Building resilience along the Colombian Caribbean coast in the face of sudden and slow-onset environmental hazards

Resilience is at the heart of the current development agenda and underpins approaches to disaster risk reduction. It has a central role in the 2030 Global Goals. Fundamentally, resilience is about the ability of communities to resist and absorb the impacts of environmental hazards, so they can continue to function as successful societies. The frequency and severity of environmental hazards, such as floods and droughts, are increasing in many lower and middle-income countries, where environmental degradation (like water and soil pollution) can make recovery from such impacts more prolonged. The poor, marginalised ethnic groups and other vulnerable social sectors, including the old and the very young, are particularly vulnerable to such impacts. These groups lack the social, economic and political capital that underpins resilience and, consequently, the overall cost of environmental change is greater for these communities than for more privileged ones. It is particularly important, therefore, to understand how to build resilience in and for poorer communities in order to ensure that they are less vulnerable in the future.

One important influence on how communities and societies are able to adapt to environmental hazards is how they have developed in the past. Historical context, culture and political dynamics are all important factors affecting resilience and shape how it is locally understood and framed. However, most research on resilience fails to take account of the importance of past events and responses, and the timeframe of studies is a few decades at most. For this reason, in this project, we will bring together social, political, cultural and environmental histories to track resilience in a vulnerable tropical coastal community over a 200 year period.

The project will focus on communities along Colombia's Caribbean Sea coast, in particular within the Biosphere Reserve site of Cienaga Grande de Santa Marta (CGSM). The CGSM is Colombia's largest coastal lagoon system, and supports seven communities, all of which are heavily dependent on fisheries from the lagoon for their livelihoods. The CGSM system is under threat from a wide range of environmental pressures including sea level rise, warming climate and reduced precipitation, which combine to threaten the fisheries. These trends are overlain by impacts from the increased frequency and severity of floods and droughts, linked to weather patterns related to large-scale Pacific Ocean warmings (El Niño events) and coolings (La Niña events).

We will extract detailed environmental histories regarding drought and flood events, pollution and sedimentation rates from cores that we take from the mangrove forests that fringe the CGSM lagoon, plot historical representations of environmental change and identify historical political trends that have shaped resilience in the past. We will date key events such as floods and droughts from these cores and then use historical sources including literature and arts-based works alongside the lens of politics to identify the range of social, political and cultural factors that have affected the response and the extent of resilience of the communities over time. Finally, we will use this information to propose ways in which resilience could be enhanced to protect the communities against future environmental and societal pressures.

The importance of ensuring ecosystems are resilient, continue to support livelihoods and contribute to poverty eradication is a central tenet of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets in the CBD's Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020. Transformative pathways to sustainability are also emphasised in national and international programmes, such as Seeds of a Good Anthropocene (USA), EKLIPSE (EU), and Future Earth (international). Our research is well placed to inform the these initiatives and the IPBES Regional Assessment for the Americas (Decision IPBES 3/1 Annex V) through Solan's membership of the scientific committee of ecoSERVICES, a project of Future Earth, and Godbold's involvement with CBD COP 13. The PEDRR platform, in which members of the team already participate, will provide tools for dissemination and information sharing with similar projects internationally.

At the global level, we will partner with The Nature Conservancy's Coastal Resilience Program of the Natural Coastal Protection project to understand how natural ecosystems can and should be worked into strategies for coastal protection to protect livelihoods. By working with the international Mangrove Capital project we will also directly contribute to the restoration of mangrove forests. Links to Wetlands International and other relevant international organisations such as UNEP-WCMC will be enabled by the team's policy networks, and by the location of UNEP-WCMC in Cambridge. CoI Spencer is embedded within all of these initiatives, including co-supervision of PhD students and joint publications, which will be strengthened through co-development within this project.

At the national level, resilience has become a key priority for Colombia, as it is for the Latin American region as a whole. Climate-resilient development now has a legal mandate in Colombia's National Development Plan. The Climate Change National Adaptation Plan (CCNAP) provides an umbrella for work on climate change, economic development and resilience, and guidance documents are starting to be produced for different sectors under the CCNAP. At the end of 2015, the Colombian Government launched Colombia Sostenible, a national-level initiative that takes an integrative approach to addressing climate change, social inequality and post-conflict challenges. Dr Lacambra's contacts with the Ministry of Environment through previous adaptation projects will ensure that the results of the research have an opportunity to influence further developments under these initiatives. We will use these contacts to deliver high level participation of policy makers in our final workshop.

Colombia has recently introduced ecosystem services into its biodiversity policy (MADS, 2012) and the first national mapping of ecosystem services for Colombia has just been completed (Rodriguez et al., Land Use Policy 42:609). Our expert local partners will lead on ensuring that the project provides regional authorities with information to feed into sectoral adaptation plans that are already being developed, particularly in the areas of fisheries and agriculture. Through the environmental records that we will obtain on past impacts of pollution alongside environmental change, it will also inform the national and local environmental authorities in decisions on infrastructure developments, where impacts on key lagoon ecosystem functions and services are likely to occur, and what impacts on livelihoods may follow as a consequence. Finally, at the local level, the project will provide information to the Colombian Municipalities to improve their Local Territorial planning, in accordance with the national emphasis on resilience. Continued dialogue through the project with representatives of the Ministry of Environment, local environmental authorities, community groups and other end-users will expand our existing research and knowledge network and establish further impact for the project at international, national and local levels.