Barriers to building community resilience to the impacts of climate change

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report demonstrates with growing confidence that climate change is going to have increasing negative impacts on communities around the world (IPCC, 2014). Over the next century, extreme weather, flooding, forest fires and droughts will cause disruption and devastation at an increasing frequency. Governments and community leaders are under huge pressure to protect their citizens and infrastructure from increasingly severe events, which can overwhelm the local capacity to respond and recover. Many communities in vulnerable regions are already facing limits in their capacity to adapt, and as climate change accelerates, more communities will begin to approach these limits (Dow et al, 2013). More research needs to be conducted into what happens on both a national and local scale when adaptive capacities are met, and how this can be avoided. The potential consequences could be devastating, with the risk of conflict, mass forced migration and financial collapse possible scenarios. As climate disruptive events increase in frequency and severity, communities will become even more reliant on local governance structures for relief and recovery. Whilst it is vital that governments increase resources to meet this need. If citizens are better prepared for disruptions, this should reduce some of the reliance and pressure on central recovery efforts. This is recognised across research into disaster preparedness (WHO, 2007) (FEMA, 2011), however much of the research focuses on specific events, such as earthquakes or flooding, whereas it could be argued that building overall resilience to any disruption would hold more value to communities.
The economic cost of natural disasters is also increasing, reaching $1.5 trillion in the decade 2003-2013 . Not only do these increasing costs affect governments at a country level, but also at a local, community level. Individual citizens will also share the burden of the economic costs, as businesses and homes are disrupted and damaged, and livelihoods temporarily or permanently destroyed.

The design of the research will be purposeful and interpretive- engaging specific community populations who have experienced climate-related impacts and disruptions to gather insight into that experience. Discovering what challenges and barriers they faced in building personal resilience will help achieve the overall projects aims and objectives - to understand what barriers are in place to prevent ground-level resilience, whether it be knowledge and information, finance or time resources, or psychological barriers (e.g. they are safe, "it'll never happen", "the [technological adaptation e.g. levees] will protect us").