ABSTRACT
Small island developing states (SIDS) face unique development challenges, in terms of their remoteness from markets, limited natural resources and their vulnerability to natural and human-induced disasters. The impacts of natural limitations and disasters cannot, however, be understood in isolation from a range of anthropogenic considerations related to pressures for economic change. Pressures for economic change variously result from responses to natural disasters, limited resource availability and isolation or, alternatively, the way in which countries are able to use their assets in an increasingly constrained global economic and trading environment. While SIDS have, at one level, had to embark on economic restructuring in response to natural disasters, changes in the global trading environment also require states to reorientate established economic activities. These changes can have negative impacts on land use, employment and economic practices on a scale as profound as that of the impact of natural disasters. Our core argument is that in a time of economic change, to understand what is happening within the economies of SIDS, both natural disasters and changing economic pressures need to be understood in parallel. Overall, how SIDS may respond has much to do with levels of local resilience (Aldrich 2012; Pike et al. 2010), which they have, to both respond to shocks and adapt to new conditions imposed by natural disasters and anthropogenic impacts.
