Climate News 25:16
The release of the Victorian Parliament’s Inquiry into Climate Resilience is not only a good summary of current action and the gaps in climate governance at all levels of government. It’s also a good jumping off point for thinking about the role of community in building climate resilience.
This is a two-parter: this week, how we engage with our communities on resilience and next week, how that translates to social licence for government action. Local governments, generally, take a holistic review when considering how to improve climate resilience across their policies, projects and operations. This helps to ensure more effective climate governance through and integrated approach and collaboration. But, as individuals, that’s not how we think about it in our everyday lives. We tend to think “it’s going to be extremely hot today” or “there’s a drought and I need to think about saving water” or “there’s been a sudden storm and the roads will be flooded when I need to get home from work”. In other words, we treat individual impacts separately. Academic research also takes this approach when considering climate resilience and the impacts of events on individuals. The question is: is it possible or desirable to get people to think about climate resilience in a holistic manner. On the one hand, this is going to be our future, and we should be prepared for all eventualities. Dealing with one impact after another without the context of what’s causing it and how we need to adapt as a society is only likely to lead to increasing anxiety and lack of adequate preparation on the part of individuals. On the other hand, what’s the value of communities thinking about climate change all the time. Does that lead to additional anxiety and perhaps a negative reaction when there isn’t a constant run of disasters? The solution may lie in just thinking about ‘resilience’ rather than ‘climate resilience’. There are plenty of ways we can improve community resilience that will also contribute to the strength of those communities to deal with climate impacts. Framing it as a resilience issue rather than a climate resilience issue creates new opportunities for engagement with groups and individuals, who may not normally respond to climate base messaging. I’d be interested to know if anyone out there has tried this.
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