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Social capital is considered important for resilience across social levels, including communities, yet insights are scattered across disciplines. This meta-synthesis of 187 studies examines conceptual and empirical understandings of how social capital relates to resilience, identifying implications for community resilience and climate change practice. Different conceptualisations are highlighted, yet also limited focus on underlying dimensions of social capital and proactive types of resilience for engaging with the complex climate change challenge. Empirical insights show that structural and socio-cultural aspects of social capital, multiple other factors and formal actors are all important for shaping the role of social capital for guiding resilience outcomes. Thus, finding ways to work with these different elements is important. Greater attention on how and why outcomes emerge, interactions between factors, approaches of formal actors and different socio-cultural dimensions will advance understandings about how to nurture social capital for resilience in the context of climate change.

In this paper, we explore how we can use catchment resilience as a unifying concept to manage and regulate catchments, using structured reviews to support our perspective. Catchments are complex systems with interrelated natural, social, and technical aspects. The exposure, vulnerability, and resilience of these aspects (separately and in combination) are the latent conditions, which, when triggered by a hydrohazard, result in catchment impacts. In complex catchment systems, resilience is the ability to bounce back, the ability to absorb, and the ability to transform. When all three abilities are accounted for, we are forced to consider the interactions of the catchment system. Six main complexity concepts can be used to frame how we approach evaluating catchment resilience. These concepts are: natural-social-technical aspects, interactions, spatial scales, time scales, multiple forms of evidence, and uncertainty. In analysing these complexity concepts, we have found that there are several gaps in current practice. Requirements for future methodological approaches are suggested. Central to any effective approach is the incorporation of a linking systems or interaction analysis, which draws together the natural-social-technical system in a meaningful way. If our approaches do not begin to acknowledge the interdependencies and interactions, we may miss substantial opportunities to enhance catchment resilience.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted public health, the economy and society—both directly and indirectly. Few approaches exist to understand these complex impacts in a way that (1) acknowledges cross-sectoral interdependencies; (2) models how short-term shocks translate into impacts on longer-term outcomes; (3) builds in local, contextual variation; and (4) recognises a wide set of priorities. The Urban Systems Abstraction Hierarchy (USAH) is proposed as an approach with these capabilities, and applied to Edinburgh (UK) between March-October 2020 to identify city-level impacts of the pandemic and associated policy responses. Results show changing priorities in the system and suggest areas which should be targeted for future urban resilience planning in Edinburgh for both short-term shocks and long-term recovery. This makes both methodological contributions (in the form of testing a new complex systems approach) and practical contributions (in the form of city-specific results which inform different aspects of resilience) to urban science.

Floods are increasing in both frequency and intensity under climate change. Research has shown that people who are socially vulnerable are more exposed to flood risk. Worse is that flood disadvantage that exists today is projected to continue in the future: it is stubborn. Current approaches are not working sufficiently well to unblock this stubborn disadvantage. Something new is required. A fresh perspective to flood exposure is offered in this thesis. Flood exposure is nested within the wider urban environment through the development of a systems tool - the Urban Systems Abstraction Hierarchy - to quantify how tangible flood exposure cascades through complex system interactions to impact longer-term resilient outcomes. Resilience concepts are applied to navigate the tool and interpret its quantitative results. The thesis provides a theoretical contribution to understanding how flood resilience concepts are currently perceived and applied within flood risk management. It provides a methodological contribution to capture these new resilience insights in a tool. It provides a practical contribution by identifying the interactions which can help cities withstand, absorb or adapt to flood exposure, enabling transformative resilience strategies.