A term that, in various forms, crops up often in the Sustainable Development Goal targets is resilience. We actually find it in six of the 17 SDGs. Goal number one, talks about resilience of the poor. Number two, of resilient agricultural practices. Number nine, mentions sustainable and resilient infrastructure. Number 11, targets cities and human settlements with resilience to disasters and resilient buildings. Goal number 13, focuses on resilience and adaptive capacity to climate related hazards. And finally, goal number 14, talks of strengthening the resilience of marine and coastal ecosystems. This focus on resilience warrants some consideration of what it is and how it can be nurtured and how it actually relates to sustainable development. In a sustainability development context, the term resilience is usually used to mean, the capacity to recover from sudden or long term change. Understanding resilience is currently a hot research topic and some general features of strategies for increasing resilience and systems include: ensuring and maintaining diversity and managing connectivity. In other words, different types of members and redundancies in a system can create resilience. Consider for example, a situation where the majority of say, financial institutions, are using the same or interconnected software. In this case, the system as a whole becomes much more vulnerable to hacking, than when the system relies on numerous non or minimally connected software. The message here is that, resilience is something that can, at least to a certain degree be designed into constructed systems. Also promoting learning and experimentation can increase resilience. The more we understand about the situation we find ourselves in and the options we have for dealing with it, the more likely it is that we will be able to deal with the situation at hand. While this applies at many levels it can be illustrated by considering our own health. The better we understand the symptoms we experience the easier it becomes to treat the root causes of the malady and return to good health. Thus, SDG number four, promoting quality education, can actually be regarded as a tool for promoting resilience more generally in social systems. Resilience is a concept already applied in specialized sub-fields, including disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. This means that the idea of resilience has been especially useful for societies facing sudden or abrupt change. I therefore met with Associate Professor Christian Cedervall Lauta from the Faculty of Law at the University of Copenhagen. Christian heads the cross disciplinary Research Centre, COPE. Copenhagen Centre for Disaster Research and I wanted to ask him about the role of resilience in the human response to disasters. How do you think about resilience? There was a major change in disaster research 15 years back, from a period where we've been focusing on society's vulnerabilities. That is the kind of negative abilities of a society to withstand external shocks. Resilience was kind of this positive agenda. Looking at what we can actually do in terms of the capacities, in terms of things we already have at hand to resist disasters. It means, the ability to bounce back. So, it's the ability of the society both structurally, community wise, culturally to re-establish itself after a major shock in disaster research. We've had a number of different meanings of resilience in the last 15 years. You could say it's kind of a contested concept that draws on a wide verities of meanings and interpretations. There are at least three of those. But two of them are incredibly important. The first one is, resilience has the ability to come back to status quo. So kind of a conservative idea of resilience. But the second one is more adaptive tied into communities ability, to not only withstand external pressure and shocks, but also to adapt to future shocks coming from the outside of the community. So, we're coming actually, we're coming to something that's been worrying me and that is resilience and get you back to it and you recover, but it's very static in a way. And for sustainability, and to achieve the sustainability goals, we really need some pretty transformational change in some places. Does resilience work against sustainability? It's been a major critique of resilience in the last couple of years, that it somehow makes us forget the central question, which is what kind of society do we want to bounce back to? It makes us focus on just bouncing back and then everything is okay. Rather than asking the real question which is, "How do we transform our societies to prevent these disastrous long term as well as create this sustainability turn?" I think there is, at least, a group of people within research focusing on resilience as more adaptive, as more complex, more tied into sustainability agendas. But definitely, it's one of the shortcomings of the concept. Another major critique of the concept which ties into this, is that it's been used the last couple of years to create big reforms of the way we think about, who should respond to disasters? So in the United States, after Hurricane Sandy, it was a major triumph for resilience. It was everywhere. Resilience was the reason why the eastern coast of the United States coped so well with Hurricane. What happened with Katrina? Yeah, we'll get back to that. But Sandy was this major triumph and what happened was that, it was used afterwards as an argument to cut back on funding to FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. So, it was used as kind of to fund a neoliberal agenda saying, "Listen, you've become so resilient now. That you don't need the state anymore. You don't need us to do something." So, in a way, in a really evil version of resilience, it's not only a matter of bouncing back, but even a matter of moving the responsibility from the institutions to the individuals, for dealing with these things in the future. Katrina was a horrible example of vulnerabilities and failure of the state and led to this entire reform of the public system in the United States. Katrina is the emblematic disaster of modern times showing us that the state, as it is, is probably not able to deal with the kind of shocks that we can foresee in the immediate future. But you talk about Sandy and Katrina which there was almost no time difference a year or so, but in the same country. And the response was so different although the result was so different. What kinds of factors drive those changes? So, a number of factors drive those changes. You could say from disaster research perspective, it's been clear for years that disasters themselves are not natural processes but social processes. So when we look at the outcome of disasters that is, the reason for Hurricane Katrina was not because of one of the worst tropical hurricanes making landfall in the southern part of the United States. It was because of a horrible levee construction, because of horrible management, because of racial problems in the southern part of the United States, because of corruption and inequality as part of that community. So one of the major reasons between Sandy and Katrina was the part of the United States that affected. That might be a small point when it comes to United States. But if we scale that to the global level, it becomes apparent to us that disasters almost always hits the most vulnerable places on earth, no matter the hazard profile. For years that has meant that disaster research is in fact focusing on building strong communities, building strong institutions to deal with these things. And to a certain extent, resilience is a quite useful concept to think along when you built these communities. It's a way of giving the power back to the people to say, "listen, you need to capacity build. You need to strengthen local people's ability to understand the climate and to understand the context they're embedded in because only then can you deal effectively with disasters." The problem is as you say, it only solves part of the problem because it does not change the fundamental social global inequalities that originally left them so vulnerable to which natural hazards. It's interesting that the SDGS mentioned resilience so many times. And in so many different contexts, there's resilient buildings, there's resilient ecosystems, there's societal resilience. Is it an overused word? It's positive buzzword that has this effect of bringing the smiles and making us focus on the good stories after a disaster rather than focusing on all the bad things that happened, all the malpractices, all the social injustice inherent in disasters. There's definitely an overuse of the concept and there is an emerging critique now of using the concept so much. The positive thing about resilience in terms of the Sustainability Development Goals is sustainable development goals is that it ties in both the climate agenda, disaster agenda, with the sustainability agenda. It's one of the concepts that actually do figure in all of the different government spheres. So it has the potential of actually enabling this discussion, you know. So it's glue. Resilience is glue. It is cool. It's both academic glue and it's glue for these kind of global regimes, global agreements that didn't relate very much to each other to be absolutely honest. 2015, we also had agreements in Paris. We also had the agreement on disastrous the so-called Sendai Framework, a 15 year global strategy for disaster risk reduction. And obviously in my opinion, all of these things should have been integrated into one major global framework, one global strategy that we should have pursued going ahead. But, are the SDGs then the framework that you were looking forward to bring all these different conventions and agreements together? I think they could be, but I don't think they are necessarily. What I see when I work from the disastrous perspective is that the SDGs does not figure centrally with the organizations working on disasters, they all focus on the Sendai Framework. So we do still have these silos to struggle with, but the SDGs could be the beginning of that. That could be the movement or the agent starting this kind of coherent global strategy in the next round, in 15 years, hopefully. Many of the SDGs focus on developing resilience in our societies and infrastructure. Talking with Christian reminds us that resilience is not a goal in and of itself, but rather resilience can provide a useful tool for maintaining or improving human welfare. In order to achieve the societal vision outlined in Agenda 2030 and the SDGs, major changes in some of humanity's most central activities including food production and energy provision are necessary. Resilience implies an ability to recover or bounce back following a shock or change, thus resilience on its own does not necessarily promote sustainable development. A major contribution that having SDGs can make to sustainable development is that they provide a vision for where we want to go. Knowing the final goal is a prerequisite for assessing whether the current starting point is compatible with reaching the goal. If you live in Europe, for example, and plan to go to Australia, it is obvious that the goal will never be reached if you only have a car at your disposal. In the same manner, we can see that it will not be possible to achieve SDG 13, the climate goal, if we continue to obtain the bulk of our energy from fossil fuels. Therefore, the energy SDG number 7 specifies that the future goal is access for all to clean, that is renewable energy. With respect to energy then, the need for a change in current practice is clearly spelled out in the SDGs. The need for transformational change in current practices in order to achieve the vision identified in other SDGs is in most cases not so specifically addressed. Nevertheless, the vision for a future society identified in SDGs provides a useful reference point against which we can assess which current practices we merely need to adjust in order to obtain sustainable development, and which practices we need to drastically transform in order to achieve sustainable development.
