Destination Resilience

Concept Definitions

• Resilience: In social-ecological terms, resilience is broadly defined as the ability of a SES to decrease vulnerability to shocks and uncertainty through adaptation and / or transformation (Folke et al., 2010); in natural hazards research, resilience is essential to the development of multi-level disaster reduction and is generally defined as the capacity to resist and recover from loss (Zhou et al., 2010).
• Risk: Any unpredictable, potential events such as natural disasters or social crises that threaten a socio-ecological system (SES); within a coupled SES, actions for reducing vulnerability and enhancing resilience can all contribute to risk mitigation (Lei et al., 2014).
• Vulnerability: Often defined as susceptibility to harm; in the risk field, researchers consider vulnerability as an internal attribute of a system that increases the probability of the potential hazard occurring (Folke et al., 2010); vulnerability is often measured in terms of exposure and sensitivity, where exposure is the extent to which a system is physically in harm’s way, and sensitivity is the extent to which a system is affected after being exposed to stress (Engle, 2011).

Reference List

Engle, N. L. (2011). Adaptive capacity and its assessment. Global Environmental Change, 21(2), 647–656. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.01.019.

Folke, C., Carpenter, S. R., Walker, B., Scheffer, M., Chapin, T., & Rockström, J. (2010).

Resilience thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability. Ecology and Society, 15(4):20. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art20/.

Lei, Y., Wang, J., Yue, Y., Zhou, H., & Yin, W. (2014). Rethinking the relationships of vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation from a disaster risk perspective. Natural Hazards, 70, 609-627. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-013-0831-7.

Zhou, H., Wang, J., & Wan, J. (2010). Resilience to natural hazards: a geographic perspective. Natural Hazards, 53, 21–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-009-9407-y.