CLIMATE CHANGE: DISASTER RISK AND BUILDING RESILIENCE

Social contracts share reciprocal rights, obligations and responsibilities
regarding our environment and our responses to climate change. The
recent pandemic creates opportunities to rethink these existing and evolving
social contracts and make changes regarding risk management and the need to
build a better program of resilience in the face of change and uncertainty.
This paper is about resilience thinking. We discuss how the capacity to recover from
difficulties may be improved. Examples include the impact potential of Spekboom
in South Africa; Pinus Radiate in New Zealand, the Empress tree and the treasury of
plants and products from revolutionary science already underway. Social -ecological
system elasticity and examine insights on creating resilience in a warming world.
Focus is on social rearrangement and activity that may enhance responses to ecosystem
change, yet unusual weather events, and the consequences of some social-ecological
changes already undertaken around the world. Examples include changes
adopted in the McKenzie River Valley, the grasslands in Romania, a novel weighted
index of spatial resilience for Spanish olive landscapes; and the future potential from
the European eLTER project.
The harvest from resilience thinking provides valuable insight for the social ecological
thinker and ways to build resilience and social security in a warming world.