Identifying sources of coastal resiliency

But old town HavanaOld Havana is the city center and one of the 15 municipalities forming Havana, Cuba. and the surrounding areas showed very little evidence, at least to the naked eye, that anything untoward had occurred. In comparison, I had spent the evening before arriving in Cuba in Miami, and it looked like a war zone. There were trees down everywhere, piles of shrubs, power lines down, boats piled up on top of each other.

AN: What factors influence an area’s ability to be resilient?
Mooney:We need to be looking both at communities and the physical nature of the land. One factor is topography, what does the land look like? Is it mountainous or low-lying? Also, human development and settlements. Have people located their homes right on a beach? Have they created instances where they have removed lots of vegetation so there is increased erosion and greater saltwater inundation or high tide?

One of the topics that came up really frequently [at the workshop] as having a big impact on coastal resilience, particularly in the Caribbean, was tourism. Tourism might encourage more development on coasts [which is not resilient], and it also creates a strain on resources in some areas because you need more water, more food, more infrastructure to support the tourism industry. And certainly, the Caribbean is very dependent on tourism for much of its income.

AN: Are there any efforts currently underway to promote coastal resilience?
Mooney:In Cuba, they’ve already started to move the community away from the coast and resettle them in other areas. It’s really complicated because people become very attached to houses and areas where they grew up. So even when new housing was provided, people still had a tendency to keep going back and living in their old houses.

AN: What are the next steps?
Mooney:One thing we talked about [at the workshop] was what does resilience actually mean? It can be viewed in many different ways depending on if you’re a physical scientist, a natural scientist, a social scientist. Also, communities might define for themselves very different definitions of resiliency. So I’ll be working with local communities and scientists to try and understand what does the local populace really understand about coastal resilience? What are their thoughts, what do they feel resilience might look like? And then come up with ways we can help them adapt to the future and have healthy, active and productive lives.

It’s a new area of research I’m looking forward to. We’re going to write two papers as a result of the workshop: one looking at resilience and adaptive capacity, and the other looking at the relationship between food, water and health systems, because they’re all related, and if you disturb one of those systems, it impacts the others. So those are the two areas we’re going to start with.