Blending to Build Coastal Resilience: Lessons from Integration of Science and Societal Applications to Manage Coastal Extremes in the Asia-Pacific

Coastal zones in the Asia-Pacific are experiencing unprecedented rate of change due to global climate change, population growth, human induced vulnerability, unplanned development and other driving forces. The effects of these changes are placing communities at increasing level of risk from the recurring coastal hazards such as tsunamis, tropical cyclones, storm surge, and shoreline erosion, salinity. In recent times the coastal hazards are also manifesting the extreme nature (e.g. Typhoon Haiyan, El Nino 2016).This changes in extremes has raised the question of how to increase community resilience to the unprecedented thresholds. The wide range of hazards taking their toll on coastal communities requires that the response to these various issues must be holistic, integrated, sustainable and also accommodative of the new extreme thresholds. This paper will look into some of the practical initiatives from the Asia-Pacific countries to see how coastal resilience building are growing through a ‘mixed set of blending' of scientific endeavors, coastal risk management and societal applications.  These mixed set of initiatives have given a rise of a ‘blended approach’ for building coastal resilience in a profound manner. It will provide some empirical examples from the ground where coastal hazards particularly both type of hazards either slow onset or rapid onset hazards (either relating to the climatic extremes or associated to coastal rapid onset geophysical episodes of extremes) have given rise to grow towards a blended approach of resilience building that we see as ‘blending for resilience’. These initiatives in most of the cases are often shaped up by their local realities, available resources/capacities but also from framed by the opportunities and linkages between science and societal innovations. Blending elements of strengthening capacity for accurate forecasts for anticipated hazards; developing procedures for disseminations of these risk information and responding appropriately; setting up mechanisms for end-to-end connectivity to manage these coastal risks; and creating sustainable services and interfaces on the ground were examples how these blending takes place for building coastal resilience in an effective manner.