Climate change : disaster risk and building resilience

Social contracts share reciprocal rights, obligations and responsibilities regarding our environment and our responses to climate change. The recent pandemic creates opportunities to rethink these existing and evolving social contracts and make changes regarding risk management and the need to build a better program of resilience in the face of change and uncertainty. This paper is about resilience thinking. We discuss how the capacity to recover from difficulties may be improved. Examples include the impact potential of Spekboom in South Africa; Pinus Radiate in New Zealand, the Empress tree and the treasury of plants and products from revolutionary science already underway. Social-ecological system elasticity and examine insights on creating resilience in a warming world. Focus is on social rearrangement and activity that may enhance responses to ecosystem change, yet unusual weather events, and the consequences of some social-ecological changes already undertaken around the world. Examples include changes adopted in the McKenzie River Valley, the grasslands in Romania, a novel weighted index of spatial resilience for Spanish olive landscapes; and the future potential from the European eLTER project. The harvest from resilience thinking provides valuable insight for the social ecological thinker and ways to build resilience and social security in a warming world.