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Climate Disaster Resilience: History
Please note this is an old version of this entry, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Subjects: Engineering, Civil
Contributor: Eng Editorial Office

Climate disaster resilience is the capacity of a system, community, or region exposed to climate-related hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform, and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions. The concept integrates exposure, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity into a dynamic property that evolves as hazards intensify and social conditions change [1]. It is characterized by four functional properties: robustness of critical infrastructure to withstand physical impact, redundancy of alternative systems to absorb failure, rapid recovery speed to restore operations, and adaptive capacity to learn and transform after each event. Resilience is distinguished from vulnerability and from hazard mitigation: whereas vulnerability describes susceptibility to harm, resilience describes the system's intrinsic ability to maintain function under stress and reorganize after disruption. The operational measurement of resilience combines physical infrastructure fragility, social capital and equity, institutional governance capacity, and ecosystem services that buffer climate extremes, all assessed at geographic scales ranging from individual buildings to national policy frameworks [2]. The conceptual model treats resilience not as a static target but as a continuous adaptive process shaped by iterative exposure, response, and recovery cycles under changing climate forcing [3].

  • climate resilience
  • disaster resilience
  • adaptive capacity
  • community resilience

Infrastructure Resilience and Vulnerability Analysis •  Civil and Structural Engineering •  Engineering •  Physical Sciences

References

  1. Susan L. Cutter; Lindsey Barnes; Melissa Berry; Christopher Burton; Elijah Evans; Eric Tate; Jennifer Webb; A place-based model for understanding community resilience to natural disasters. Glob. Environ. Chang. 2008, 18, 598-606, 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2008.07.013.
  2. IPCC. Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2014. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/.
  3. National Academies. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative; National Academies Press: Washington, DC, USA, 2012. https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/13457.
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