Want to develop climate resilience? Ask people

Climate resilience has been a hot topic in science and policy over the recent decades. Yet, even after years of research and application debates remain on how to effectively measure and manage it. A new article in the WIRE’s: Climate Change may shine a bit of light on the issue, showing that how we understand resilience is crucial for enhancing our ability to maintain and develop it.

Reliable resilience measurements can help people and societies respond to climate challenges. Donors, governments, researchers and NGOs are committing great resources to support robust climate resilience measurements and effective action. “Communities and nations must have a thorough understanding of how resilience takes shape within their territories, and where hotspots of high and low resilience exist before being able to tailor suitable resilience‐building interventions”, says Lindsey Jones, a researcher from Grantham Resilience Institute for Climate Change and the Environment.

Multiple resilience measurement frameworks and tools are available. Currently, most of them rely on the objective methods of evaluation, which represent how scientists see resilience but not how people define and experience it. Objective approaches largely dictate our current understanding of resilience and shape societal responses to climate change. Meanwhile, researchers are starting to reveal that objective indicators may often poorly predict subjective resilience evaluations, which challenges assumptions about the effectiveness of objective measures.

Recently, subjective evaluation methods have started to gain attention. They rely more on the people’s understanding of their own capacity to deal with climate risks, while limiting expert perspectives on the issue. The study emphasizes that combining the two perspectives can boost the outcomes of resilience management.

In another recent paper, Jones and his colleague show the practical use of subjective methods. In surveying 2,308 households in Northern Uganda the authors combined traditional objective methods with subjective resilience measures, for the first time providing their “like-for-like comparisons”. The findings suggest that while there are correlations in results based on different methods, there are also important differences; for example regarding response strategies or evaluations on how levels of education influence resilience levels, which ultimately impacts decisions regarding relevant resilience measures.

Subjective approaches are not perfect, either: people usually remember peak moments better than events in general, which distorts their real experience of extreme events from the time they occurred. They also tend to take a particular stance on the issue, depending on their political realities and local ideological framing. These and other factors make clear that subjective approaches alone are also insufficient and can prove most useful when synthesized with results based on objective methods. 

Jones emphasizes that when measuring climate resilience, it is important to understand the merits and drawbacks of different methods and that “there is no one‐size fits all approach to resilience measurement”. As climate challenges continue to rise, we should get better in responding to them through combining perspectives and coming up with unique solutions at the intersection of science and society, without hoping that one silver bullet will solve it all.