Resilience to Natural Hazards – Concepts, Ecosystems and Communities

Resilience has its conceptual origins in psychology where it can be described as the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. In short, it is that ineffable quality that allows people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever. This quality has been extended to engineering (elasticity of products), ecology (ecological responses to perturbations) and socio-ecological systems (community response to natural and anthropogenic perturbation). Resilience can be conceptualized as being comprised of two elements – vulnerability and recoverability. Vulnerability represents the likelihood of a risk or perturbation happening to a system, either natural or anthropogenic. Recoverability is the ability to respond positively to that perturbation or disturbance in a somewhat rapid manner either through resisting damage or revering quickly. In ecology, resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to these perturbations and recover quickly. Interdisciplinary discourse on resilience now includes consideration of the interactions of humans and ecosystems aimed at environmental resource management toward adaptive capacity. This concept has been further expanded to socio-economic-ecological systems where community resilience is the sustained ability of a community to utilize available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations (e.g., natural hazards, acute climate events, economic collapse).

The topic of the special issue would be Resilience to Natural Hazards – Concepts, Ecosystems and Communities. In this capacity, the issue would be a mix of manuscripts addressing resilience of natural and human systems from a conceptual as well as a practical perspective. Sub-topic areas include: concepts of resilience, natural resilience to perturbations, community resilience to social issues, community resilience to climate events, database needs for addressing these types of topics, index development, and forecasting.