Resilience Practice

Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function

Brian Walker, David Salt

• Éditeur: Island Press
• Année: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781610912310
• Sujet: Biowissenschaften
• Sous-sujet: Wissenschaft Allgemein

In 2006, Resilience Thinking addressed an essential question: As the natural systems that sustain us are subjected to shock after shock, how much can they take and still deliver the services we need from them? This idea caught the attention of both the scientific community and the general public.In Resilience Practice, authors Brian Walker and David Salt take the notion of resilience one step further, applying resilience thinking to real-world situations and exploring how systems can be managed to promote and sustain resilience.The book begins with an overview and introduction to resilience thinking and then takes the reader through the process of describing systems, assessing their resilience, and intervening as appropriate. Following each chapter is a case study of a different type of social-ecological system and how resilience makes a difference to that system in practice. The final chapters explore resilience in other arenas, including on a global scale. Resilience Practice will help people with an interest in the "coping capacity" of systems—from farms and catchments to regions and nations—to better understand how resilience thinking can be put into practice. It offers an easy-to-read but scientifically robust guide through the real-world application of the concept of resilience and is a must read for anyone concerned with the management of systems at any scale.

1

Preparing for Practice:

The Essence of Resilience Thinking

There are any number of ways of putting resilience science into practice, and it needs to be said at the outset that following strict recipes and prescriptions simply isn’t appropriate. Working with resilience requires you to constantly reflect on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And once an assessment of resilience is done, you are encouraged to go back and reexamine it, expand on it, and then adapt accordingly. Our focus in most of this book is on the resilience of social-ecological systems (linked systems of humans and nature). Resilience is a dynamic property of such a system, and managing for it requires a dynamic and adaptive approach.

This being said, the activities undertaken as part of resilience practice can be grouped into three broad steps: describing the system, assessing its resilience, and managing its resilience. In this book we’ll provide a variety of ways you can undertake these steps, but the ultimate aim is that you devise your own approach.

While resilience science is not new, attempts to apply it in real-world situations have only recently started taking shape. Workshops of all sizes and flavors have been held around the world on various aspects of resilience practice, and one clear lesson is emerging from this experience. People seeking to undertake resilience assessments or work with resilience need to be in a “resilience frame of mind” to begin with. In other words, it’s unlikely they’ll engage with resilience practice if they haven’t some idea of what resilience is about.

That’s not a major hurdle. People with a bit of life experience and some responsibility for managing a system (e.g., a farm, a catchment, a business, or a national park) are usually very quick in picking up on resilience thinking. These systems are self-organizing systems, and people working with them have been attempting to understand them in their day-to-day work. Resilience thinking provides a useful framework for a deeper engagement on why these systems behave as they do.

A simple overview of resilience science is provided in our earlier book, Resilience Thinking, but there are also many other resources available at the website of the Resilience Alliance (www.resalliance.org). This is a group of organizations and individuals involved in interlinked aspects of ecological, social, and economic research. It is the network that has created and developed the framework of “resilience thinking.”

Resilience and Identity

The word resilience is now common in many vision and mission statements. But ask the people who use these statements what they think it means, and you get a range of different answers, most of which relate to how something or someone copes with a shock or a disturbance.

Concepts of resilience are used in all sorts of disciplines, but the term has four main origins—psychosocial, ecological, disaster relief (and military), and engineering. We discuss these in chapter 5, but it’s helpful to consider them briefly in this introduction.

Psychologists have long recognized marked differences in the resilience of individuals confronted with traumatic and disastrous circumstances. Considerable research has gone into trying to understand how individuals and societies can gain and lose resilience.

Ecologists have tended to describe resilience in two ways: one focused on the speed of return following a disturbance, the other focused on whether or not the system can recover.

People engaging with resilience from the perspective of disaster relief or in a military arena incorporate both aspects (i.e., speed and ability to recover). Indeed, there is a lot of commonality in the understanding of resilience in the three areas of psychology, ecology, and disaster relief.

In engineering the take on resilience is somewhat different. In fact, engineers more commonly use the term robustness with a connotation of “designed resilience.” It differs from the other three uses in that it assumes bounded uncertainty—that is, the kinds and ranges of disturbances and shocks are known, and the system being built is designed to be robust in the face of these shocks. This view is now changing, and in chapter 5 we look at the emergence of what is being dubbed a “metarobustness” approach. This sees a convergence of ideas about resilience as used in the other three domains.

In this book we present a definition and description of resilience that is being used commonly by scientists in many areas of inquiry. It is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, and feedbacks—to have the same identity. Put more simply, resilience is the ability to cope with shocks and keep functioning in much the same kind of way.

A key word in this definition is identity. It emerged independently in ecological and psychosocial studies, and it is both important and useful because it imparts the idea that people, societies, ecosystems, and social-ecological systems can all exhibit quite a lot of variation, be subjected to disturbance and cope, without changing their “identity”—without becoming something else.

The following pages seek to present a simple overview of the essence of resilience thinking. If you can appreciate the following ten key points, you’re in a good position to consider how you can move from thinking to practice.

1.The systems we are dealing with are self-organizing.

2.There are limits to a system’s self-organizing capacity.

3.These systems have linked social, economic, and biophysical domains.

4.Self-organizing systems move through adaptive cycles.

5.Linked adaptive cycles function across multiple scales.

6.There are three related dimensions to resilience: specified resilience, general resilience, and transformability.

7.Working with resilience involves both adapting and transforming.

8.Maintaining or building resilience comes at a cost.

9.Resilience is not about knowing everything.

10.Resilience is not about not changing.

1. Self-Organizing Systems

First and foremost, resilience thinking requires that you recognize and appreciate that the systems we depend upon are complex adaptive systems. We use the more general term self-organizing systems because most people seem to grasp that more readily. Box 1 explains what the terms mean and the difference between being complex and being complicated.

All the things that most resource managers are interested in (e.g., farms, landscapes, and fishing grounds), but also things like your body, your family, and your business, are self-organizing systems. You can change bits of the system, but the system will then self-organize around this change. Other bits will change in response to your control. Sometimes you have a good idea about how the system will respond to your actions, sometimes it’s difficult to predict, and sometimes the response comes as a complete surprise.

Most of the time the system can handle the changes it experiences, be they human management or some external disturbance such as a storm. By “handling it” we mean the system absorbs the disturbance, reorganizes, and keeps performing in the way it did—it retains its identity.

But sometimes the system can’t cope with the change and begins behaving in some other (often undesirable) way. Sometimes a fishery crashes and doesn’t come back when fishing pressure is removed. Sometimes an agricultural catchment becomes salinized as the water table rises and is no longer productive, even if the water table later drops. Even with the best intentions, our management sometimes turns our most precious ecosystems from valuable assets to expensive liabilities.

This often happens because our traditional approach to managing resources, which usually focuses on narrowly optimizing for some product (e.g., fish or timber or grain), fails to acknowledge the limits to predictability inherent in a self-organizing system. Don’t worry if that sounds too technical; it makes sense when you work through a few of the concepts embedded in it.

2. Thresholds

There are limits to how much a self-organizing system can be changed and still recover. Beyond those limits it functions differently because some critical feedback process has changed. These limits are known as thresholds. When a self-organizing system crosses a threshold, it is said to have crossed into another “regime” of the system (also called a “stability domain” or “basin of attraction”). It now behaves in a different way—it has a different identity.

Box 1: Complex versus Complicated: It’s a Basic Difference

The word complex is used by all of us, usually when we are attempting to explain a difficult or tricky situation. For example, we might say, “This is a challenging and complex set of circumstances our nation is facing.” In a resilience framework, the concepts of complex and complex systems carry particular meanings.

The three requirements for a complex adaptive system are

•It has components that are independent and interacting

•There is some selection process at work on those components and on the results of their interactions

•Variation and novelty are constantly being added to the system (through components changing over time or new ones coming in)

To understand complexity it’s helpful to distinguish between complex and complicated.

The mechanism that drives an old-style clock is a set of tiny, intricate cogs and springs, often consisting of many pieces. This is a complicated machine and, to most people, a thing of wonder. However, the individual pieces are not independent of one another; rather, the movement of one depends on another in an unvarying way. Also, there is no selection process at work on the pieces, and these pieces don’t change over time. It’s a complicated machine but not a complex system.

Although a farm might produce just one item (e.g., wheat), the farm is far from simple. The farmer, the farming practices, the crop, the soil it grows on, and the market are all interacting and changing over time. This is a complex adaptive system.

Complex adaptive systems have emergent properties (i.e., their future states can’t be predicted from the properties of their component parts). It’s possible to control parts of the system for a time, but no one is in charge of the whole system. And because of all these features it’s virtually impossible to keep it in some (optimal) state. Trying to do so initiates secondary feedback effects that can change and undermine the viability of that state.

The terms self-organizing and self-regulating are also used to describe systems with complex dynamics. Not all self-organizing systems have the emergent properties of complex adaptive systems, but self-organizing is an easier term to grasp, and so it is the one we tend to use.

On coral reefs, for example, there is a threshold associated with nutrient levels. Plant nutrients find their way to coral reefs from fertilizers being used on the land. The nutrients wash off the land, eventually finding their way to waters around coral reefs. Nutrients stimulate the growth of algae. When the concentration of nutrients rises above a certain level, algae outcompete coral polyps for bare spaces on the reef. There is a critical level of nutrient concentration where this feedback effect on algae-coral competition takes place, and this is a threshold.

Below the nutrient-load threshold, corals predominate and coral polyps rapidly occupy any bare spaces created by disturbances. But if the reef crosses the nutrient threshold, algal growth overwhelms the young corals. It might be a storm that creates the bare space, but suddenly the system is behaving in a dramatically different way. It goes from a coral system to an algae system—it has a new identity; this change has major consequences for all the other organisms (including people) that depend on that reef.

In self-organizing systems you need to put the emphasis on thresholds because crossing them can come with huge consequences. Resilience practice is very much about thresholds—understanding them, determining where they might lie and what determines this, appreciating how you might deal with them, and very importantly, having the capacity to be able to deal with them.

Thresholds occur in ecosystems and in social systems. In social systems they are more often referred to as “tipping points.” Tipping points might be changes in fashion, voting patterns, riot behavior, or markets.

Thresholds are often not easy to identify. Most variables in a system don’t even have them; that is, considered on their own, the variables show a simple linear response to the change in underlying controlling variables and at no point exhibit a dramatic change in behavior (see figure 1a). For the variables that do have thresholds, it’s important to know about them because they cause regime shifts. This means that once a threshold has been crossed, all the variables in the system are likely to undergo significant change. But, as we’ll discuss, discovering where thresholds might lie is not easy.

And not all thresholds are the same. Sometimes you can cross a threshold but cross right back relatively easily. Water changes to ice when it crosses a temperature threshold of zero degrees Celsius, but it changes back to water when you raise the temperature above the threshold.

Sometimes there’s a large step change when you cross a threshold, and then a similar large reverse change is experienced when you cross back, at the same point (see figure 1b). A common example of this is when some landscapes lose more than about 90 percent of their cover of native vegetation. Below this threshold there is a loss of a suite of native animal species from the landscape. However, provided they haven’t been lost entirely from the whole region, restoring the landscape to more than 10 percent cover allows for their reestablishment (Radford et al. 2005...