There is considerable research interest on the meaning and measurement of resilience from a variety of research perspectives including those from the hazards/disasters and global change communities. The identification of standards and metrics for measuring disaster resilience is one of the challenges faced by local, state, and federal agencies, especially in the United States. This paper provides a new framework, the disaster resilience of place (DROP) model, designed to improve comparative assessments of disaster resilience at the local or community level. A candidate set of variables for implementing the model are also presented as a first step towards its implementation.

A place-based model for understanding community resilience to natural disasters

While there is a recognised need to adapt to changing climatic conditions, there is an emerging discourse of limits to such adaptation. Limits are traditionally analysed as a set of immutable thresholds in biological, economic or technological parameters. This paper contends that limits to adaptation are endogenous to society and hence contingent on ethics, knowledge, attitudes to risk and culture. We review insights from history, sociology and psychology of risk, economics and political science to develop four propositions concerning limits to adaptation. First, any limits to adaptation depend on the ultimate goals of adaptation underpinned by diverse values. Second, adaptation need not be limited by uncertainty around future foresight of risk. Third, social and individual factors limit adaptation action. Fourth, systematic undervaluation of loss of places and culture disguises real, experienced but subjective limits to adaptation. We conclude that these issues of values and ethics, risk, knowledge and culture construct societal limits to adaptation, but that these limits are mutable.

Are there social limits to adaptation to climate change

The future of humanity depends on whether or not we have a vision to guide our transition toward sustainability, on scales ranging from local landscapes to the planet as a whole. Sustainability science is at the core of this vision, and landscapes and regions represent a pivotal scale domain. The main objectives of this paper are: (1) to elucidate key definitions and concepts of sustainability, including the Brundtland definition, the triple bottom line, weak and strong sustainability, resilience, human well-being, and ecosystem services; (2) to examine key definitions and concepts of landscape sustainability, including those derived from general concepts and those developed for specific landscapes; and (3) to propose a framework for developing a science of landscape sustainability. Landscape sustainability is defined as the capacity of a landscape to consistently provide long-term, landscape-specific ecosystem services essential for maintaining and improving human well-being. Fundamentally, well-being is a journey, not a destination. Landscape sustainability science is a place-based, use-inspired science of understanding and improving the dynamic relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being in changing landscapes under uncertainties arising from internal feedbacks and external disturbances. While landscape sustainability science emphasizes place-based research on landscape and regional scales, significant between landscape interactions and hierarchical linkages to both finer and broader scales (or externalities) must not be ignored. To advance landscape sustainability science, spatially explicit methods are essential, especially experimental approaches that take advantage of designed landscapes and multi-scaled simulation models that couple the dynamics of landscape services (ecosystem services provided by multiple landscape elements in combination as emergent properties) and human well-being.

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Landscape sustainability science: ecosystem services and human well-being in changing landscapes

In an ever-more interconnected world (social, technological and environmental), no organisation can retain a competitive position and survive disruptions as an independent entity. This article provides a review of resilience literature in its widest context and later its application at an organisational level context. The origins of the concept are reported and consequently, the various fields of research are analysed. The concept is shown to remain essentially constant regardless of its field of enquiry and has much to inform the fields of organisation theory, strategy and operations management. This article identifies a number of areas for advancing resilience research, in particular: the relationship between human and organisational resilience; understanding interfaces between organisational and infrastructural resilience.

Resilience: the concept, a literature review and future directions

Since anthropogenic climate change first emerged on the public agenda in the mid-to-late 1980s, public communication of climate change and—more recently—the question of how to communicate it most effectively have witnessed a steep rise. This paper synthesizes what is known, presumed, and still unknown about how to effectively communicate this problem. An introductory historical overview of climate change communication is followed by a discussion of the challenges that communicators face in trying to convey the issue (invisibility of causes, distant impacts, lack of immediacy and direct experience of the impacts, lack of gratification for taking mitigative actions, disbelief in human's global influence, complexity and uncertainty, inadequate signals indicating the need for change, perceptual limits and self-interest). The core of the paper focuses on key aspects of the communication process (purpose and scope of the communication, audience, framing, messages, messengers, modes and channels of communication, and assessing the outcomes and effectiveness of a communication). These elements are placed in relationship to several contextual factors that affect the communication process. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research on climate change communication. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Communicating climate change: history, challenges, process and future directions

Cet article analyse les relations conceptuelles (imprecises) de la vulnerabilite, de la resilience et de la capacite d’adaptation aux changements climatiques selon le systeme socio-ecologique (socio-ecologigal systems – SES) afin de comprendre et anticiper le comportement des composantes sociales et ecologiques du systeme. Une serie de questions est proposee par l’auteur sur la specification de ces termes afin de developper une structure conceptuelle qui inclut les dimensions naturelles et so...

Linkages between vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity

Cet article souligne que les recherches sur l’adaptation aux changements climatiques omettent souvent l’importance des facteurs psychologiques dans la determination des mesures et actions d’adaptation. Les auteurs presentent donc un modele socio-cognitif de l’adaptation proactive privee aux changements climatiques (socio-cognitive Model of Private Proactive Adaptation to Climate Change – MPPACC) qui montre que le nœud du probleme de l’adaptation se trouve dans la perception du risque et la pe...

Adaptive capacity and human cognition: The process of individual adaptation to climate change

Focusing on the representation of climate change in the British "quality press," this article argues that the discursive (re)construction of scientific claims in the media is strongly entangled with ideological standpoints. Understood here as a set of ideas and values that legitimate a program of action vis-a-vis a given social and political order, ideology works as a powerful selection device in deciding what is scientific news, i.e. what the relevant "facts" are, and who are the authorized ...

Ideological cultures and media discourses on scientific knowledge: re-reading news on climate change

The burgeoning interest on social capital within the climate change community signals a positive movement towards a concern for the behavioural elements of adaptive action and capacity. But social capital is a slippery concept. In this paper the case is put forward for a critical engagement with social capital. There is need for an open debate on the dangers and opportunities that social capital presents. This paper discusses the formation, operation and utility of social capital and reviews ...

Understanding adaptation: What can social capital offer assessments of adaptive capacity?

This exploratory study examines whether readers’assessments of the certainty of scientific findings depend on characteristics of news stories. An experimental design tested whether adding controversy and/or context to a news story about global warming influenced readers’ perceptions of its certainty. There was a significant difference in readers’assessment of the certainty of global warming across treatments. The context treatment produced the highest level of certainty about global warming a...

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Papers

Linkages between vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity

Adaptive capacity and human cognition: The process of individual adaptation to climate change

Ideological cultures and media discourses on scientific knowledge: re-reading news on climate change

Understanding adaptation: What can social capital offer assessments of adaptive capacity?

Testing Public (Un)Certainty of Science: Media Representations of Global Warming