Building Resilience for Sustainability and the Future Environment
Reni Juwitasari
Disaster Resilience and Environmental Sustainability (DRES) Program, ARCID,
School of Social Innovation, Mae Fah Luang University
Source of picture: https://www.pinterest.de/pin/537265430551635458/ (kissclipart.com)
Introduction
The rapid environmental destruction, climate change, and ecosystem degradation induced by nature and humans significantly affect frequent disasters. The present natural hazards may trigger cascading other natural disasters resulting from the anthropogenic activity of vegetation removal, infrastructure development, and groundwater (abstraction) prevailing in every inhabited region of the world. For instance, an earthquake or flooding can also precipitate another disaster, particularly landslides triggered by road building, vegetation removal, and deforestation (Gill & Malamud, 2017). Continuously, the dominant paradigm of neoliberal economic activity generates a cluster of industrial activity and uncontrolled urbanization. These activities have had profound consequences on the rise in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, residual chemical wastes, superfund sites, and called global warming (IPCC, 2007). Consequently, these activities impact a massive environmental change unbeneficial for the health and well-being of surrounding communities (National Research Council, 2015).
UNESCAP (2017) report mentioned that the current disaster risk management (DRM) strategies have failed to address the unanticipated calamities. The mismanagement of climate regulation and policy architecture in Asia-Pacific countries, for instance, can lead to cascading disasters. In addition to this misleading management, the disparity in local communities’ circumstances, such as inequality and poverty rate, affects their capacity for disaster resilience and increases vulnerability (UNESCAP, 2017). To cope with vulnerability, developing community resilience is crucial in the long-term perspective. Communities learn from past experiences and adapt to unprecedented disaster events while preparing for the future with a continuous commitment. As a result, long-term commitment becomes an ultimate goal of resilience development, creating sustainability.
In accordance with the background mentioned above, a new program of “Disaster Resilience and Environmental Sustainability (DRES)” was set up to discover and enhance resilience to disasters and climate change, development, and disaster risk-seeking for sustainability, guided by the Paris Agreement on climate change, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. The purpose of this article is to introduce social-ecological resilience as a vital goal of sustainability in response to arising vulnerability, growing environmental threats, and climate crises in order to raise awareness of the non-binary perspective between human-nature interaction and strengthen current and future generations’ adaptive capacity, with the primary goal of reducing the disaster impacts.
Defining Resilience
Resilience becomes one of the powerful mantras to overcome uncertain and rapid change. The emphasis on resilience has emerged due to the devastating and severe catastrophe impacts and vulnerability reduction endeavors. Historically, resilience was extensively discussed in 1970’s psychology and ecology, but now resilience may be applied to a wide variety of systems (Canizares, Copeland & Doorn, 2021). The term “resilience” refers to the capacity to cling or to lock in a certain course. Resilience is frequently acknowledged as an ultimate outcome rather than a process (UNDRR, 2020). The resilience encompasses the system to bounce back and better or return after experiencing a shock in which composites adaptation, anticipation, learning, and improvement (Regibeau & Rockett, 2013).
Resilience is a central feature in response to shocks and stresses, targeting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) number 1.5 and 13.1 on more desirable with social, environmental, and economic resilience and capacity adaptation to climate-related hazards and natural disasters (Kharrazi, Kudo & Allasiw, 2018; HLPF, 2018). Furthermore, resilience explores the ways to avoid future disasters or, at the very least, mitigate the disaster’s negative consequences (McPhearson, 2014). However, providing immediate relief, recovery and mitigation is no longer enough. A comprehensive resilience framework needs to be contextual and target a holistic view of a system-based and integrated approach (Regibeau & Rockett, 2013).
Resilience is, in fact, embedded in the local community (Imperiale, 2021). Their local knowledge is the source of resilience development regarding environmental risk (Shava et al., 2010). It enables the local people to cope with environmental change. For example, farmers in rural areas comprehend the ecological systems (Shava et al., 2021). Hence, resilience anticipates the adverse impact of disaster and combats vulnerability, stimulating adaptive capacity. It urges that the local community with their potential vulnerability needs to be strengthened with mainstreaming resilience in every aspect of decision and policy-making.
Defining Sustainability
Resilience is inseparable from the concept of sustainability. Resilience and sustainability have emerged as two key paradigms within human-environmental interactions, socio-ecological systems, and global environmental change (Johnson et al., 2018). Resilience is a descriptive term from complex theory, while sustainability is a moral term (Canizares, Copeland & Doorn, 2021). Sustainability in history has come later in the 1980s than resilience in the 1960s and has been adopted in three links of environment, society, and economy (Galantini & Tezer, 2018). Consequently, sustainability means balancing economic and social conditions with environmental requirements such as resource conservation and renewal for the future for the triple bottom line; Planet, People, and Prosperity (Metaxas & Psarropoulou, 2021). Sustainability is taken into account for maintaining the current potential, opportunities, and social system, restoring the endangered natural processes, emphasizing the idea of continuity, stability, and society’s well-being (Regibeau & Rockett, 2013; Canizares, Copeland & Doorn, 2021). Therefore, sustainability points out human activities as causes of ecological and environmental crises, such as biodiversity loss, climate change, or resource depletion. Instead of those crises, sustainability ensures the stability of the environment, society, and economic issues.
In terms of sustainability, resilience takes the biggest role in preserving a sustainable environment. In addition, both resilience and sustainability are highlighted in terms of capacity. Resilience refers to capacity in the face of disruption, while sustainability is the capacity to preserve the system long-term. As a result, resilience and sustainability are two concepts empowering a balance of continuous adjustment for change and transformation.
The Interconnectedness of Resilience and Sustainability and Its Assemblage
Both concepts of resilience and sustainability are interconnected (Johnson et al., 2018). Prior to the interconnection of resilience and sustainability, human-nature interaction, or socio-ecological system, inextricably represents a deeply interwoven relationship between society and ecosystems. In this view, humans and their environment are inextricably linked. Traditional farming and fishing, for example, constitute a socio-ecological system in rural areas. Farmers and fishers use their traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) to anticipate the natural cycle season, sustainably manage natural systems, and measure the quality of ecosystem products and services, as well as migratory fish harvests (Petrosillo, Aretano & Zurlini, 2015).
Indeed, various socioeconomic activities have impacted several traditional agricultural landscapes, including population increase, economic, industrial, infrastructure development, and globalization. According to Petrosillo, Aretano & Zurlini (2015), these changes have reduced traditional subsistence agriculture economically and, are unable to meet rising social demands, and eroded numerous valuable cultural and ecological elements, especially the connections between local communities and their ecosystems. Hence, the preservation of local knowledge of environmental issues needs to be continued in a sustained manner in order to enhance socio-ecological sustainability and resilience (Redman, Grove & Kuby, 2004).
Responding to environmental degradation, the assemblage of the socio-ecological system is importantly addressed. Assemblage is described as ‘the process of coming together of heterogeneous elements into dynamic, provisional, revisable wholes in a given context’ reflecting the human responses to environmental degradation (Briassoulis, 2017; Lejano, 2017). The heterogeneous elements are indicated as governance and management to establish a ‘proper policy’ of a resilient and sustainable environment (Tyson, 2017). Moreover, the role of actors includes humans, local people, governments, INGOs, NGOs, and other related actors, and non-humans; traditional knowledge, technology, and others (Müller, 2015). Therefore, the assemblage of relational humans and nature or socio-ecology rejects the dichotomy because both are at the same level of adaptation to achieve future sustainability.
After reviewing the resilience and sustainability concepts, environmental preservation becomes a crucial manifestation, along with an equal perspective of humans and nature in the environmental cycle. These two concepts offer the utopian realm for a preferable future amid the Anthropocene epoch. Moreover, the resilience lesson learned from local communities’ knowledge is importantly revived. As a result, an integrative policy-making decision among stakeholders, especially humans and nature, in equal perspective is urged.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I advocate for resilience and sustainability to strengthen adaptation and continuous commitment to the future environment. Both ideas would benefit from being non-binary and allow multidisciplinary researchers to expand the understanding of knowledge production. Hence, the next article on the Monitor and Analysis Unit will discuss resilience and/or sustainability through the lens of a case study or phenomenon.
Thanks to Dr. Yuki Miyake, the Head of Disaster Resilience and Environmental Sustainability (DRES) Program, Asian Research Center for International Development, School of Social Innovation, Mae Fah Luang University, for supervising this article.
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