Resilientscapes: perception and resilience to reduce vulnerability in the island of Madeira

This paper intends to discuss landscape resilience as a way of reducing disaster risk in the island of Madeira. Maderia is a Portuguese Macaronesian island that is located in the Atlantic Ocean and frequently affected by natural hazards. Here, the concept of resilience is discussed as a dichotomous and place-based concept and as a way of achieving sustainability, sustainability being one of the main solutions for climate change. This paper will discuss the complexity of defining “resilience”, the contradictions involved in its use and its positive and negative applications. In order to make resilience an operative concept, it is investigated within landscape research, in which landscape is considered to be the result of human and natural actions and their interaction. Here, landscape is considered as a holistic, place-based, bottom-up concept that can be used as a unit of measure for community resilience. As a consequence of the kind of relationship that a community builds with the landscape in which it lives, we can encounter different kinds of lansdscapes: riskscapes, hazardscapes, resilientscapes, sustainable landscapes, etc. These landscapes are investigated in the context of the island of Madeira in order to identify the resilient actions of its community. To conclude, today, Madeira is a riskscape and often a hazardscape. The most recent incidents were the fires of 2013 and the flash flood of 2010, which was one of the worst events in the history of the archipelago. However, the first signs of resilience have been identified, which represent interesting examples of increasing awareness in both top-down and bottom-up ways.