Exploring Particularity: Vulnerability, Resilience, and Memory in Climate Change Discourses

摘要

Though frequently referred to in the risk, hazards, and disaster literature, vulnerability has become an important concept in the field of environmental change and for understanding people's susceptibility to harm in the context of uncertain climatic futures. Resilience has similarly become a popular concept for exploring the complexities of linked human-nature systems but focuses on capacity building, learning, and adaptation in response to threats or harm. In recent years, there have been efforts to propose synergies between research on vulnerability and on resilience in linked social-environmental systems. Integrated studies of vulnerabilities and resilience to climate change in the past, effectively drawing on a combination of geographic and historical approaches, afford insight into the way in which societies have been affected by, have coped with, and adapted to past climate variability and weather or weather-related events. This essay argues that detailed investigations of relative vulnerability and resilience could be pivotal for analyzing the adaptability of societies and regions that are considered to be vulnerable to future climate change impacts according to current predictions, and it highlights a vitally important and potentially politically significant arena for environmental history research.