Resilience, vulnerability, and adaptation: A cross-cutting theme of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change

Abstract

The concepts resilience, vulnerability, and adaptation are increasingly important for the study of the human dimensions of global environmental change. Events during the last 2 years, such as the hurricane Katrina, the Southeast Asian tsunami, and the Pakistan earthquake, together with the bird flu and continuing droughts in Africa, dramatically illustrate the potential vulnerability of human society to disturbances and variability. The concepts of resilience, vulnerability, and adaptation are used to analyze these and similar events. While these concepts are becoming more important within the global change research community, they do have diverse and somewhat separate intellectual histories. In organizing this special issue, we initially experienced a Tower of Babel in hearing the diverse definitions made of core concepts. The diversity is largely explained by the distinct communities from which the concepts originate. As editors of this special issue, we have not aimed to impose a uniform language, but recognize the diversity of ways in which the terms and concepts are used. By bringing together the various insights on resilience, vulnerability, and adaptation, we hope to provide a comprehensive overview of diverse approaches. A typical example of the linguistic confusion is the use of socio-ecological systems (Gallopı́n et al., 1989), social–ecological systems (Berkes and Folke, 1998), and coupled human–environment systems (Turner et al., 2003). Although there may be some minor differences in the meanings of these terms, all emphasize the importance of including both social and ecological systems as well as their mutual interactions when studying their dynamics. To understand the various concepts of resilience, vulnerability, and adaptation, it is important to know their intellectual histories, which is one of the goals of this issue. By understanding the origin and history of a term, linguistic confusion should slowly be reduced as the different scholarly communities begin to collaborate more and more. We hope this issue stimulates further collaboration among scholars from these diverse traditions. Resilience is a core concept used by ecologists in their analysis of population ecology of plants and animals and in