Managing Climate Risk: Building Community Resilience to Extreme Weather Events

Climate change is reshaping the Earth's atmospheric and hydrological systems, making extreme weather events more frequent, more intense, and harder to predict. Warmer temperatures are driving stronger hurricanes, longer heatwaves, heavier rainfall, worse flooding, deeper droughts, and more destructive wildfires — no longer rare occurrences but a growing routine for communities worldwide. Yet despite advances in climate science, a critical gap remains: communities still lack the practical, locally grounded strategies needed to translate climate knowledge into real resilience. This Research Topic is designed to address that gap. It brings together interdisciplinary scholarship spanning the natural and social sciences, engineering, public health, urban planning, and policy, focused on managing climate risk and strengthening community resilience to extreme weather events. The aim is to produce evidence genuinely useful to governments, practitioners, and communities working to assess hazards, reduce vulnerability, build adaptive capacity, and embed resilience into local governance and planning.Climate change is reshaping the conditions under which communities experience and respond to extreme weather. Atmospheric warming, altered precipitation patterns, and rising sea levels are intensifying flood events, heat emergencies, storm surges, and drought cycles with disproportionate consequences for vulnerable and marginalized populations. These compounding climate-driven hazards are straining existing disaster risk reduction frameworks and exposing the limitations of siloed approaches to hazard management. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015–2030) and the Paris Agreement both recognize the inseparability of climate change and disaster risk, calling for integrated strategies that address root causes of vulnerability alongside physical exposure. This Research Topic responds directly to that imperative, bringing together scholarship that treats climate change as the foundational driver of extreme weather risk and community resilience as the essential response, advancing integrated, equity-centered, and place-based approaches to climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction.This Research Topic invites contributions that engage with the social, institutional, and cultural dimensions of community resilience across diverse geographic, demographic, and hazard contexts, including urban, rural, coastal, Indigenous, and marginalized communities. Specific themes include:1. Climate risk assessment and mapping - methods for identifying and quantifying community exposure to extreme weather events2. Social vulnerability and equity - how demographic, economic, and structural factors shape differential impacts of climate hazards3. Adaptive governance and policy frameworks - local, national, and international policy mechanisms for managing climate risk4. Nature-based and engineered solutions - infrastructure and ecosystem-based approaches to reducing climate hazard exposure5. Community-led resilience building - participatory and Indigenous-led approaches to climate preparedness and response6. Post-event recovery and learning - mechanisms by which communities rebuild adaptive capacity after extreme weather events7. Climate communication and behavioral response - public understanding of climate risk and barriers to protective actionThe editors welcome Original Research articles, Methods papers, Policy Briefs, Reviews and Mini-Reviews, and Perspectives or Case Reports co-authored with practitioners, community organizations, and policymakers working on community-scale resilience and vulnerability reduction. Submissions from diverse geographic contexts, particularly from the Global South and underrepresented regions, are strongly encouraged. Topic editors: Himanshu Grover, Jerry Anthony Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82337/managing-climate-risk-building-community-resilience-to-extreme-weather-events