Responses to Disasters and Climate Change Understanding Vulnerability and Fostering Resilience

As the global climate shifts, communities are faced with a myriad of mitigation and adaptation challenges. These highlight the political, cultural, economic, social, and physical vulnerability of social groups, communities, families, and individuals. They also foster resilience and creative responses. Research in hazard management, humanitarian response, food security programming, and other areas seeks to identify and understand factors that create vulnerability and strategies that enhance resilience at all levels of social organization. This book uses case studies from around the globe to demonstrate ways that communities have fostered resilience to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Introduction

Chapter 1: Vulnerability and Resilience to Climate Change in a Rural Coastal Community

Chapter 2: The story of Rising Voices: facilitating collaboration between Indigenous and Western ways of knowing

Chapter 3: Youth based learning in disaster risk reduction education: barriers and bridges to promote resilience

Chapter 4: Household Response to Flash Flooding in the United States and India: A Comparative Study of the 2013 Colorado and Uttarakhand Disasters

Chapter 5: Traditional and Contemporary Social Safety Nets in Rural Mozambique

Chapter 6: Accessing Disaster Recovery Resource Information: Reliance on Social Capital in the Aftermath of Hurricane Sandy

Chapter 7: Lessons Learned from Evaluating a Leadership Development Initiative to Foster Climate Change Adaptation, Mitigation, and Resilience

Chapter 8: Let’s Talk Oil Spill Risk: Lessons Learned from Coastal Communities in British Columbia, Canada

Chapter 9: Imagining Culture: the Politics of Culturally Sensitive Reconstruction and Resilience-Building in Post-Wenchuan Earthquake China

Chapter 10: The Shared Vulnerability and Resiliency of the Fukushima Animals and their Rescuers

Chapter 11: Understanding Child Nutrition Preservation After an Extreme Weather Event Disaster: Lessons from Tropical Storm Ketsana and Typhoon Parma (2009) in the Philippines

Chapter 12: Food insecurity and health disparity synergisms: Reframing a praxis of anthropology and public health for displaced populations in the United States

Chapter 13: The Dynamics of Vulnerability and Adaptive Capacity in Southern Ethiopia

Chapter 14: The Production of Material Goods as Resilience Adaptation by Impelled Migrants in Malawi

Chapter 15: Gender Dimensions in Disaster Management: Implications for Coastal Aquaculture and Fishing Communities in the Philippines

Chapter 16: Women’s Leadership in a Texas Forest Fire and Recovery: How Gender Roles and Assumptions Empower and Constrain Women and Men Post-Disaster in a Rural Southern Town

Chapter 17: Gender dynamics and disasters in Zimbabwe: a case of Tokwe Mukosi flooding

Chapter 18: Vulnerability and Tourism Development: Fostering the Capacity of Resilience in the Context of Climate Change

Chapter 19: Why Isn’t There a Plan? Community Vulnerability and Resilience in then Latrobe Valley’s Open Cut Coal Mine Town

Chapter 20: Best Family Rwanda: a Case Study on Religious Sources of Resilience

Chapter 21: Grassroots and Guerrillas: Radical and Insurgent Responses for Community Resilience

Chapter 22: "Prepper" as Resilient Citizen: What Preppers Can Teach Us About Surviving Disasters

Chapter 23: All the Years Combine: The Expansion and Contraction of Time and Memory in Disaster Response

Michèle Companion is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado - Colorado Springs, U.S.A. She is a food and livelihood security specialist, working in countries across Africa with international NGOs. This work focuses on the expansion of market-based food security indicators to increase local sensitivity to food crisis triggers and on population displacement, migration, and resettlement. She also researches Native American nutritional dynamics, including impacts of low income diets on overall health and food security and tribal participation in the food sovereignty movement. She has recently been looking at cultural barriers to healthy eating among low-income urban Indian populations. Her recent publications include Disaster’s Impact on Livelihood and Cultural Survival: Losses, Opportunities, and Mitigation.

Miriam S. Chaiken currently holds the position of Dean of the William Conroy Honors College at New Mexico State University and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. She is a cultural anthropologist with decades of experience in international economic development, having conducted field research on issues of population resettlement and migration, food security and hunger, livelihoods and agricultural production, and maternal and child health. Most of this work was done in collaboration with humanitarian NGOs such as UNICEF and Save the Children. Her earliest long-term field work was on Palawan Island in the Philippines, followed by extensive work in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Mozambique.