When the CRO works with communities to plan for and enhance their resiliency in the face of challenges like natural hazards and climate change, we often use some key terms that are important to understand to effectively implement resiliency work.
A | C | E | F | G | H | I | O | P | R | S | T | V
A
Adaptation: An adjustment in natural or human systems to a new or changing environment. Adaptation includes proactive planning and preparation to reduce risk, utilize new opportunities, and enhance resilience.
Adaptive capacity: The potential of a person, asset, or system to adjust to a hazard to limit damage, take advantage of opportunities, and cope with change.
Assets: People, resources, ecosystems, infrastructure, and the services they provide. Assets are the tangible and intangible things people or communities value.
C
Climate change: Changes in average weather conditions that persist over multiple decades or longer. Climate change encompasses both increases and decreases in temperature, as well as shifts in precipitation, changing risk of certain types of severe weather events, and changes to other features of the climate system.
Climate-smart: Plans, ordinances, strategies, and codes that proactively account for a changing climate based on current and future projections.
Community Stakeholders: Residents, groups of residents, organizations, companies, agencies, or others that have a connection to community resilience and a vested interest in the outcomes of any specific resilience project. These may be individuals or groups that can help in the assessment, preparation, recovery, or implementation of resilience strategies.
COG: Continuity of Governments.
COOP: Continuity of Operations.
E
Effectiveness: Whether or not a resilience strategy is working as intended and meets the purpose for which it is designed.
Emissions scenarios - Quantitative illustrations of how the release of different amounts of climate altering gases and particles into the atmosphere from human and natural sources will produce different future climate conditions. Scenarios are developed using a wide range of assumptions about population growth, economic and technological development, and other factors.
F
Frontline communities: Historically disadvantaged and underserved members of the community experience the first and worst impacts of climate change. These frontline community members may include older adults in the community, those with disabilities, low-income residents, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color), LGBTQ individuals, English as a Second Language (ESL) communities, the unhoused, those who lack transportation, and those who lack access to television, radio, internet, and/or phone service.
G
Ground-truth: To confirm or validate directly (information or data derived indirectly), especially (in remote sensing) by direct observation on the ground, rather than by interpretation of remotely obtained data; to make observations of (land, an area, etc.) directly on the ground, especially in order to confirm or validate data obtained indirectly.
H
Hazard: An event or physical condition that has the potential to cause fatalities, injuries, property damage, infrastructure damage, agricultural losses, damage to the environment, interruption of business, or other types of harm or loss.
Hazard mitigation: Sustained action taken to reduce or eliminate the long-term risk to human life and property through actions that reduce hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. Hazard mitigation can be one component of climate change adaptation.
I
Impact: Effects on natural and human systems that result from hazards. Evaluating potential impacts is a critical step in assessing vulnerability.
Implementation plan: A formal or informal approach to establishing a clear, equitable, and actionable path towards the implementation of resilience strategies in your community. This entails defining your approach to both short and long-term implementation.
O
Objective: The desired outcome of your resilience efforts or what you are trying to achieve through your work.
Outcomes: The ultimate changes resulting from resilience action(s).
Outputs: The immediate, easily measurable effects (usually quantifiable) of a resilience action.
P
Pre-disaster recovery plan: Pre-disaster recovery planning promotes a process in which the whole community fully engages. It is an important process that allows a comprehensive and integrated understanding of community objectives, connects community plans to guide post-disaster decisions and investments, and aids in understanding the key considerations and processes that local governments can use to build a community’s recovery capacity.
R
Resiliency (Resilience): The ability of communities to rebound, positively adapt to, or thrive amidst changing conditions or challenges (including human-caused and natural disasters) and to maintain quality of life, healthy growth, durable systems, economic vitality, and conservation of resources for present and future generations.
Resilience Action: A specific activity, act, project, program, or effort that your community can take to facilitate progress towards achieving a resilience strategy.
Resilience Strategy: A general area of action or statement that can help enhance the resilience of the community.
Risk: The potential total cost if something of value is damaged or lost, considered together with the likelihood of that loss occurring. Risk is often evaluated as the probability of a hazard occurring multiplied by the consequence that would result if it did happen.
S
Sensitivity: The degree to which community function, structures, and populations are affected by a climate exposure.
Shocks: Large, disruptive events that cause significant immediate damage, injuries and deaths, or result in sudden changes in a community. Shocks are direct vulnerabilities; they are intense, acute events that can disrupt communities. They include flash floods, wildfires, widespread loss of electrical power, dam failures, public health crises, and terrorist attacks. Shocks can lead to significant damage to infrastructure, as well as injuries and deaths. Communities use hazard mitigation as a means to reduce vulnerability by reducing exposure to shocks.
Stressors: Chronic conditions that magnify vulnerability and make it harder to recover from shocks. In contrast to shocks, stressors are underlying long-term economic, social, and environmental conditions that can negatively impact a community’s environmental, social, and economic health; they are indirect vulnerabilities. Stressors can also limit a community’s ability to address and recover from a shock. Stressors can include aging infrastructure, an economic downturn, long-term high rates of unemployment, and a lack of affordable housing. Communities use resiliency planning as a way to reduce their indirect vulnerability by addressing and improving the underlying conditions that expose them to hazards and developing a capacity to adapt to changing conditions.
T
Threshold: A point at which a particular asset (or group of assets) is compromised so that it no longer functions as intended, or a change of circumstances (e.g. funding opportunity) arises that prompts decision makers to adjust or implement actions.
V
Vulnerability: The degree to which something is susceptible to or predisposed to adverse effects of hazards as determined by exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. Vulnerability can increase or decrease because of physical (built and environmental), social, political, and/or economic factors.
Most glossary terms shown rely on descriptions from either the National Climate Assessment (2018), California Adaptation Planning Guide (2020), FEMA, the U.S. Global Change Research Program or U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit.