The UCI Regional Climate Resilience Project is an exploratory, community organizing project focused on climate change impacts, vulnerabilities, action, and activism from the deserts of Riverside County to the coast of Orange County, California. While climate change is a global problem, its effects are--and will continue to be--felt locally. Increasingly, municipalities are looking regionally for support, knowledge sharing, and partnership to address local climate challenges. Regional knowledge hubs, like the University of California, Irvine, can play an important convening, coordination, and scientific role in this work. The UCI Regional Climate Resilience Project seeks to better understand the matrix of existing activities regarding climate preparedness in Orange and Riverside counties and their borderlands.

The Deconstructing Resilience Project is the product of a ten-week UCI Regional Climate Resilience Internship. Danilo Caputo, a doctoral student in English and Climate Action Training fellow at UC Irvine, conducted research into the definition(s) and meaning(s) of resilience (climate and others) across sectors and disciplines. By analyzing the myriad definitions and connotations associated with the term "resilience," the project aims to increase our understanding of the term in order to guide interactions with diverse communities and direct continued discursive and formative processes associated with regional collaboration. Resilience means different things to different people. By attending to the nuances of the term, the RCRP can foster clearer lines of communication and achieve expeditious impacts across the region. 

Under the supervision of Kimberly Serrano, an academic coordinator with the UC Irvine Sustainability Initiative, Danilo researched and wrote about resilience in four contexts: historical, ecological, governmental, and philanthropic. The historical report uses the Oxford English Dictionary to trace the origins and evolution of the term from its latin roots to its first English language appearance in the seventeenth century. It also reviews the various literal and figurative uses of resilience from the seventeenth century to today. The ecological report is an assessment of the ecologist C.S. Holling's development of resilience theory. C.S. Holling is credited with distinguishing ecological resilience from engineering resilience and for being among the first to use the term in the context of climate change and global warming. The governmental report examines a selection of domestic and international uses of resilience among governmental entities. It begins with two Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, then proceeds to observe a number of U.S. departments and agencies that use resilience including the Executive Office of the President of the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The philanthropic report examines the different ways in which various national foundations include resilience in their climate action efforts. The report attends to the similarities and differences between philanthropic entities--such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Kresge Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation--seeking to build resilience in cities and among communities.