The dark side of resilience

Breaking down the risks of putting too much trust in resilience to be the one-cure-for-all disasters.

Welcome back to Climate Psyched, a newsletter where we explore all things related to the psychological aspects of the climate and environmental crises!

As some of you might’ve noticed, there was no Climate Psyched in December.
Simply because I was overloaded, and in all honesty somewhat depressed in the time leading up to the end of the year. I wrote a piece about allowing the waves of climate depression wash over and put trust in time and each other to find one’s way back. It’s in Swedish, and available here.

With the start of the new year, and after some well needed sleep and time with loved ones, my heart feels lighter and more resilient, ready to keep taking on the parallell ongoing crises of this world.

The topic of resilience is what we’ll be exploring in this month’s post. More specifically potential risks of putting too much faith in resilience as a one-cure-for-all-and-everything. It’s a topic that’s recently rose on the agenda in Sweden.

Situation

At the beginning of January, the Swedish minister for Civil Defence said that there’s a risk of war in Sweden, and that everyone has a responsibility to strengthen Sweden’s resiliency. This, he said, entails a shift of perspective; rather than having the state och municipalities rescue the individuals in times of crisis, the civil defense should act the other way around: everyone needs to defend society’s existence.

This raises some interesting questions that can be applied on a number of crisis scenarios: What is it that we should defend or try to rescue? What is my responsibility, and what is out of my individual hands? Am I prepared enough for war and crisis if I run to the store and stock up on toilet paper, fill some tanks with water and change the batteries in my flash light?

The minister mentioned that he himself has bought a battery radio and has stored water at home. A way of prepping for crisis - but is this how we build up enough resilience to sustain a crisis, whether it’d be caused by war, extreme weather or another global pandemic? Is there even such a thing as negative resilience if we rely too much on each individual?

Explanation

When preparing for crises (whether it’s war or natural disasters) building resilience is essential, but not without reservations or risks. The climate crisis is already displaying its consequences, and regardless of how fast the world phases out greenhouse gas emissions, we will continue to encounter harmful consequences, which means that a focus on building resilient systems, communities and nurturing individual resilience is essential. In order to nurture resilience that is helpful we need to identify what who or what needs to become resilient and what potential side effects of focusing too much on resilience might be.

In recent years the dark side of resilience has been brought up in at least two research paper with that same title. One, by Lyytimäki et al. (2023), focuses on resilience on a system level, and the other by Mahdiani and Ungar (2021) on individual resilience. I’ll address both below, along with some other interesting research.

What do we want to be resilient?
Lyytimäki and colleagues bring up the problem with many of current socio-ecological systems, that are seemingly resilient, also being unsustainable. This is something that can slow down the climate transition, and that’s sometimes called an undesirable resilience.

An example of an unsustainable system is the car-dependent transport system, which is made resilient due to factors such as pro-car politics and an incapability of transport planning to break away from the car norm. Even though climate research shows the need for more sustainable infrastructure, the car’s central role in many societies seems as resilient as it is unsustainable. This upholding of unsustainable systems are sometimes made unintentionally, and in contradiction to a country’s or region’s plan to phase out transport sector emissions. One aspect of the upholding of unsustainable systems might be different types of defenses such as denial and rationalization, thinking that the innovation of new technology will make it possible to not remove or restructure current unsustainable systems. This shows how psychological factors and cognitive biases come into play to affect political and planning decisions.

The presence of several current, resilient and unsustainable systems is a reminder that resilience is not a universal tool that should be applied to everything, but rather that there’s a need to make a thorough assessment of what needs more resilience, and what actually needs less.

The downside of individual resilience
In their article, Mahdiani and Ungar explore potential downsides of promoting individual resilience. Wanting to differentiate the concept of resilience, they ask whether there might be a wrong degree of resilience, a wrong context for resilience and a wrong type of resilience.

We’ve previously written about how community resilience can help combine mitigation with adaptation, supporting and strengthening the community. But while community resilience place a large focus on the surrounding environment, psychological resilience has traditionally placed a heavy focus on the isolated individual’s ability to adapt to difficult situations. Only recently has researchers started to point out that resilience also comes with a price for the individual. One potential risk of individualizing the responsibility of resilience is that it suggests that there is a right, and wrong, way to adapt to risk. It also looks at the individual as isolated from their surrounding context, and suggests that whether a person is prepared to tackle a crisis has to do with their own capabilities, and not whether they live in a resilient and supportive context or community.

As mentioned above, resilience of one system might come at the expense of long term sustainability. The same might be said of individuals being put under too much pressure for too long.

The risk of having unrealistic expectations
Psychological is not an either or, but can rather be seen on a spectrum, where too much trust in one’s own resilience might actually pose a risk. In 2000 the term false hope syndrome was introduced by Policvy and Herman. It describes that those who, at the beginning of a personal change process, start off with high hopes and expectations can be harmed by their optimism. Factors that are generally associated with personal resilience, such as self-confidence and high levels of self-efficacy, are only helpful if the goal is realistically achievable.

Consider the metaphor of steering a ship when a storm suddenly hits; is the person who manages to steer right through the storm, damaging the sails, or the person who takes a longer route to avoid the storm, more resilient? Who is smartest? What decision is more sustainable to make?

Looking at the false hope syndrome, an unrealistic trust in one’s own abilities might increase the risk of making stupid decisions. In the context of encountering a natural disaster, over-reliance of once’s coping ability can actually be a source of fragility, sometimes referred to as negative resilience.
Another risk, if too much responsibility of being resilient is placed on the individual, is that it might neglect the need to strengthen communal and structural resources, and instead encouraging tolerance of inequality and disparity, masking structural problems. A person putting all responsibility on oneself under conditions that are too deprived, might over time experience a learned helplessness; “it doesn’t matter what I do, I’ll never get rid of these problems”. Neither over-confidence nor learned helplessness equals helpful resilience.

The negative spill-over of resilience
In terms of climate mitigation and adaptation, it’s sometimes highlighted that too much focus on adaptation and resilience building can be used as a way of justifying slowing down mitigation. In that way it can be seen as a potential negative spill over effect, i.e. that focus on one type of (wanted) action increases the risk of another (unwanted) action.

Ogunbode et al. (2019) has coined the term resilience paradox, which describes the risk that a reduced negative emotional response to natural disasters and extreme weather can display as a weakened motivation to work towards climate change mitigation (i.e. not feeling that much in relation to the disaster can make us less motivated to take climate action). One way of working around this might be to explicitly call out the affect of climate change has had on the disaster and the need to take action to mitigate future climate risks.
The climate paradox shows that resilience shouldn’t be confused with emotional indifference towards the things happening to us, or we might risk a higher passivity towards mitigation efforts.

The emotional response and its relation to climate action, has also been explored by Bergquist and colleagues (2019) in a study that followed people affected by the hurricane Irma. In their study they found that after the hurricane, respondents expressed stronger negative emotions towards climate change, and were more willing to pay higher taxes to help mitigate climate change - but were on the other hand not more willing to cut living standards after the hurricane (which might be due to the respondents recently having lived through destruction of their homes and city). While the underlying motivation of the willingness to pay higher taxes after the hurricane can have multiple explanations, the study shows that the emotional affect of the hurricane also shifted the respondents emotional response to climate change and acceptance of collective financing of climate mitigation and adaptation.

ACTION

After a long text about potential downsides of resilience, let’s end with a few examples of how resilience can work in a helpful and strengthening way.

• In her book “How to change everything”, Naomi Klein brings up the example of Casa Pueblo, a citizen and environmental group center in Puerto Rico, that years ago had installed sun panels and were self sustaining on electricity. When hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico hard, the center and its sun panels somehow survived the tolls of the storm. In the time following the hurricane, the house became a center point for the local community, organizing help to care for the needs of its citizens. People collected food, clean water and utensils, but also used the sun energy to charge phones and stay connected to each other and relatives in other parts of the world. By having an intact electricity supply, the center could also be turned into a hospital and help save lives. What this shows is that the resilience was formed both by having access to renewable energy, independent of the larger grid, and that the center could provide a physical space for people to gather at, and help each other out in various ways. That cooperation and helpfulness helped save lives.

• That people tend to come together in times of crisis has been explored by Rebecca Solnit in “A Paradise Built in Hell”, where she explores how disaster can help bring out altruistic sides, as well as bravery in people, and that emergency mode can help us put differences aside to unite in the joint goal of getting through the emergency. But as we’ve reflected on throughout this text, there’s a risk in assuming that cooperation and forming of social ties will automatically happen in case of emergency. Naomi Klein writes about the risks of how unequal societies deal with disasters in her book “On Fire”. It seems as though when preexisting inequalities are too big to start with, these divides might deepen as disasters emerge. This means that we cannot wait for disaster to happen to start building a supportive and cooperative community - communal resilience needs to be nurtured before shit hits the fan.
  

• As we’ve written about in a previous post, sometimes mitigation, adaptation and building resilience go hand in hand. Collective action, led by one’s own community, seems to nurture a sense of belonging and social connectedness while also helping the community to adapt to and prepare for consequences of the climate crisis. Getting the opportunity to engage in community level activism and democratic actions seems to offer a constructive response to the frustration and anger caused by governmental inaction. Building that resilience, before disasters hit, is not only a way of preparing for darker times, it also offer direct benefits in providing meaning and purpose, together with social support.
  

As you notice, there’s a lot to be said on the topic of resilience, and I’m sure we will come back to it more times. But for know, we’d be interested to know your thoughts about resilience, potential risks, or maybe good examples of helpful resilience! Feel free to give this post a like to increase its visibility, or spread it to others who might be interested in reading it.

See you next month!