Hoping for Resilience: The Magical Properties of Awareness and Risk

Are we in danger of treating resilience as a magical quality?

Imagine a physician only helping you with your healthcare by telling you about things not to do: Don’t smoke cigarettes. Don’t handle uranium fuel rods in a nuclear power plant without protective gear. Don’t work as a circus acrobat, balancing on tightropes high above the ground.

My strained metaphor is close approximation for how we limit resilience by just talking about climate risks. “Thou shall not do specific things.” And often these specific things are quite narrowly defined and usually tied to extreme climate events. And this injunction-based approach to climate change leads what — to me — seems like a curiously inverted definition of climate resilience: If we avoid these specific items, then we should “safe” and “resilient.” Sleep easy, young prince and princess.

Reducing risks is important and necessary when those risks are clear and significant, but risk reduction alone is not sufficient to enable resilience. Truly, we shouldn’t build in a floodplain. But what if the floodplain is bigger or more extensive than we imagined, or comes more quickly or at a time of year we didn’t expect? What if we’re already in the floodplain? Is reducing risk the same as building resilience?

This last question was driven home to me in a small, closed workshop here in the US two weeks ago. Agencies that had been tasked with including climate components in their existing portfolios came to the table to talk about where they were and where they might be headed. On the same day, more than two dozen federal agencies released updated adaptation and resilience reports. A number of strategic consultants and organizations representing regional and local interests were also involved, representing their views.

I heard strong comments that we need to focus on communicating risk, that risk was about extreme events, and that these extreme events were reasonably well known and predictable.

If anything, these viewpoints were alarming to me. What if instead of smoking cigarettes, I switched to a pipe or chewing tobacco? From handling uranium fuel roads to working with nuclear waste? From the tightrope to working as the target for the circus knife-thrower? These risks are different, right? We eliminated one set of risks. Did we improve our situation? Are we resilient just because those initial risks are gone? Often, we see risks themselves shift or transform. And an overly narrow approach on specific issues keeps us from seeing more systematic hazards.

Does awareness of risk by itself create resilience? What if you are a low-lying coastal town, with limited resources, and you’re worried about declining regional freshwater supplies and sea-level rise? Simply knowing that you have risks does not automatically tell you how to respond to these threats, much less how to pay for them. You probably need a regional approach, as well as support from national and private sector funding sources. And you should be prepared to develop a flexible strategy, as the situation changes. Your new storage reservoir may become to exposed to saltwater intrusion, or your coastal retreat strategy may literally run into your less-exposed neighbors and create legal and governance conflict over land use. Awareness that a problem exists does not automatically lead to a single clear solution, much less a single feasible, affordable solution.

Listening at the table, I began to wonder about magical resilience and the assumption that awareness alone — especially of a limited number of hazards — would translate into dramatic, affordable, realistic change. If anything, the transition in mindset we need — to seeing systems, learning about options and alternative approaches, and developing flexible approaches that can evolve over time — is profoundly unmagical as a process. Learning, listening, and exploring are not magical. Resilience is a process, which encompasses a process of learning.

Perhaps most importantly, resilience is about more than avoiding or minimizing hazards. Indeed, resilience is about more than climate change itself. Resilience is about seeing where we and the systems we are embedded within may be headed, and how to change ourselves at least as much as we modify our operations, policies, and structures. Maybe tobacco itself is the problem. Maybe we should be avoiding nuclear options. Maybe life is better as a circus clown.

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA