Climate resilience

Climate resilience is a concept to describe how well people or ecosystems are prepared to bounce back from certain climate hazard events. The formal definition of the term is the "capacity of social, economic and ecosystems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance".^[1]: 7 For example, climate resilience can be the ability to recover from climate-related shocks such as floods and droughts.^[2] Methods of coping include suitable responses to maintain relevant functions of societies and ecosystems. To increase climate resilience means one has to reduce the climate vulnerability of people and countries. Efforts to increase climate resilience include a range of social, economic, technological, and political strategies. They have to be implemented at all scales of society, from local community action all the way to global treaties.

To make societies more climate resistant, politicians can encourage more climate resilient development. This kind of development has become the new paradigm for sustainable development.^[2] It influences theory and practice across all sectors globally.^[2] Two approaches that fall under this kind of development are climate resilient infrastructure and climate-smart agriculture. Another example are climate-resilient water services. These are services that provide access to high quality drinking water during all seasons and even during extreme weather events.^[3] On every continent, governments are now adopting policies for climate resilient economies. International frameworks such as the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals are drivers for such initiatives.^[2]

Tools exist to measure climate resilience. They allow for comparisons of different groups of people through standardized metrics. Objective tools use fixed and transparent definitions of resilience. Two examples for objective tools are the Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis (RIMA) and the Livelihoods Change Over Time (LCOT).^[4][5] Subjective approaches on the other hand use people's feelings of what constitutes resilience. People then self-evaluate accordingly. An example is the Subjectively-Evaluated Resilience Score (SERS).^[6]

Climate resilience is closely related to climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and to the concept of climate justice.