A Coupled Human–Natural Systems Framework of Community Resilience

This article compares and contrasts resilience frameworks to identify commonalities and gaps. It proposes use of a coupled human-natural systems framework (CHNS) to analyze community resilience to disasters. CHNS builds on the human ecosystem model that analyzes how institutions and social order shape fluxes and flows of resources between and within social and environmental systems. It expands on the model by including anthropological concepts of culture, agency, power, and discourse. The framework covers environmental and social legacies, pre-disaster trends and conditions, resilience measures, and system changes provoked by a disaster. The article proposes eleven categories of variables that affect resilience and discusses research steps for putting the framework into action. The CHNS framework can be used to predict system changes and identify resilience measures that allow communities to articulate and achieve their resilience goals.