The concept of “climate resilience” has become top-of-mind for many businesses, but it’s more than just a buzzword. Learn what climate resilience means and how businesses can achieve this status in order to advance your own organization’s impact.
What Is Climate Resilience?
Climate resilience is the ability to foresee, prepare for, and react to unpredictable and dangerous events caused by climate change.
A relatively new term emerging from the devastating effects of continuous catastrophic climate change events, climate resilience is the adaptive capacity of humanity to observe and prepare for those severe impacts.
The strategic plan for coping with socio-ecological hazardous events is the core value behind climate resilience.
What’s the Goal of Climate Resilience?
Climate change awareness is increasing every year, having national and international governments building climate resilience strategies with joint efforts to address the climate change vulnerability.
The goal of climate resilience is to communicate the upcoming negative natural impacts such as downpours, tsunamis, wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, cyclones, sea level increases, and floods to communities, states, and countries.
What Are the Current Climate Resilience Efforts?
Current climate resilience efforts surround an entire network of ecological, social, economic, political, and technological strategies, implementing them in all society levels worldwide.
Despite the enormous efforts made on a local and global scale, climate resilience is still considered only a theory by many, trying to dismantle all the undertakings by the national bodies.
What’s the Work Done By Climate Resilience Creators?
Climate resilience groups are focusing on actions that protect existing systems and structures. This means that starting from small communities to entire states, everyone’s preparing for the inevitable impact of massive natural forces caused by climate change.
The resilience work, according to experts, recognizes three leading aspects, including transformative, adaptive, and absorptive. They state that ecological and socio systems can renew and develop after surviving a severe impact.
Actions done to prevent severe impacts of climate change on the environment include building flood defenses, early installation of alarm systems for tsunamis and cyclones, cultivating drought-resistant crops, redesigning government policies, and many more.
What Does Climate Adaptation Mean?
Climate adaptation is a set of events and actions by the sociological, ecological, economic, and political systems preparing a response for actual or expected climate change-induced impacts.
What’s the Difference Between Climate Resilience and Climate Adaptation?
Climate adaptation is a set of events that occur after the negative impact of climate change, working on immediate adapting of ecosystems to the newly-occurred devastations.
On the other hand, climate resilience is more of an upfront planning on protecting the environment from possible catastrophic impacts caused by rapid climate change.
Also, climate resilience is working on predicting the possible hazardous event that could occur due to global climate change, while adaptation means adapting society after it’s been already affected.
How Can Governments and Policymakers Help with Climate Resilience?
Governments can help develop climate resilience by creating preventive strategies before catastrophic events even happen.
Although adaptation will always be one of the key processes for environmental recovery after a climate change impact, it’s essential to understand the importance of climate resilience as a pre-disaster task force that can change the course of predicted disastrous events. Policymakers must put all their efforts into creating sustainable plans for protection.
How Can Small Businesses Help with Climate Resilience?
Sometimes, it’s not enough to have a general climate resilience plan created by governments unless every single link of the chain creates a proper resilience strategy.
Small businesses deal with risk evaluation policies all the time, having the opportunity to add climate resilience as one of the key points to their internal strategy.
The only way climate resilience could work is if it’s applied by every single society structure and joint forces.
What’s Climate Change Vulnerability?
Vulnerability of the environment by climate change impact is known as climate change or climate risk vulnerability. The phrase comes to use mostly during climate evaluations, discussions, and risk possibilities.
It’s tightly connected to climate resilience due to representing both sides of the same problem. Climate resilience is a process that detects the possible climate vulnerability, creating a set of actions to prevent further development of negative impacts.
What is Environmental Justice?
Environmental injustice is also closely connected to climate resilience, being the alarming factor when it comes to low-income and underdeveloped communities. Climate resilience in those communities basically doesn’t exist.
A perfect example for understanding this viewpoint is the catastrophic impact of Hurricane Katrina and the devastating aftermath that New Orleans citizens needed to live through back in 2005. The unequal preparedness of different communities leads to environmental injustice, thus questioning the climate resilience governmental plan from social and economic aspects.
Creating pre-catastrophe prevention plans for some communities while leaving out others is what causes severe environmental impacts due to climate change.
What Is Climate Gap?
A climate gap is the inequitably negative impact of climate change on poor people and underdeveloped communities. Urban centers with heavy air pollution and increased carbon emissions are the most affected areas suffering climate change.
On top of that, those areas lack permanent jobs and have increased costs of living and transportation, which adds up to the greenhouse effect, leading to heat and pollution-related illnesses.
Overcoming the climate gap is possible with new legislation that would encourage carbon emissions and toxic gases reduction, potentially protecting the citizens of those communities.
What Is Urban Resilience?
There are urban environments worldwide with a disproportionally high increase in population. These places are the least aware of climate resilience while they’re most impacted by climate change effects. Increasing the capacities to absorb catastrophic disturbances and return to the basic structures of society is key to an urban resilience plan, lacking in most highly-populated city areas.
An urban resilience plan should include high maintenance and protection of the infrastructure, power grids, and runoffs as a basic strategy to ensure that citizens would have access to food, electricity, and elemental hygiene during eventual devastating climate change impacts.
Climate resilience is a set of actions created by governments and policymakers with the goal to predict, prevent, and react to hazardous impacts on the environment and societies by inevitable climate change effects.
This strategic plan is only possible if the preventive actions are distributed equally nationwide, controlling every underdeveloped community and imposing new rules and regulations for the common wellbeing.
