Seeking Patterns of Resilience to Climate-Related Disasters

Over the past decade climatic events have become more frequent and extreme than in the past, but such events and the resulting disasters are not new. It is important to understand how human societies with varying types of livelihoods and vulnerabilities have responded to such conditions. This session compares societies across varied geographic and temporal domains through the present day, testing theories derived from different disciplines, to understand how resilience to climatic disasters has been achieved. Controlling for type of economy and political system, predictable patterns of resilient behavior are explored. To complement data on natural hazards from historical and contemporary observations, a climatologist will discuss how rainfall and temperature data provide independent measures of environmental predictability and variability.