Peter -
Thanks for your response. I yake note of what you’ve said about efficiency and economics.
I think the point we agree on about climatic effects and approaching resiliency to them can be taken a step further. From climate change to climate, then from climate to development.
I think it is easy to take the resilience to climatic effects out of context. By that I mean that extracting the idea of a communities vulnerability to a certain kind of climatic effect – flooding, snow, heatwave, whatever – we can miss that these vulnerabilities are all correlates with something else. In England we have resilience to all these possibilities, but this wasn’t always the case. The difference isn’t that we looked at these problems and solved them in isolation, but that as a consequence of development, prosperity and infrastructure, we have become immune to almost every kind of climatic event [as a nation].
So, wherever I see people being identified as vulnerable to climatic events [or bizarrely climate change events] I see people in need of development [+ of course good governance, peace, education etc - the usual things!]
Somehow I feel our choice of perspective is important. Even moving from a focus on climate change to climate itself still obscures the most important variable – not the weather, but the circumstances of the people themselves.