This book provides an accessible overview of how efforts to combat climate change and social inequalities should be tackled simultaneously. In the context of the climate emergency, the impacts of extreme events can already be felt around the world. The book centres on five case studies from the Global South, Latin America, Pacific Islands, Africa, and Asia with each one focused on climate justice, resilience, and community responses towards a just transition. The book will be an invaluable reference for advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in environmental studies, urban planning, geography, social science, international development, and disciplines that focus on the social dimensions of climate change.
While urban settlements are the drivers of the global economy and centres of learning, culture, and innovation and nations rely on competitive dynamic regions for their economic, social, and environmental objectives, urban centres and regions face a myriad of challenges that impact the ways in which people live and work, create wealth, and interact and connect with places. Rapid urbanisation is resulting in urban sprawl, rising emissions, urban poverty and high unemployment rates, housing affordability issues, lack of urban investment, low urban financial and governance capacities, rising inequality and urban crimes, environmental degradation, increasing vulnerability to natural disasters and so forth. At the regional level, low employment, low wage growth, scarce financial resources, climate change, waste and pollution, and rising urban peri-urban competition etc. are impacting the ability of regions to meet socio-economic development goals while protecting biodiversity. The response to these challenges has typically been the application of inadequate or piecemeal solutions, often as a result of fragmented decision-making and competing priorities, with numerous economic, environmental, and social consequences. In response, there is a growing movement towards viewing cities and regions as complex and sociotechnical in nature with people and communities interacting with one another and with objects, such as roads, buildings, transport links etc., within a range of urban and regional settings or contexts. This comprehensive MRW will provide readers with expert interdisciplinary knowledge on how urban centres and regions in locations of varying climates, lifestyles, income levels, and stages development are creating synergies and reducing trade-offs in the development of resilient, resource-efficient, environmentally friendly, liveable, socially equitable, integrated, and technology-enabled centres and regions.
Climate Change, Community Response, and Resilience: Insight for Socio-Ecological Sustainability, Volume Six presents a fundamental theoretical framework for understanding how community resilience and risk assessment affect climate change adaptation behavior. This framework is based on a 26-chapter theoretical and empirical examination that includes pioneer projects from various regions that illustrate the relationship between theory and practice, reflect a paradigm shift in climate change, community response, and resilience, and focus on these important aspects from a sectoral perspective. Climate change, ecological consequences and resilience are then discussed in the final section. Members of the Royal Meteorological Society are eligible for a 35% discount on all Developments in Weather and Climate Science series titles. See the RMetS member dashboard for the discount code. - Provides insights into the impact of community resilience and risk assessment on climate change adaptation behavior - Examines several case studies in which local communities have used innovative methods to address climate threats - Assesses the vulnerability of households and agroecosystems to climate change and environmental degradation
As the global climate shifts, communities are faced with a myriad of mitigation and adaptation challenges. These highlight the political, cultural, economic, social, and physical vulnerability of social groups, communities, families, and individuals. They also foster resilience and creative responses. Research in hazard management, humanitarian response, food security programming, and other areas seeks to identify and understand factors that create vulnerability and strategies that enhance resilience at all levels of social organization. This book uses case studies from around the globe to demonstrate ways that communities have fostered resilience to mitigate the impacts of climate change.
The impacts of climate change are already being felt. Learning how to live with these impacts is a priority for human development. In this context, it is too easy to see adaptation as a narrowly defensive task – protecting core assets or functions from the risks of climate change. A more profound engagement, which sees climate change risks as a product and driver of social as well as natural systems, and their interaction, is called for. Adaptation to Climate Change argues that, without care, adaptive actions can deny the deeper political and cultural roots that call for significant change in social and political relations if human vulnerability to climate change associated risk is to be reduced. This book presents a framework for making sense of the range of choices facing humanity, structured around resilience (stability), transition (incremental social change and the exercising of existing rights) and transformation (new rights claims and changes in political regimes). The resilience-transition-transformation framework is supported by three detailed case study chapters. These also illustrate the diversity of contexts where adaption is unfolding, from organizations to urban governance and the national polity. This text is the first comprehensive analysis of the social dimensions to climate change adaptation. Clearly written in an engaging style, it provides detailed theoretical and empirical chapters and serves as an invaluable reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in climate change, geography and development studies.
"The Fight for Climate after COVID-19 draws on the troubled and uneven COVID-19 experience to illustrate the critical need to ramp up resilience rapidly and effectively on a global scale. After years of working alongside public health and resilience experts crafting policy to build both pandemic and climate change preparedness, Alice C. Hill exposes parallels between the underutilized measures that governments should have taken to contain the spread of COVID-19 -- such as early action, cross-border planning, and bolstering emergency preparation -- and the steps leaders can take now to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Through practical analyses of current policy and thoughtful guidance for successful climate adaptation, The Fight for Climate after COVID-19 reveals that, just as our society has transformed itself to meet the challenge of coronavirus, so too will we need to adapt our thinking and our policies to combat the ever-increasing threat of climate change." --
Climate Adaptation and Resilience Across Scales provides professionals with guidance on adapting the built environment to a changing climate. This edited volume brings together practitioners and researchers to discuss climate-related resilience from the building to the city scale. This book highlights North American cases that deal with issues such as climate projections, public health, adaptive capacity of vulnerable populations, and design interventions for floodplains, making the content applicable to many locations around the world. The contributors in this book discuss topics ranging from how built environment professionals respond to a changing climate, to how the building stock may need to adapt to climate change, to how resilience is currently being addressed in the design, construction, and operations communities. The purpose of this book is to provide a better understanding of climate change impacts, vulnerability, and resilience across scales of the built environment. Architects, urban designers, planners, landscape architects, and engineers will find this a useful resource for adapting buildings and cities to a changing climate.
The frequency and severity of disasters over the last few decades have presented unprecedented challenges for communities across the United States. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed the complexity and breadth of a deadly combination of existing community stressors, aging infrastructure, and a powerful natural hazard. In many ways, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for understanding and managing disasters, as well as related plan making and policy formulation. It brought the phrase "community resilience" into the lexicon of disaster management. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program summarizes the existing portfolio of relevant or related resilience measurement efforts and notes gaps and challenges associated with them. It describes how some communities build and measure resilience and offers four key actions that communities could take to build and measure their resilience in order to address gaps identified in current community resilience measurement efforts. This report also provides recommendations to the Gulf Research Program to build and measure resilience in the Gulf of Mexico region.
This book analyses the links between climate change adaptation, resilience and the impacts of hazards. The contributors cover topics such as climate change adaptation in coastal zones, the evaluation of community land models, climate change considerations in public health and water resource management, as well as conceptual frameworks for understanding vulnerabilities to extreme climate events. The book focuses on a variety of concrete projects, initiatives and strategies currently being implemented across the world. It also presents case studies, trends, data and projects that illustrate how cities, communities and regions have been striving to achieve resilience and have handled hazards.
Psychology and Climate Change: Human Perceptions, Impacts, and Responses organizes and summarizes recent psychological research that relates to the issue of climate change. The book covers topics such as how people perceive and respond to climate change, how people understand and communicate about the issue, how it impacts individuals and communities, particularly vulnerable communities, and how individuals and communities can best prepare for and mitigate negative climate change impacts. It addresses the topic at multiple scales, from individuals to close social networks and communities. Further, it considers the role of social diversity in shaping vulnerability and reactions to climate change. Psychology and Climate Change describes the implications of psychological processes such as perceptions and motivations (e.g., risk perception, motivated cognition, denial), emotional responses, group identities, mental health and well-being, sense of place, and behavior (mitigation and adaptation). The book strives to engage diverse stakeholders, from multiple disciplines in addition to psychology, and at every level of decision making - individual, community, national, and international, to understand the ways in which human capabilities and tendencies can and should shape policy and action to address the urgent and very real issue of climate change. - Examines the role of knowledge, norms, experience, and social context in climate change awareness and action - Considers the role of identity threat, identity-based motivation, and belonging - Presents a conceptual framework for classifying individual and household behavior - Develops a model to explain environmentally sustainable behavior - Draws on what we know about participation in collective action - Describes ways to improve the effectiveness of climate change communication efforts - Discusses the difference between acute climate change events and slowly-emerging changes on our mental health - Addresses psychological stress and injury related to global climate change from an intersectional justice perspective - Promotes individual and community resilience
