Climate resilience

Climate resilience is generally considered to be the ability to recover from, or to mitigate vulnerability to, climate-related shocks such as floods and droughts. It is a political process that strengthens the ability of all to mitigate vulnerability to risks from, and adapt to changing patterns in, climate hazards and variability. Each of these capacities are more readily recognizable which also means that any changes can more easily be tracked. The focus is on resilience as an outcome of an action or program, and how to measure an improvement. Climate resilience is an important part of building system-level resilience to multiple shocks. • Adaptation is any action or process that helps people or nature adjust to negative impacts of climate change. More rarely, it is about taking advantage of those changes. Climate resilient development is a closely related area of work and research topic that has recently emerged. It describes situations in which adaptation, mitigation and development solutions are pursued together. It is able to benefit from synergies from among the actions and reduce trade-offs. == Implementation ==

in the U.S. Currently, the majority of work regarding climate resilience has focused on actions taken to maintain existing systems and structures. Such adaptations are also considered to be incremental actions rather than transformational ones. Transformations, and the processes of transition, cover major systems and sectors at scale. These are energy, land and ecosystems, urban and infrastructure, and industrial and societal. == By sector ==

Development "Climate resilient development" has become a new (albeit contested) paradigm for sustainable development, influencing theory and practice across all sectors globally. This is particularly true in the water sector, since water security is intimately connected to climate change. On every continent, governments are adopting policies for climate resilient economies, driven in part by international frameworks such as the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. Infrastructure , India, where urban forests are being developed to improve the climate resilience of the city Infrastructure failures can have broad-reaching consequences extending away from the site of the original event, and for a considerable duration after the immediate failure. Furthermore, increasing reliance infrastructure system interdependence, in combination with the effects of climate change and population growth all contribute to increasing vulnerability and exposure, and greater probability of catastrophic failures. To reduce this vulnerability, and in recognition of limited resources and future uncertainty about climate projections, new and existing long-lasting infrastructure must undergo a risk-based engineering and economic analyses to properly allocate resources and design for climate resilience. Incorporating climate projections into building and infrastructure design standards, investment and appraisal criteria, and model building codes is currently not common. Some resilience guidelines and risk-informed frameworks have been developed by public entities. Such manuals can offer guidance for adaptive design methods, characterization of extremes, development of flood design criteria, flood load calculation and the application of adaptive risk management principals account for more severe climate/weather extremes. One example is the "Climate Resiliency Design Guidelines" by New York City. Agriculture Water and sanitation Ecosystems Climate change caused by humans can worsen ecosystem resilience. It can lead to regime shifts in ecosystems, often to less desirable and degraded conditions. On the hand, some human actions can make ecosystems more resilient and help species adapt. Examples are protecting larger areas of semi-natural habitat and creating links between parts of the landscape to help species move. Disaster management At larger governmental levels, general programs to improve climate resiliency through greater disaster preparedness are being implemented. For example, in cases such as Norway, this includes the development of more sensitive and far-reaching early warning systems for extreme weather events, creation of emergency electricity power sources, enhanced public transportation systems, and more. == Resilience assessment ==

Governments and development agencies are spending increasing amounts of finance to support resilience-building interventions. Resilience measurement can make valuable contributions in guiding resource allocations towards resilience-building. This includes targeted identification of vulnerability hotspots, a better understanding of the drivers of resilience, and tools to infer the impact and effectiveness of resilience-building interventions. In recent years, a large number of resilience measurement tools have emerged, offering ways to track and measure resilience at a range of scales - from individuals and households to communities and nations. Indicators and indices Efforts to measure climate resilience currently face several technical challenges. Firstly, the definition of resilience is heavily contested, making it difficult to choose appropriate characteristics and indicators to track. Secondly, the resilience or households or communities cannot be measured using a single observable metric. Resilience is made up of a range of processes and characteristics, many of which are intangible and difficult to observe (such as social capital). As a result, many resilience toolkits resort to using large lists of proxy indicators. Finally, a climate resilience perspective encourages greater cross-scale connectedness of systems. Creating mechanisms of adaptation that occur in isolation at local, state, or national levels may leave the overall social-ecological system vulnerable. A resilience-based framework would require far more cross-talk, and the creation of environmental protections that are more holistically generated and implemented. ==Tools==

Tools for resilience assessment vary depending on the sector, the scale and the entity such as households, communities or species. They vary also by the type of assessment, for example if the aim is to understand effectiveness of resilience-building interventions. Community resilience assessment tools Community resilience assessment is an important step toward reducing disasters from climate hazards. They are also helpful for being ready to take advantage of the opportunities to reorganize. There are many tools available for investigating the environmental, social, economic and physical features of a community that are important for resilience. A survey of the available tools found many differences between tools with no standardized approaches to assess resilience. One category of tools focuses mainly on measuring outcomes. In contrast tools that focus on measuring resilience at the 'starting point' or early stages and continuously over a project are a less common. USAID published a field guide for assessing climate resilience in smallholder supply chains. Most objective approaches use fixed and transparent definitions of resilience and allow for different groups of people to be compared through standardized metrics. However, as many resilience processes and capacities are intangible, objective approaches are heavily reliant on crude proxies. Examples of commonly used objective measures include the Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis (RIMA) and the Livelihoods Change Over Time (LCOT). == Related concepts ==

Climate change adaptation Climate change vulnerability Disaster risk reduction ==See also==