Small Island Community Resilience: Building the Capacities of Isolated Communities to Address Climate Risks and Disasters

Small island communities located in the open sea are exposed to different kinds of hydro-meteorological and climatological hazards such as typhoons, monsoon winds, micro-climate anomalies, and dry spells. Isolation from basic services, insecurity over land tenure, economic deprivation, and cultural inferiority exacerbate this exposure. This chapter discusses the public service initiative of the University of the Philippines Visayas (UPV) carried out in partnership with the local communities of Gigantes Islands to mainstream disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation into local plans and practices by way of community development. Three objectives linked the programmatic and multi-year effort: (1) to expand community and local government knowledge about small island community vulnerabilities and risks; (2) to establish functional links between the islands and the mainland government services; and (3) to enhance local capacities to gain recognition and voice and mainstream small island community concerns into local planning and policy. Local governments and small island communities around the Philippine archipelago may adopt the “Small Island Community Resilience Framework” developed by the UPV team and the good practices and recommendations discussed in this chapter.