Community resilience

“Community resilience is the sustained ability of a community to use available resources [. . .] to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations. [. . .] This allows for the adaptation and growth of a community after disaster strikes.”

Source: Community resilience. (2023, 25 July). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_resilience

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0

Communities can build resilience by working together to take action against the impacts of climate change. For example, they can have plans in place to organise themselves and respond to severe floods or fires. This will help to build capacity to deal with the impacts of climate change and will ultimately lead to increasing participation in collective decision-making.

Watch the video Improving the Resilience of Family Farmers to Climate Change by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and discuss as a group what your local community can do to improve farming techniques to increase crop produce and villagers’ income. Use the information in the video and what you have learned from Units 1–4. Make notes about your ideas, then invite local government representatives to watch the video and discuss your ideas.

Group activity

Formative assessment 5: 

This assessment builds on the outcome of the group activity in Unit 4. Work as a group with the help of a leader or facilitator to do the following:

1  Identify what support systems are required to turn ideas about total biomass use into an innovation.

2  List the different types of assistance needed from each of the following groups to make the innovation happen: entrepreneurs, grassroots-level organisations, research institutions and the government.

3  Identify:

i   what types of skills villagers need to learn in order to implement biomass use activities, and

ii  what roles the village or local community can play in  implementing such activities.