Social resilience research on climate-related hazards: Trends, accomplishments and shortcomings

Two calls by research and policy institutions internationally inform this paper. The first is a need to better accommodate local social-ecological conditions through more fine-grained data collection and analysis. The second is to increase the level of community engagement in studies of social resilience to climate change. In this paper, we assess progress towards these aspirations by examining and describing research that explore community resilience to climate-related hazards. More specifically, we critically appraise how this growing body of research engages with the communities and places that are the subject of these studies. Using the Web of Science Core Collection database, we conducted a scoping review of 647 articles that aim to understand lived-experiences of climate-related hazards through a place- or community-based focus. Our findings reveal that only 140 articles (21%) met our inclusion criteria by meaningfully engaging with the communities and places being studied, while also developing grounded strategies to improve social resilience to climate-related hazards. Key findings from the reviewed literature also highlight: the social attributes emphasised within the studies, the research methods most frequently employed, the scale the strategies are most often aimed at, and the diversity and frequency of proposed strategies to improve social resilience to climate-related hazards. Collectively, these findings highlight key trends, accomplishments and shortcomings in social resilience research on climate-related hazards. Two major recommendations from our review emerge. First is a need for more widespread grounded engagement during data collection phases with populations impacted by climate-related hazards to increase researcher sensitivity to the specific needs of at-risk communities. Second is the development of strategies within published research that are more tailored, and thus more locally beneficial and equitable, so that key insights can be applied in place-specific contexts and by a range of people across diverse social attributes and networks.