Vulnerability and resilience are nebulous and contested concepts. Island studies has provided plenty for understanding them, sorting out differences, and proposing ways forward. Two key points are (i) vulnerability and resilience are not opposites and (ii) they are processes, not states.
Vulnerability and resilience are social constructions. Many languages do not have direct translations for the words and many cultures do not have the notions, especially as defined and debated in academia. As such, both must be explained in detail to be communicated and acted on. Island studies contributes significantly by noting that both exist simultaneously, meshing with each other, and that both must arise by people and societies interacting with themselves and their environments. They are also much more than interaction, since nature and culture cannot be separated, as is the case for society and the environment. Thus, vulnerability and resilience are simply part of being, rather than distinct entities or traits.
As such, they express and espouse reasons for ending up with situations and circumstances where dealing with opportunity and adversity is more possible or less possible. They are long-term processes describing why observed states exist, not merely descriptions of those states. These explanations must cover society and the environment interlacing rather than disconnecting from one another and must involve histories and potential futures, not merely snapshots in space and time.
For islands, environmental phenomena and changes are frequently seen as exposing or creating vulnerabilities and resiliences. Yet an earthquake or the changing climate do not tell people and societies how to respond. Instead, those with power, opportunities, and resources make decisions about long-term governance aspects including equality, equity, collective support, and societal services.
We know how to construct infrastructure to withstand earthquakes. This task cannot happen overnight, but requires building codes, planning regulations, skilled professions, and choices in order to succeed. Taking island examples, leaders inside and outside Haiti controlling the country over decades decided not to build for earthquakes, leading to devastating disasters in 2010 and 2021. Meanwhile, Japan adopted a different approach meaning that few collapses were witnessed despite earthquakes in 2003, 2011 (which had a terrible tsunami toll), and 2022 that were far stronger than Haiti’s.
This long-term process of stopping or permitting earthquake-related damage is a societal choice, meaning that disasters emerge from the choice of vulnerability and resilience processes. Disasters do not come from earthquakes or other environmental phenomena, so they are not from nature and “natural disaster” is a misnomer.
Since climate change affects the weather and weather does not cause disasters, climate change does not often affect disasters. For instance, islands have experienced tropical cyclones for millennia, with the storm season happening annually. Plenty of knowledge exists to avoid damage and plenty of time has existed to implement this knowledge, yet disasters are still witnessed frequently such as Hurricane Maria in the Caribbean in 2017 and Cyclone Harold in the Pacific in 2020. When people and infrastructure are not ready for a storm, then disasters occur. Climate change increases intensity and decreases frequency of tropical cyclones, yet does not impact long-term human choices to prepare (creating resilience) or not (creating vulnerability). The choice not to do so is a crisis of human choice, not a “climate crisis” or “climate emergency”—so those phrases are also misnomers.
Island studies has long taught the islander mantra that environmental and social changes are always to be expected at all time and space scales. Vulnerability becomes the social process of expecting life to be constant and not being ready to deal with different or altering environments, at short (e.g. earthquake) or long (e.g. climate change) time scales. Vulnerabilities most commonly arise because people do not have the options, power, or resources to change their situation due to factors such as poverty, oppression, and marginalisation. Others make the decision for the majority to be vulnerable. Resilience becomes the process of continual adjustment and flexibility to make the most of what the ever-shifting environment and society can offer to support everyone’s life and livelihoods. To do so requires options, power, and resources.
Yet island studies demonstrates that limits to resilience are nonetheless evident. Human history displays a long list of island communities being wiped out and entire islands being forcibly abandoned. Manam Island, Papua New Guinea has been evacuated a few times due to volcanic eruptions. Many Pacific island communities disappeared in the fourteenth century due to a major regional climatic and sea-level change while nuclear testing during the Cold War left many atolls uninhabitable. The Beothuk indigenous people of Newfoundland died out due to violent and disease-ridden colonialism. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chagossians were forced off their Indian Ocean archipelago to make way for a military base. All such situations test resilience—or lose it entirely.
Island studies thus demonstrates the construction of vulnerability and resilience as concepts, as processes, and as realities, illustrating the care in interpretation and application needed for both in order to capture a comprehensive picture. Vulnerability and resilience neither contradict nor oppose each other, rather overlapping and morphing according to context and nuance. Island vulnerability and resilience are very much based on the perspectives of those observing and affected.