The Resilience Renaissance? Unpacking of Resilience for Tackling Climate Change and Disasters

The term ‘resilience’ is increasingly used in the context of discussion, policies and programming around climate change adaptation (‘adaptation’) and disaster risk reduction (DRR). It has become particularly popular to describe the intersection between these two fields and those of poverty and development as ‘climate resilient development’, and ‘climate resilient development’ is rapidly becoming a catch-all for tackling climate change impacts in a development context’.

However, despite this growth in popularity, there has been little attempt to scrutinise the literature to examine how it might underpin an operational approach to resilience. This working paper reviews academic conceptualisation of the concept of ‘resilience’ in social, ecological and socio-ecological systems. It reviews 16 overlapping conceptualisations of resilience from the literature, outlining key characteristics and indicators of resilience. A metatable captures the key findings of the paper, including detail on indicators.