- Vulnerability and resilience
There are different ways through which vulnerability and resilience can be defined in different academic study (Gallopi’n, 2006). Disaster risk literature describes vulnerability in terms of susceptibility to damage (IPCC, 2012). Vulnerability is, in particular, the tendency of exposed items to have a harmful effect.
The word resilience is a terminology used in the ecological field. It is a description of how an ecosystem can recover from harmful incident. Resilience can be characterized as the ability to withstand, absorb, tolerate, adjust, transform and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner of a system, population or society exposed to hazards.
Two years after the tsunami at the Indian Ocean in 2004, Bill Clinton published a report on the tsunami recovery. The report gave a proposal on the resilience concept, saying it should reduce community vulnerability and increase community resilience. To strengthen the community and to reduce the risk of its disaster. In other words, it supports the narrowly defined paradigm, which suggests that resilience is the opposite of vulnerability.
Moreover, there are some conceptual variations between resilience and vulnerability. Resilience can be described as the intrinsic features of an item that does not include the exposure to disturbance; the reverse is the case for vulnerability. Resilience and vulnerability are interrelated through their capacity to respond; this feature is an important feature of vulnerability (Gallopi’n, 2006, Nelson et al., 2007). The characteristics definition of the response and adaptive rate greatly influences whether resilience is a subset of vulnerability. Due to general knowledge, resilience is dependent on the system responsive and adaptive response ability. To a large extent, it would mean that resilience is a subset of vulnerability,
A lot of strong and complex hotel in Cancun were destroyed by the hurricane Wilma in 2005, the hurricane Wilma had a pressure of 140mph wings, and the flood lasted for two days, this incidence affected the services of the hotel especially during the peak tourist season every year. Though the impact of this hurricane was felt by a few people, estimations are made from the destructive damage caused by this hurricane. The tourism had been shut down because of this damage. An estimated $15m (£8m) per day is estimated to be lost by the tourism sector as published by John McCarthy, director of the National Fund for Tourism. A whopping $7m is estimated to be lost daily in revenue according to the Cacun hoteliers. To restore the old style, the government of the city of Cancun is ready to transform disaster into riches. The Cancun Municipal Government, with funding from the Mexican Federal Government, has decided to rebuild the city at all costs. The repaired beach is not only as delicate as the original but even whiter than the original. To that end, Cancun has also been set by the United Nations International Tourism Organization as a model for post-disaster reconstruction. The hurricane reveals that the tragedy has had major negative, medium-term impacts on the lives and livelihoods of coastal residents, especially in terms of beach and building revenue, jobs and destruction. The loss of productive assets, the shock of human capital and the travelling reputation were key factors that explained heterogeneity of resilience across households. While the people with assets in Cancun were the most vulnerable and suffered relatively greater economic, physical, and structural damage, they exhibited a relatively high ability to respond and recover from the shock with the help of Mexico ‘s government. These results suggest that increased risk of a hurricane in coastal populations is likely to decrease wages and living standards. However, it is doubtful that the brunt of such detrimental impacts would be met overwhelmingly by the group which is struggling most from society’s catastrophe. This example shows that weakness may be the same toughness side but is not the opposite side.
From my point of view, vulnerability is opposite to coping and resistance, while resilience is related to the system’s ability to recover damage quickly. As a result, a system could be highly vulnerable due to high environmental or socio-economic value, but also have high resilience, i.e. it could quickly return to a balance like Cancun. It is obvious that at some stage, the two terms are linked (vulnerability and resilience) as high resilience may minimize vulnerability, but they do not exist as the opposite relationship.