Community Resilience And Environmental Transitions

This book discusses the resilience of communities in both developed and developing world contexts. It investigates the notion of ‘resilience’ and the challenges faced by local communities around the world to deal with disturbances (natural hazards or human-made) that may threaten their long-term survival. Using global examples, specific emphasis is placed on how learning processes, traditions, policies and politics affect the resilience of communities and what constraints and opportunities exist for communities to raise resilience levels.

Urban centres are bastions of inequalities, where poverty, marginalization, segregation and health insecurity are magnified. Minorities and the poor – often residing in neighbourhoods characterized by degraded infrastructures, food and job insecurity, limited access to transport and health care, and other inadequate public services – are inherently vulnerable, especially at risk in times of shock or change as they lack the option to avoid, mitigate and adapt to threats. Offering both theoretical and practical approaches, this book proposes critical perspectives and an interdisciplinary lens on urban inequalities in light of individual, group, community and system vulnerabilities and resilience. Touching upon current research trends in food justice, environmental injustice through socio-spatial tactics and solution-based approaches towards urban community resilience, Resilience, Environmental Justice and the City promotes perspectives which transition away from the traditional discussions surrounding environmental justice and pinpoints the need to address urban social inequalities beyond the build environment, championing approaches that help embed social vulnerabilities and resilience in urban planning. With its methodological and dynamic approach to the intertwined nature of resilience and environmental justice in urban cities, this book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners within urban studies, environmental management, environmental sociology and public administration.

Urban centres are bastions of inequalities, where poverty, marginalization, segregation and health insecurity are magnified. Minorities and the poor – often residing in neighbourhoods characterized by degraded infrastructures, food and job insecurity, limited access to transport and health care, and other inadequate public services – are inherently vulnerable, especially at risk in times of shock or change as they lack the option to avoid, mitigate and adapt to threats. Offering both theoretical and practical approaches, this book proposes critical perspectives and an interdisciplinary lens on urban inequalities in light of individual, group, community and system vulnerabilities and resilience. Touching upon current research trends in food justice, environmental injustice through socio-spatial tactics and solution-based approaches towards urban community resilience, Resilience, Environmental Justice and the City promotes perspectives which transition away from the traditional discussions surrounding environmental justice and pinpoints the need to address urban social inequalities beyond the build environment, championing approaches that help embed social vulnerabilities and resilience in urban planning. With its methodological and dynamic approach to the intertwined nature of resilience and environmental justice in urban cities, this book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners within urban studies, environmental management, environmental sociology and public administration.

Resilience, Community Action and Societal Transformation is a unique collection bridging research, theory and practical action to create more resilient societies. It includes accounts from people and organizations on the front line of efforts to build community resilience; cutting-edge theory and analysis from engaged scholar-activists; and commentary from sympathetic researchers. Its content ranges from first-hand accounts of the Transition Movement in the UK, Canada and Spain, to theoretical reflections on resilience theory and the shifts in mindsets and perspectives required for transitions to sustainability. The book contains substantive contributions from activists and activist-scholars such as Lorenzo Chelleri (Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy), Juan del Rio (Transition Spain), Naresh Giangrande (Transition Network), Maja G�pel (Wuppertal Institute), Thomas Henfrey (Transition Research Network), Justin Kenrick (Forest People's Programme), Glen Kuecker (University of Indiana), Cheryl Lyon (Transition Peterborough Ontario) and Gesa Maschowski (Transition Bonn), along with briefing notes from noted experts in resilience. The result is a compelling cocktail of insights, ideas and action points likely to define the scientific and practical fields of community resilience for years to come.

National and global efforts have failed to stop climate change, transition from fossil fuels, and reduce inequality. We must now confront these and other increasingly complex problems by building resilience at the community level. The Community Resilience Reader combines a fresh look at the challenges humanity faces in the 21st century, the essential tools of resilience science, and the wisdom of activists, scholars, and analysts working on the ground to present a new vision for creating resilience. It shows that resilience is a process, not a goal; how it requires learning to adapt but also preparing to transform; and that it starts and ends with the people living in a community. From Post Carbon Institute, the producers of the award-winning The Post Carbon Reader, The Community Resilience Reader is a valuable resource for community leaders, college students, and concerned citizens.

In this fifth volume of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Culture of Health series, Community Resilience: Equitable Practices for an Uncertain Future highlights the importance of resilience, or the set of assets that allow a person or place to recover when adversity hits, by illustrating the policies and stories of lived experience surrounding health equity. Whether that adversity is acute--such as an environmental disaster or an abuse of police power--or chronic--such as that engendered by poverty and racism--local innovation and community engagement are key to nurturing resilience and promoting health equity. Community Resilience positions storytelling and narrative shifts as essential to influencing our perceptions of who deserves empathy or support, and who does not, by examining the systemic barriers to resilience and the opportunities to reshape the landscape to overcome those barriers. The central message of this volume--across immigration or imprisonment, opioids or trauma, housing or disaster preparedness--is that we must act intentionally and allow a shift in power in order to make progress.

In 2008, the best selling The Transition Handbook suggested a model for a community-led response to peak oil and climate change. Since then, the Transition idea has gone viral across the globe, from universities and London neighbourhoods to Italian villages and Brazilian favelas. In contrast to the ever-worsening stream of information about climate change, the economy and resource depletion, Transition focuses on solutions, on community-scale projects and on positive results. The Transition Companion picks up the story today, describing one of the most fascinating experiments now under way in the world. It shows how communities are working for a future where local enterprises are valued and nurtured; where lower energy use is seen as a benefit; and where cooperation, creativity and the building of resilience are the cornerstones of a new economy. The first part discusses where we are now in terms of resilience to the problems of rising oil prices, climate change and economic uncertainty. It presents a vision of how the future might look if we succeed in addressing these issues. The book then looks in detail at the process a community in transition goes through, drawing on the experience of those who have already embarked on this journey. These examples show how much can be achieved when people harness energy and imagination to create projects that will make their communities more resilient. The Transition Companion combines practical advice; the tools needed to start and maintain a Transition initiative; with numerous inspiring stories from local groups worldwide.

Our population is aging--by 2034, the US will have more people over 65 than under 18, and older residents make up a disproportionate number of casualties from natural disasters. In Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation, community resilience and housing expert Danielle Arigoni argues that we cannot achieve true resilience until communities adopt interventions that work to meet the needs of their oldest residents. Arigoni explores how to integrate age-friendly resilience into community planning and disaster preparedness efforts through new planning approaches. These include an age-friendly process, and a planning framework dedicated to inclusive disaster recovery. Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation will help professionals and concerned citizens understand how to best plan for both the aging of our population and the climate changes underway to create communities that serve the needs of older adults better, not only during disasters but for all the days in between.

This book provides an alternative perspective on community resilience, drawing on critical sociological and social policy insights about how people individually and collectively cope with different kinds of adversity. Based on the idea that resilience is more than simply an invention of neoliberal governments, this book explores diverse expressions of resilience and considers what supports and undermines people’s resilience in different contexts. Focusing on the United Kingdom, it examines the contradictions and limitations of neoliberal resilience policies and the role of policy in shaping how vulnerabilities are distributed and how resilience is manifested. The book explores different types of resilience including planning, response, recovery, adaptation and transformation, which are examined in relation to different types of threat such as financial hardship, disasters and climate change. It argues that resilience cannot act as an antidote to vulnerability, and aims to demonstrate the importance of shared institutions in underpinning resilience and in preventing socially created vulnerabilities. It will be of interest to academics, students and well-informed practitioners working with the concept of resilience within the subject areas of Sociology, Social Policy, Human Geography, Environmental Humanities and International Development.

The 2012 National Research Council report Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative highlighted the challenges of increasing national resilience in the United States. One finding of the report was that "without numerical means of assessing resilience, it would be impossible to identify the priority needs for improvement, to monitor changes, to show that resilience had improved, or to compare the benefits of increasing resilience with the associated costs." Although measuring resilience is a challenge, metrics and indicators to evaluate progress, and the data necessary to establish the metric, are critical for helping communities to clarify and formalize what the concept of resilience means for them, and to support efforts to develop and prioritize resilience investments. One of the recommendations from the 2012 report stated that government entities at federal, state, and local levels and professional organizations should partner to help develop a framework for communities to adapt to their circumstances and begin to track their progress toward increasing resilience. To build upon this recommendation and begin to help communities formulate such a framework, the Resilient America Roundtable of the National Academies convened the workshop Measures of Community Resilience: From Lessons Learned to Lessons Applied on September 5, 2014 in Washington, D.C. The workshop's overarching objective was to begin to develop a framework of measures and indicators that could support community efforts to increase their resilience. The framework will be further developed through feedback and testing in pilot and other partner communities that are working with the Resilient America Roundtable. This report is a summary of the one-day workshop, which consisted of a keynote address and two panel sessions in the morning and afternoon breakout sessions that began the discussion on how to develop a framework of resilience measures.