Research on climate change and peak oil impacts on urban settlements, and what is required for settlements to successfully respond to those impacts and other forces of change is a dynamic and emerging field of study, with many gaps where further work could be carried out. While disaster research has studied how settlements and communities prepare for natural disasters, less is known of how settlements prepare for persistent, cascading pressures such as climate change and peak oil. Settlements will not just have to withstand or rebuild as they have historically done for floods and earthquakes, they are likely to need structural transformations. Literature indicates that institutional and social resilience characteristics are critical building blocks towards these urban transformations. Research on why some cities globally have begun implementing these transformations while others have not, would help increase understanding of the institutional characteristics needed for urban resilience in the 21st Century. Equally research on whether there are tensions between notions of efficiency, commonly used in policy analysis, and the redundancy and diversity characteristics attributed to long-term resilience of economies and infrastructure would be fruitful.
As the understanding of climate change and peak oil impacts and the effectiveness of urban policy responses grow, policy tools such as this framework should be revised or reinvented. Reflective learning and continuous improvement of policy tools is in itself a critical characteristic of adaptive policy institutions.
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