Global Inequality and Potential Trade‐Offs in Community Resilience to Compound Climate Extremes

Abstract

The resilience of human society to multiple climate disasters is crucial for supporting sustainable development progress and promoting human well‐being in an era of climate change. Yet little research has attempted to assess global spatial‐explicit capacity of communities to deal with compound extreme climate disasters simultaneously, and the relationship between resilience to different climate extremes remains unknown. Here we presented a high‐resolution assessment of community resilience to compound climate extremes simultaneously by developing the Community‐Climate Resilience Index (CCRI) using the multisource satellite remote sensing data sets, the geocoded disaster records and fuzzy logic model. We further explored interrelationships among resilience to major climate extremes, that is, resilience to floods (Resilience ^flood ), resilience to extreme temperature (Resilience ^ET ) and resilience to droughts (Resilience ^drought ). The results indicated western Europe showed higher CCRI while South America, Africa and Oceania showed lower CCRI. Urban areas showed higher CCRI but lower scaling effects comparing with rural areas with lower CCRI level and higher scaling effects. Most of the regions showed positive associations among resilience to different climate extremes, but there were also negative associations between resilience in some areas, especially located in suburban and rural Sub‐Saharan Africa. Our analysis suggested leveraging integrated and coordinated risk management for resilience capacity building to multiple climate extremes in vulnerable areas and on a local and global scale.