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Show-Me Resilience: Assessing and Reconciling Rural Leaders’ Perceptions of Climate Resilience in Missouri

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Abstract

Rural areas of the United States play a vital role in coping with, adapting to and mitigating climate change, yet they often lag urban areas in climate planning and action. Rural leaders—e.g., policymakers, state/federal agency professionals, non-profit organization leadership, and scholars – are pivotal for driving the programs and policies that support resilient practices, but our understanding of their perspectives on climate resilience writ large is limited. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 rural leaders in Missouri to elucidate their conceptualizations of climate resilience and identify catalysts and constraints for climate adaptation planning and action across rural landscapes. We investigated participants’ perceptions of the major vulnerabilities of rural communities and landscapes, threats to rural areas, and potential steps for making rural Missouri more resilient in the face of climate change. We found that most rural leaders conceptualized climate resilience as responding to hazardous events rather than anticipating or planning for hazardous trends. The predominant threats identified were flooding and drought, which aligns with climate projections for the Midwest. Participants proposed a wide variety of specific steps to enhance resilience but had the highest agreement about the utility of expanding existing programs. The most comprehensive suite of solutions was offered by participants who conceptualized resilience as involving social, ecological, and economic systems, underscoring the importance of broad thinking for developing more holistic solutions to climate-associated threats and the potential impact of greater collaboration across domains. We highlight and discuss a Missouri-based levee setback project that was identified by participants as a showcase of collaborative resilience-building.

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Acknowledgements

The authors express gratitude to all the interviewees for participating in the project and to Gaurav Kandlikar for helping with coding and visualizations. ZM thanks MOST Policy Initiative for providing support, and Josh Mueller for input and guidance. Lastly, ZM expresses deep gratitude to Jeanne Heuser for being a wealth of knowledge, a source of inspiration, and an incessant force for change in rural Missouri. This is Kellogg Biological Station Contribution no. 2348. ZM was supported by the Graduate Research Fellowship and Graduate Research Internship Program through the National Science Foundation. Lastly, the authors thank the two anonymous reviewers whose incisive feedback vastly improved this manuscript.

Author Contributions

ZM & COB conceptualized the project with input and guidance from CC & LLS. ZM conducted all the interviews and developed the figures, COB crafted the tables, and ZM & COB jointly coded participants’ responses, analyzed data, and wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript editing.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Zachary J. Miller, Caleb O’Brien

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

    Zachary J. Miller & Lauren Sullivan

  2. The Nature Conservancy, Columbia, MO, USA

    Zachary J. Miller

  3. Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Caleb O’Brien

  4. Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO, USA

    Casey Canfield

  5. Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Lauren Sullivan

  6. W. K. Kellogg Biological Station, Michigan State University, Hickory Corners, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Lauren Sullivan

  7. Ecology, Evolution and Behavior Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Lauren Sullivan

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Correspondence to Zachary J. Miller or Caleb O’Brien.

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Miller, Z.J., O’Brien, C., Canfield, C. et al. Show-Me Resilience: Assessing and Reconciling Rural Leaders’ Perceptions of Climate Resilience in Missouri. Environmental Management 72, 771–784 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-023-01836-7

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