Building Short-Term Coping Capacity and Longer-Term Resilience
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The chapter is structured as follows. The first of its three sections outlines the framework used for analysis. The SLF is extended to distinguish among three different types of social capital that, in principle, communities can draw on when faced with natural hazards. Also, recognizing that livelihood assets can be used either to avoid (or mitigate) the impact of climate hazards on livelihoods or to adapt to their consequences, the discussion extends the SLF to accommodate a distinction between these two different coping strategies: (a) enhancing the longer-term resilience of the livelihood to a climate impact through adaptation, and (b) strengthening coping and recovery capacity, as a more immediate-term response to a climate event, also through adaptation. In the second section of the chapter, the augmented SLF is applied to five diverse cases: experiences with droughts in southern Bolivia and in northeast Brazil illustrate the importance of increasing livelihood resilience through adaptation to slow-onset climate-related disasters. Experiences with hurricanes in Nicaragua and floods in Belize provide examples of successful livelihood adaptation measures that improve short-term coping and recovery from sudden extreme events. All five cases highlight the importance of social capital and the role that institutions, especially local ones, can play in generating synergy among the different types of capital and thus increasing the effectiveness of coping strategies. Experiences reported in other chapters of this book support these findings. The chapter concludes by drawing some implications for policy, emphasizing the importance of approaches that focus on the livelihood strategies of poor communities and also on local governance structures, which play a key role in determining the impacts of natural hazards on livelihoods.
Social Capital and Livelihood Adaptation and Resilience The following section outlines the framework used for analysis. The SLF is extended to distinguish among three different types of social capital that, in principle, communities can draw on when faced with natural hazards. Also, recognizing that livelihood assets can be used either to avoid (or mitigate) the impact of climate hazards on livelihoods or to adapt to their consequences, the discussion extends the SLF to accommodate a distinction between these two different coping strategies: (a) enhancing the longer-term resilience of the livelihood to a climate impact through adaptation, and (b) strengthening coping and recovery capacity, as a more immediate-term response to a climate event, also through adaptation.