Resilience
Community resilience means being able to survive, adapt, and thrive no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks we experience.
South-east Europe faces some of the highest climate, economic, security and social vulnerabilities in Europe.
These vulnerabilities need to be reduced. To achieve this, communities need to embark on a radical and transformative process of building resilience. However, current social-economic challenges mean communities in SE Europe start from low adaptive capacities to do this. It is a vicious circle.
Through this area of our work, we aim to build the community capacity needed to accelerate regional communities in SE Europe onto pathways that will make them global exemplars of a transition to safe, just, prosperous and climate-resilient communities by 2030.
Our approach is designed to help communities with exactly this sort of journey.
The EU Mission: Mission Adaptation to Climate Change places a particular focus on building resilience to the new climatic conditions that are now largely an inevitable part of our future. Our work supports communities to pursue this EU climate resilience mission.
Of course, climate resilience cannot be achieved in isolation. Communities also need to be able to deal with shocks from pandemics, conflict, migration, demographic and economic shifts, biodiversity loss and natural disasters – as recent years have shown us repeatedly.
Using resilience to frame radical community change means taking a systemic approach to considering the cascading risks that we face – and improving the rebound capacity of key community systems like social cohesion, creativity, critical infrastructure, food systems, security, economic systems and businesses.