Rusca Maria, Messori Gabriele, Di Baldassarre Giuliano
Department of Earth Sciences Uppsala University Uppsala Sweden.
Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science (CNDS) Uppsala Sweden.
Earths Future. 2021 Apr;9(4):e2020EF001911. doi: 10.1029/2020EF001911. Epub 2021 Apr 2.
In a rapidly changing world, what is today an unprecedented extreme may soon become the norm. As a result, extreme-related disasters are expected to become more frequent and intense. This will have widespread socio-economic consequences and affect the ability of different societal groups to recover from and adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions. Therefore, there is the need to decipher the relation between genesis of unprecedented events, accumulation and distribution of risk, and recovery trajectories across different societal groups. Here, we develop an analytical approach to unravel the complexity of future extremes and multiscalar societal responses-from households to national governments and from immediate impacts to longer term recovery. This requires creating new forms of knowledge that integrate analyses of the past-that is, structural causes and political processes of risk accumulation and differentiated recovery trajectories-with plausible scenarios of future environmental extremes grounded in the event-specific literature. We specifically seek to combine the physical characteristics of the extremes with examinations of how culture, politics, power, and policy visions shape societal responses to unprecedented events, and interpret the events as extremes. This new approach, at the nexus between social and natural sciences, has the concrete advantage of providing an impact-focused vision of future social-environmental risks, beyond what is achievable within conventional disciplinary boundaries. In this paper, we focus on extreme flooding events and the societal responses they elicit. However, our approach is flexible and applicable to a wide range of extreme events. We see it as the first building block of a new field of research, allowing for novel and integrated theoretical explanations and forecasting of social-environmental extremes.
在一个瞬息万变的世界里，如今前所未有的极端情况可能很快就会成为常态。因此，与极端情况相关的灾害预计会变得更加频繁和剧烈。这将产生广泛的社会经济后果，并影响不同社会群体从快速变化的环境条件中恢复和适应的能力。所以，有必要解读前所未有的事件的成因、风险的积累与分布，以及不同社会群体的恢复轨迹之间的关系。在此，我们开发了一种分析方法，以揭示未来极端情况的复杂性以及从家庭到国家政府、从直接影响到长期恢复的多尺度社会反应。这需要创造新的知识形式，将对过去的分析——即风险积累和差异化恢复轨迹的结构性原因及政治过程——与基于特定事件文献的未来环境极端情况的合理情景相结合。我们特别致力于将极端情况的物理特征与对文化、政治、权力和政策愿景如何塑造社会对前所未有的事件的反应的考察相结合，并将这些事件解读为极端情况。这种介于社会科学和自然科学之间的新方法具有具体优势，即能提供一种以影响为重点的未来社会环境风险视角，这超越了传统学科界限所能实现的范围。在本文中，我们聚焦于极端洪水事件及其引发的社会反应。然而，我们的方法具有灵活性，适用于广泛的极端事件。我们将其视为一个新研究领域的首个基石，能够对社会环境极端情况进行新颖且综合的理论解释和预测。
