mean in their local jurisdiction (Table 2). While academics see resilience as omnipresent [30], several practitioners claimed not to know what it means, others noted that it was not acknowledged in their community, and one even dismissed it as “meaningless jargon”. In contrast, other respondents called resilience “critical” and “absolutely imperative”. Some definitions focused on very specific threats or sectors, like “heavy rain”, “hurricanes”, or “public transportation”, whereas in other cases resilience was more generic, such as “improvement in quality of life.” In fact, livability or quality of life was mentioned in almost 10 percent of responses. For more than 20 percent of respondents, resilience had an economic component, whether in terms of general economic prosperity or specifically in terms of reducing the cost of climate impacts. Other common themes (found in at least 5 percent of responses) were health, education and learning, sustainability, self-sufficiency, advanced planning, and the importance of assisting vulnerable populations. 4. RESULTS: CHARACTERISTICS OF A CLIMATE RESILIENT CITY In our reviewof the academic literaturewe identified 16 characteristics of urban systems and processes that supposedly foster resilience (Table 3). Hypothesized characteristics of resilient processes include: inclusivity, transparency, and equity in stakeholder engagement approaches [9,31,32], as well as processes that are flexible, forward looking, and iterative [6,33,34,35]. Resilience processes are also valued for being knowledge or information driven, meaning that they integrate traditional, as well as scientific knowledge into their frameworks and approaches and provide equitable access to information for all parties interested [36,37,38]. Research in the climate, urban, and resilience fields has postulated that there may be general characteristics of resilience, as well as generic/general forms of adaptive capacity that promote resilient systems [39,40,41,42,43]. Examples of general resilience characteristics include: diversity, iterative/feedback mechanisms, transparency, collaboration and integration, social-ecological integration (also coined environmental focus), efficiency, and adaptive capacity enhancement [42,44,45]. There is also a series of characteristics that are believed to be important for assessing specific resilience to unique climate impacts. Examples include redundancy in the case of drought, robustness in the case of hurricanes and extreme winds, and decentralization in the case of flooding [46,47,48].