Climate change and natural hazards: the geography of community resilience in Norway

In recent years, extreme weather and natural hazard events have affected numerous local communities in Norway badly. Climate changes are likely to lead to more frequent and severe events, hence putting more and more pressure on any communities? abilities to handle them. Community resilience describes a community's ability to prepare for, handle during, and recover after a disaster, at least to some extent, through the use of local-level resources and capabilities. In the project we have: Explored the importance of local knowledge and community involvement in disaster response. Investigated people?s perceptions of climate change, natural hazards and their consequences, including possible factors that influence these perceptions. Taken a closer look at the notion of community, an integral part of community resilience that is often overlooked. Operationalized community resilience through the development of an index. Depicted natural hazard damages through the development of a visualization tool. Conclusions and recommendations: At the heart of community resilience lies the community and people?s abilities to handle crises through using their resources and networks. People?s competences and willingness to act can, in the early stages of a crisis and prior to the presence of professional actors, be decisive for the outcome. Emergency management in Norway is to a large degree focused on strengthening the professional response system, i.e. making such response more robust and efficient. This is important, yet it is also critically important that locals and professionals cooperate in all phases of a crisis. We recommend that routines and mechanisms for cooperation are developed that make sure that local people's resources and knowledge and professional actors, better find each other during crises. We also recommend that local people and communities are more clearly included in risk and vulnerability assessments, as well as in emergency management and planning. Within the context of planning, it can be relevant to identify indicators for measuring vulnerability and resilience. For such indicators to be useful for planning, we recommend that researchers and practitioners cooperate in order to develop a set of vulnerability and resilience indicators that can be used locally, regionally and nationally. A dynamic and interactive tool showing exposure to natural hazards, vulnerability and resilience, can be prove valuable for planning and emergency response. We recommend investing in the further development of a geo-visualisation tool that can provide easy, user-friendly access to relevant hazard information, including the vulnerability and resilience of local communities.

ClimRes har økt forskerne sin kompetanse på konsekvenser av klimaendringer, krisehåndtering og resiliens i norske lokalsamfunn. I tillegg til å formidle den opparbeidede kompetansen til fagfeller, har vi har uteksaminert 15+ MA-studenter i løpet av prosjektperioden. Majoriteten av disse ansettes i norske kommuner og i skoleverket. Prosjektperioden har i stor grad sammenfalt med Nordic Centre of Excellence on Resilience and Societal Security. Det har vært et nært samarbeid mellom flere av ClimRes sine forskere og senteret, noe som har bidratt både til økt tverrfaglig kompetanse, og kunnskapsutveksling på tvers av de nordiske landene. Tre av ClimRes-forskerne har hatt lengre opphold finansiert av prosjektet ved universiteter i USA og Australia. Utviklingen av det interaktive geovisualiseringsverktøyet har ført til utstrakt samarbeid med Finans Norge. Kommuner og fylkeskommuner har også vist interesse for verktøyet, og dette vil bli fulgt opp etter at prosjektet er avsluttet.

This project, ClimRes, investigates how community resilience manifests itself in the context of climate change related natural hazards in Norway with particular focus on how communities prepare for, act during, and recover after a crisis. The ability to r espond to crisis will be increasingly important as climate change is likely to lead to more extreme weather with more intense precipitation, potentially causing more frequent and damaging floods, landslides and storms. With some exceptions, in Norway, suc h events tend to be spatially limited, mainly damaging buildings and infrastructure causing few casualties. However, the relative importance of such events can be high, i.e. they can have severe social and material consequences for the communities affecte d. Hence, the capability to prepare for, cope during and recover after a crisis situation is of vital importance. This capability is commonly referred to as community resilience. Community resilience in the context of climate change in Norway has been r elatively little explored. ClimRes sets out to identify dimensions of community resilience that are relevant, and further, to explore to what extent some of these dimensions can be captured in measurable indicators, hence providing a basis for mapping com munity resilience. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods and visualization techniques will be used. ClimRes will enable us to identify where community resilience needs to be strengthened, and which measures can assist communities in effect ively preparing for, coping with, and recovering from disastrous events.