ABSTRACT
As climate change fuels more frequent and more extreme weather events around the world, researchers, policymakers, and activists are working to make communities more resilient to natural disasters. Building social capital as a way of increasing resilience to extreme weather events or natural disasters does not supplant investments in more conventional kinds of capital such as disaster relief funds, disaster preparedness plans, or storm surge infrastructure One way to gauge the strength of a community is to measure its social capital. Learning how to strengthen social capital is an important research topic as scholars, policymakers, and community advocates make plans to cope with the challenges posed by climate change-fueled disasters. Adaptive capacity describes a community’s ability to respond to shocks, including heat waves and other extreme weather events. Collaborative governance models have been used to build a community’s linking social capital.
