Resilience and Vulnerability: a Focus on Indigenous Communities

A great example of successful resilience to change is indigenous people: most of indigenous populations present nowadays have endured several challenges, from socio-economic-political ones to ecological ones such as climate warming. Those communities which survived and thrives until now demonstrated to have an undeniable and particularly keen sense of adaptation and resilience. From this, we might be able to extract a key learning or two to adopt in the global fight against climate change. 

The main concept shared by academics on the topic of resilience by indigenous people is the notion of community: community assigns to each individual present into them a specific role and task, it allows the development of mutual connections and inspiration to strive to a common goal without losing the respect for the plurality of all. At the same time, giving a specific purpose to people allow them to relinquish the usual every day "developed society worries" as the focus becomes only on the daily activities which blended together allow the prospering of the community by relying on each other's individualities. With regard to this, a very simple but significant and fascinating example is shared by biologist Jacqueline McGlade talking about the Maasai people in Africa. This community collectively decided to approach the upcoming droughts which were killing the cattle with a so called rule of 5-5-2, five cows, five children and two wives, re-writing overnight the traditional practices of 9 wives and dozens of cattle adopted since decades by this indigenous community. Dy doing so, they were able at the same time to ensure overnight the survival of nearly three quarters of a million people by providing food security supply. Finally, it all boils down to the sense of identity and community, being able to collectively decide that we are going to adapt to climate change and make decisions every day towards a common goal is the strongest decision making process which will create the highest yield of impact towards climate change.

The above insights into indigenous people are a living proof of the coexistence and actually flourishing of vulnerability as a cause to a more robust resilience, which can therefore be considered a mutual concept.

But how are they considered in the literature?

It has been conventionally accepted to view vulnerability and resilience as two conceptually different approaches: academics have fantasized on the idea of creating a parallel interconnected path of the two notions in order to tackle climate change adaptation, however it has always been purely theoretical. 

We are faced nowadays with an increased urgency in researching solutions for climate change. The forecasts are fatalistic in sharing the most pessimistic view of the future warming, already considering the present policies. There is a rising necessity to reconcile the academic world with the world of policy makers and institutions and thus creating a concrete action plan from global, to national and finally local levels.

This is the assumption on which we indulge today our thoughts with regard to the possibility of discovering a concrete and cohesive path in which resilience and vulnerability complement each other to convince a process of adaptation. Considering the above mentioned example of the indigenous communities, it could be as well argued that the resilience-vulnerability path displays a more human-centric approach in the way that by formulating a vulnerability induced resilience, we are also prioritizing the poorest and most disadvantageous peoples on the globe. 

In such way, we would be creating a more concrete, holistic and integrated approach which ultimately appears to be the most realistic one in order to reconcile the gap between theory and practice.

On one side, we have resilience research, which provides us with already existing and corroborated methodology on how to tackle climate change. This can be exploited by the global community to be upscaled and replicated.
On the other side, we are presented with vulnerability research with its focus on the limitations and constraints, it allows us to identify the socio-political impediments which are preventing the progression of socio-ecological changes.

Academics must assemble to work together on common case studies and try to merge the currently polarized approaches, at the same time translating complex conceptual insights into broken down achievable goals with guidelines and procedures. 

Overall, this seems to me until now the most accessible and feasible action plan to create a realistic program to tackle climate change globally. 

It is now a matter of the scientific community, alongside policy makers, to provide us with real actions.

References:

Miller, Fiona (2010). "Resilience and Vulnerability: Complementary or Conflicting Concepts?". Ecology and society (1708-3087), 15 (3)

https://www.arcticwwf.org/the-circle/stories/indigenous-peoples-have-the-knowledge-and-practices-to-support-climate-resilience/