Defining community resilience in the face of climate change public health threats

Community resilience has been defined as the ability of neighborhoods to anticipate and prepare for risks, limit the effects of these risks, and to be able to adapt quickly to changing conditions, but has been little described in the context of climate change threats. A community's vulnerability to climate change health risks depends on the characteristics of the community (sensitivity) and its adaptive capacity. Building community resilience can both decrease a community's vulnerability and increase its adaptive capacity. Resilience building can operate at an institutional level (e.g. emergency preparedness, medical and public health infrastructure, public transit), and a community level (e.g. social cohesion, community efforts to reduce crime, and to increase food security). We will briefly review definitions of resilience and resilience theory and discuss steps which have been proposed in the literature for building community resilience, including conducting vulnerability assessments, considering structural metrics of social inequality, developing efficient communication networks and partnerships, and leadership development. In addition, we will discuss strategies on how communities can engage urban planners and health departments to make the link between community resilience and efforts by local and state governments to plan for present and future climate change threats.