Paper short abstract:

Timely interventions to build resilience can prevent an overwhelming cascade in the face of natural disasters. Policy framing that focuses on such interventions as a necessary part of policy making to prevent growing risks which make regions and communities more exposed to climate change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes the adoption of a multi-dimensional resilience approach to enable the development of a problem analysis for identifying threats and opportunities of a range of possible scenarios of climate change. Examining the threats and opportunities in each scenario, can pinpoint weaknesses in existing processes in a production or delivery systems and investigate the most effective way for undertaking an ex-ante improvement in absorptive capacity to contend with natural disasters. In the case where there is a persistence in weak processes, there is a distinct possibility that systemic risks can cascade into an endogenous shock.

Undertaking resilience scanning exercises could provide a valuable way to bring together a range of stakeholders who can they more explicitly share the values of openness and market-based incentivisation to improve system level functionality. By ensuring corporate, national and civil society stakeholders all have a clear view of resilience considerations: particularly the implications of risks in the face of increased vulnerabilities can improve consensus regarding the need for climate action. By an explicit examination of the priority that should be accorded to those systemic changes that needed to increase resilience to natural disasters that are in the pipeline over the next thirty to fifty years, such as improving supply chains to reduce logistic challenges and undergirding infrastructure to overcome the increased severity and frequency of extreme weather events, will all work to reduce vulnerability, making resilience and sustainability more achievable in future years.