free download - University Press of Colorado

Long-Term Vulnerability and Resilience
Understanding Hazards, Mitigating Impacts, Avoiding Disasters
Statement for Policy Makers and the Disaster Management Community
Humans sometimes build social systems that exacerbate rather than mitigate
potential climate “hazards” or that actually prevent people from responding
effectively to them. In this chapter we examine three lessons to be learned
from understanding long sequences of human-environment interaction. The
first examines how diversity in food systems influences the vulnerability of
human societies to food shortages as a result of low precipitation in the arid
to semiarid region of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico.
The second examines how irrigation infrastructure both mitigates variability
in the temporal and spatial patterns of precipitation and creates new vulnerabilities,
emphasizing the reality that there is no “absolute resilience or
robustness.” The third emphasizes the role of social action in creating conditions
of rigidity and the extent to which rigidity, however it emerges in modern
systems, may exacerbate the potential for climate “hazards” to impact
people. Decision-making about sustainable practice that can promote resilience
requires nuanced thinking about the costs and benefits of diversity, the
tradeoffs between resilience and vulnerability that can result from the nature
of our investments in infrastructure, and the role of humans in constructing
rigidity traps. These are important factors in managing toward reductions in
the impacts of various disturbances or hazards.
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