Climate Resilience
Resilience is the difference between a heat wave that disrupts life and one that destroys it. Reflective infrastructure builds resilience because it keeps working during power outages, humanitarian emergencies and extreme conditions.
Scientific detail
Climate resilience is defined as the capacity of social, ecological or infrastructural systems to absorb disturbance, adapt and continue delivering essential functions. Passive cooling contributes to resilience by decoupling thermal safety from grid reliability, cost of energy and availability of refrigerants — a property especially valuable in low- and middle-income settings.
Related terms
Climate Adaptation
Actions that reduce harm from a changing climate here and now.
Adaptive Mitigation
Interventions that adapt to warming today and reduce warming tomorrow.
Passive Cooling
Cooling a surface, building or space using materials and design instead of electricity.
Heat Stress
The thermal load a human body experiences from its environment.
Where this concept shows up on MEER
Related projects
- Freetown, Sierra Leone
Reflective rooftops across informal settlements.
- Tanzania
Community-scale reflective interventions.
- Pune, India
Rooftop reflective installations in dense urban housing.
Related stories
- Human stories
First-person accounts of life inside extreme heat.
- News & stories
Related resources
In HeatLens
- HeatLens
Interactive heat-risk assessment tool.
Explore in topic hubs
Curated collections of MEER research, projects, publications and stories that feature this term.
Heat Resilience
MEER's work on heat resilience: physiological modeling with JOS-3, WBGT and UTCI measurement, HeatLens risk assessment, and community projects that protect the most exposed populations.
Agriculture & Cooling
How reflective materials, canopies and passive cooling protect agricultural yields, livestock and rural livelihoods under extreme heat.
Climate Adaptation
MEER's approach to climate adaptation: adaptive mitigation, radiative forcing, resilience, and the policy context around passive surface cooling.
Communities & Stories
Human stories, community reporting and field partnerships that ground MEER's science in the lives of the people most exposed to extreme heat.