Public perception of climate change and disaster preparedness: Evidence from the Philippines

The Philippines is highly susceptible to both geophysical and climate-related disasters. This article explores Filipinos knowledge and perception of climate change and their association with what action Filipinos take to prepare for rapid onset natural hazards such as typhoons. Data for this study were collected from a nationally representative random survey of 5,184 adults conducted between March and April of 2017. Filipinos self-report relatively low levels of knowledge of climate change and cited increased temperatures, shifts in seasons, and heavier rains as the most likely consequences. Levels of disaster preparedness in the Philippines differ widely by region. Although most Filipinos perceive that natural hazards are a risk to them, only a third of Filipinos undertake measures to prepare for disasters. Filipinos who perceive climate-related changes directly impacting their households report taking greater action to prepare for disasters. Filipinos who believe they have been directly impacted by climate-related changes are also more likely to prepare for disasters, take planning actions, and undertake material actions to prepare, such as dwelling improvements. Other factors associated with disaster preparedness include gender, membership in an association, wealth, risk perception, and prior exposure to and losses due to disasters. The findings imply that, while posing different challenges and requiring different responses, adaptation to climate change and disaster preparedness are inherently associated and potentially mutually reinforcing. Policies and programs would arguably benefit from a more unified intervention framework that links climate change adaptation and disaster preparedness.     

Spatial and temporal quantification of resilience at the community scale

Indicators of natural disaster resilience are factors that impact the ability to cope with and adapt to a natural disaster and climate change events. They can either contribute to or detract from resilience. Existing research has emphasized the importance of quantifying resilience in order to estimate baseline resilience and measure progress toward resilience enhancement. Previous attempts at quantification of resilience have not incorporated place-specific indicators or differential weighting of indicators for prioritization of resilience enhancement actions. Previous research efforts have also not incorporated spatial and temporal contexts when attempting to quantify resilience indicators. This research demonstrates the importance for quantifying resilience place-specific indicators, differential weighting of indicators, and the spatial and temporal contexts of indicators for resilience estimation and quantification through a case study of Sarasota County, Florida. This case study was conducted in four phases: preliminary interviews, plan review, focus group, and spatial analysis. Preliminary interviews were intended to contribute to development of research goals. The plan review process served to identify Sarasota County's planning priorities to determine possible indicators of resilience unique to Sarasota County as well as existing and planned county hazard mitigation strategies. The focus group was concerned with identifying resilience indicators through a workshop with officials from Sarasota County. The spatial analysis portion used findings from all three previous phases to demonstrate spatial patterns of resilience. This research demonstrates that although national resilience quantification metrics are useful, local scale resilience estimates appear more useful if community hazard mitigation and climate change adaptation is the primary goal.     

冰冻圈影响区恢复力研究和实践:进展与展望

气候变化引起全球冰冻圈各要素普遍退缩,进而深刻影响着区域生态安全和社会经济发展。恢复力(resilience)以降低脆弱性为目标,维持和培育社会-生态系统应对外界胁迫和干扰的能力,为应对冰冻圈变化引起的负面影响、实现区域可持续发展提供了重要的理论和实践框架。文中辨识了全球变暖背景下冰冻圈过程和功能变化对主要社会-生态系统的影响,综述了当前冰冻圈影响区恢复力相关的主要研究和实践进展,探讨了加强冰冻圈影响区社会-生态系统恢复力的路径。我们认为未来要进一步加强区域和全球冰冻圈变化及其影响综合评估,深入研究冰冻圈影响区社会-生态系统变化的驱动机制、级联效应和稳态转换;在实践上将减缓、适应和转型有机结合,建立管控区域社会-生态系统演化的综合监测、评估、预警和决策系统,从而促进系统朝着更具恢复力和可持续的路径发展。     

A method for quantifying vulnerability, applied to the agricultural system of the Yaqui Valley, Mexico

We propose measuring vulnerability of selected outcome variables of concern (e.g. agricultural yield) to identified stressors (e.g. climate change) as a function of the state of the variables of concern relative to a threshold of damage, the sensitivity of the variables to the stressors, and the magnitude and frequency of the stressors to which the system is exposed. In addition, we provide a framework for assessing the extent adaptive capacity can reduce vulnerable conditions. We illustrate the utility of this approach by evaluating the vulnerability of wheat yields to climate change and market fluctuations in the Yaqui Valley, Mexico.     

Subjective measures of climate resilience: What is the added value for policy and programming?

Subjective approaches to resilience measurement are gaining traction as a complementary approach to the standard frameworks that typically contain objective measures. Proponents suggest that subjective approaches may add value to existing measures in three areas: by improving our understanding of the drivers of resilience, reducing the questionnaire burden on respondents, and potentially offering more valid cross-cultural comparisons. This perspective assesses the potential, evidence and uncertainties around each of these claims, drawing from decades of research using subjective techniques in the wellbeing and psychological resilience literatures. Overall we find that subjective approaches can theoretically add value in each of these three areas. However the design of appropriate indicators must proceed with specificity and rigour for subjective measures to add value to programming and policy for climate resilience.     

Is resilience socially constructed? Empirical evidence from Fiji,Ghana, Sri Lanka,and Vietnam

The objective of this paper is to better understand the various individual and household factors that influence resilience, that is, people⬢s ability to respond adequately to shocks and stressors. One of our hypotheses is that resilience does not simply reflect the expected effects of quantifiable factors such as level of assets, or even less quantifiable social processes such as people⬢s experience, but is also determined by more subjective dimensions related to people⬢s perceptions of their ability to cope, adapt or transform in the face of adverse events. Data collected over two years in Fiji, Ghana, Sri Lanka and Vietnam confirms the importance of wealth in the recovery process of households affected by shocks and stressors. However our results challenge the idea that within communities, assets are a systematic differentiator in people⬢s response to adverse events. The findings regarding social capital are mixed and call for more research: social capital had a strong positive influence on resilience at the community level, yet our analysis failed to demonstrate any tangible positive correlation at the household level. Finally, the data confirm that, like vulnerability, resilience is at least in part socially constructed, endogenous to individual and groups, and hence contingent on knowledge, attitudes to risk, culture and subjectivity.     

Seawalls or social recovery? The role of policy networks and design in disaster recovery

This mixed-methods study examines the case of 30 advisory committees across 25 municipalities in Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures in northeast Japan after the 3/11 triple disasters. Drawing on synthetic control experiments, social network analysis, and case studies, we test whether the design of these committees’ policies or the traits of these committee networks improved the recovery trajectories of municipalities. We find that communities highly connected to this network of advisory committees saw better economic recovery than expected, especially when researchers, hyper-connected individuals, or plans for community centers were involved, controlling for disaster damage, infrastructure quality, social vulnerability, governance capacity, emergency services, and social capital. Our results bring with them a number of concrete policy recommendations for disaster managers, local residents, and decision makers.     

Resilience and reworking practices: Becoming the first-generation of industrial workers in Can Tho,Vietnam

For more than a decade, labor geography has stressed the importance of ‘giving primacy’ to workers in the analysis of global economic restructuring. However, the majority of contributions have focused on organized workers, leaving the issue of individual labor agency much in the dark. The aim of this article is to shed light on the agency of individual workers involved in rapid industrialization processes. In this endeavor we draw inspiration from recent contributions that have integrated Cindi Katz’s threefold categorization of agency as reworking, resilience and resistance. In combination with this categorization, we apply a distinction between workers’ intentions to enter the industrial labor market and the consequences of doing so (i.e. the outcomes of their engagement). The discrepancy between intentions and outcomes is indicative of labor agency and points to the structural constraints that condition the labor market. The empirical part of the article draws on interviews with local and migrant first-generation workers in two settlements located next to an industrial zone in Can Tho Province in the Mekong River Delta Region of Vietnam. It is suggested that the alternating practices of reworking and resilience can be conceptualized as transformative trajectories - workers’ situated knowledge and practices evolve and change over time and is conditioned by the specific labor market contexts through which the individual moves.     

The influence of urban development dynamics on community resilience practice in New York City after Superstorm Sandy: Experiences from the Lower East Side and the Rockaways

While (urban) resilience has become an increasingly popular concept, especially in the areas of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA), it is often still used as an abstract metaphor, with much debate centered on definitions, differences in approaches, and epistemological considerations. Empirical studies examining how community-based organizations (CBOs) “practice” resilience on the ground and what enables these CBOs to organize and mobilize around resilience are lacking. Moreover, in the growing context of competitive and entrepreneurial urbanism and conflicting priorities about urban (re)development, it is unclear how urban development dynamics influence community-based resilience actions. Through empirical research conducted on the Lower East Side, a gentrifying neighborhood in Manhattan, and in Rockaway, a socio-spatially isolated neighborhood in Queens, we investigate community organizing of low-income residents for (climate) resilience in a post-disaster context. Results show that both the operationalization of resilience – how resilience is “practiced” – and the community capacity to organize for the improved resilience of low-income residents are strongly influenced by pre-existing urban development dynamics and civic infrastructure – the socio-spatial networks of community-based organizations – in each neighborhood. The Lower East Side, with its long history of community activism and awareness of gentrification threats, was better able to mobilize broadly and collectively around resilience needs while the more socio-spatially isolated neighborhoods on the Rockaway peninsula were more constrained.     

Food security in the face of climate change: Adaptive capacity of small-scale social-ecological systems to environmental variability

Improving the adaptive capacity of small-scale irrigation systems to the impacts of climate change is crucial for food security in Asia. This study analyzes the capacity of small-scale irrigation systems dependent on the Asian monsoon to adapt to variability in river discharge caused by climate change. Our study is motivated by the Pumpa irrigation system, a small-scale irrigation system located in Nepal that is a model for this type of system. We developed an agent-based model in which we simulated the decisions farmers make about the irrigation strategy to use according to available water flow. Given the uncertainty associated with how climate change may affect the Asian monsoon, we simulated the performance of the system under different projections of climate change in the region (increase and decrease in rainfall, reduction and expansion of the monsoon season, and changes in the timing of the onset of the monsoon). Accordingly to our simulations, farmers might need to adapt to rainfall intensification and a late onset in the monsoon season. The demands for collective action among farmers (e.g. infrastructure repair, meetings, decisions, etc.) might increase considerably due to climate change. Although our model suggests that investment in new infrastructure might increase the performance of the system under some climate change scenarios, the high inequality among farmers when water availability is reduced might hinder the efficiency of these measures due to a reduction of farmers’ willingness to cooperate. Our modeling exercise helps to hypothesize about the most sensitive climate change scenarios for smallscale irrigation farming in Nepal and helps to frame a discussion of some possible solutions and fundamental trade-offs in the process of adaptation to improve for food and water security under climate change.