Ensuring resilience of natural resources under exposure to extreme climate events

This publication analyzes the findings of a series of participatory workshops on natural resource management (NRM) with communities in eight discrete landscapes in South East New South Wales, Australia. Climate change manifesting as increasing frequency and or severity of extreme weather events poses a threat to sustainable management of natural resources because the recurrence of events may exceed the resilience of natural systems or the coping capacity of social systems. 

This article finds that NRM is generally considered only in relation to the protection of life and property and not for the intrinsic value of ecosystem services that support communities. The authors then proceed with making three recommendations to improve NRM under extreme climate events:

• The support to communities offered by emergency management agencies could be bolstered by guidance material co-produced with government natural resource agencies.
• Financial assistance from government should specifically target the restoration and maintenance of green infrastructure to avoid loss of social-ecological resilience.
• Action by natural resource dependent communities should be encouraged and supported to better protect ecosystem services in preparation for future extreme events.

Resources, Volume 5, Issue 2, June 2016. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International.