Climate change and natural hazards – the geography of community resilience

This special issue of Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography originates from the research project ‘Climate change and natural hazards: the geography of community resilience in Norway’,¹ based in the Department of Geography at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. The project was designed as a response to the Research Council of Norway’s call for increased knowledge of how society can and should adjust to meet the challenges of climate change. A key purpose of the project was to investigate what form community resilience to climate-related natural hazards might take in different Norwegian municipalities and how it could be strengthened.

The geography of community resilience in Norway – why and how?

Disaster resilience can be understood as follows:

the ability of individuals, communities, organizations or countries exposed to disasters and crises and underlying vulnerabilities to anticipate, reduce the impact of, cope with, and recover from the effects of shocks and stresses without compromising their long-term prospects. (IFRC 2016, 19)

The crux of this definition is its emphasis on the contextual dimensions of resilience, whether spatial, social or institutional. Hence, there is no single recipe for how to be resilient or to become resilient. Nevertheless, the research literature points to some recurring traits that are considered to help communities to improve their adaptation to changing circumstances in order to be more resilient. Such traits include the existence of community networks and relationships, good governance and leadership, local knowledge, communication, material resources and economic investment, preparedness, good health, and a positive mental outlook (e.g. Norris et al. 2007; Setten & Lein 2019).

Community resilience has not been much explored within a Norwegian context, with few exceptions (e.g. Amundsen 2012). However, there are substantial spatial differences in how well communities are prepared for adverse events (as evidenced in Scherzer et al. 2019). Hence, the spatial complexity of community resilience reflects the complexity of the notion of community resilience itself. This challenged us to take three different, yet interlinked, approaches to the geography of community resilience in Norway.

First, and as a response to the scant attention given to qualitative work on the interlinkages between climate change and resilience in Norway, project members have undertaken qualitative case studies to explore cultural and social factors that contribute to local-level resilience (e.g. Andresen 2017; Setten & Lein 2019). The studies have demonstrated that what and who people know can drastically shape the immediate response to crises and thus the outcome. Setten & Lein (2019) emphasize the importance of the role of peoples’ values and norms for how they respond in a crisis and, in effect, the importance of how people see themselves with respect to their actions taken during times of hardship.

Second, from a quantitative perspective, project team members have studied resilience ‘from a distance’. Drawing on a long-standing tradition of measuring resilience (Cutter et al. 2008), we have identified community resilience dimensions and indicators, and constructed a resilience index for Norwegian municipalities based on publicly available statistics (Scherzer et al. 2019). The index can serve as a means for communication and awareness raising of why it is important for Norwegian municipalities to be more resilient. To gain further insights into people’s perceptions of climate change and its consequences, natural hazard risks, preparedness, and their communities’ level of resilience, also data from nationally representative surveys have been analysed (Lujala et al. 2015; Lujala & Lein 2020, this issue).

Third, in order to identify where the most exposed and less resilient areas are, project members have developed interactive geovisualization tools that can be used to view the history and geography of insurance compensation provided from the Norwegian Natural Perils Pool (Opach & Rød 2018).² The tool allows users to explore their level of resilience and can also be used as a platform for participatory assessments of community resilience. Importantly, the tool integrates the information provided by the resilience index to aid the use of the tool.

In sum, the project (‘Climate change and natural hazards: the geography of community resilience in Norway’) has been broad in empirical scope and ambitious in its methodologies. The findings have made clear to us that community resilience is inherently contextual and that there are myriad ways to be resilient or to become resilient, either individually or collectively. The authors of the five articles included in this special issue of Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography have mainly taken a quantitative approach to their research issues and examined some of the key aspects of geographies of community resilience as they have surfaced throughout the project period, importantly also beyond the Norwegian context. To introduce and contextualize the articles, we invited Professor Lesley Head, a member of the project’s international advisory board, to write a commentary. Her commentary appears immediately after this guest editorial.

Notes

1 Further details of the project can be accessed at https://prosjektbanken.forskningsradet.no/#/project/NFR/235490

2 The ClimRes geovisualization tool can be accessed at: http://folk.ntnu.no/opach/tools/climres/