Traditional coping strategies centred on the sale of assets or community support to recover (fom losses may be insufficient to cope with more frequently recurring or larger hazards that affect entire regions. To help deal with this, recent international debates have focused on the need for building resilience to the various impacts of environmental degradation and climate change (box 5.3). Resilience describes the properties of a social-ecological system in terms of its ability to absorb or withstand perturbations without undergoing fundamental changes in its structure or functions."