by Rafael Costa e Silva
The debate on climate change has been under the spotlight in the international public sphere for some time now. Year after year, concern about its effects has taken on greater prominence among the various public and private actors who have set out to debate it with the intention of tackling this calamitous situation. The alert on the subject was triggered by the growing negative impact on the environment caused by economic growth during the 20th century.
In 1972, the Stockholm conference began this process. Later, in 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Eco-92 or Rio-92)which consolidated the environmental debate and introduced the concept of sustainable development to the world. In Rio de Janeiro, during Rio-92, the creation of the United Nations Framework on Climate Changewhere measures were agreed with the aim of controlling the emission of Greenhouse Gases (GHG)responsible for the warming of the planet. In 1997 it was Kyoto protocolHowever, the document was only ratified in 2005, and by the mid-2010s, greenhouse gas emission reductions had not taken place as agreed.
During this period, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)In the late 1980s, the aim was to gather, analyze and evaluate information from academic and scientific production around the world. This initiative has been able to bring together various studies that seek to explain the causes, effects and impacts of global warming, increasingly with greater foresight into related events. For the IPCC, climate change is characterized by significant variation in certain climatic parameters, which may or may not be felt over a long period - decades or centuries.
In the report Risk management of extreme events and disasters to advance adaptation to climate changepublished by the IPCC in 2012, it is presented that the risks and impacts associated with climate events depend on the exposure and vulnerabilitytogether with the natural climate variability and climate change anthropogenicIn other words, caused by human action. This is where the concept of climate resilience becomes central in the context of climate change. The report sets out how risk management and adaptation to climate change can be an alternative to reducing exposure on the one hand and vulnerabilities on the other, thus contributing to increasing the resilience of infrastructures, communities and people.
The concept of resilience is commonly used to describe human behavior, and is understood as a person's ability to overcome problems, adapt to bad weather, changes or misfortunes; a natural tendency to recover easily from problems that arise; and/or, mechanical characteristics that define the shock resistance of materials.
For the United Nations International Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, in the report Report of the open-ended intergovernmental expert working group on indicators and terminology relating to disaster risk reduction, resilience relates to the ability of a system, community or society, exposed to a threat, to resist, absorb, adapt, recover and transform in the face of impacts caused by processes and/or extreme events, through risk management.
Therefore, in this approach, resilience has a definition that is not limited to the ability to return to a previous state, but goes beyond, going through processes of adaptation and transformation. We can say that being resilient, in the context of climate change, is not just about returning to the previous state of things, such as rebuilding infrastructure and social cohesion, but building solutions that prepare us for even more extreme situations that may occur in the future.
In other words, the resilience we should strive for is not one that returns us to what we were, but one that transforms the environment, communities and territories, qualifying and contributing to everyone being even better prepared for adverse situations. In this way Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk ReductionThe 2015 report shows us the importance of our actions being coordinated and multi-scalar, going from the global to the local, and vice versa, passing through the national and regional, indicating that the responsibility for building a more resilient society lies with everyone, respecting the peculiarities of each place.
