Sustainability: Resilience Concepts

Resilience: Concept and Misconceptions

• Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances and maintain its basic structure and functions.
• It involves two key aspects:
  • Avoiding tipping points: recognizing and avoiding thresholds that could push a system into an undesirable state.
  • Building general resilience: ensuring systems have attributes that allow them to cope with a wide range of disturbances.

Misconceptions About Resilience

• Resilience isn't inherently good: harmful states, such as dictatorships or degraded environments, can also be resilient.
• Resilience is more than "bouncing back": it involves adapting and reorganizing, not just returning to a previous state.

Resilience vs. Robustness

• Robustness refers to resisting change and maintaining stability (engineering resilience), which is different from ecological resilience.
• Overemphasizing robustness can reduce overall resilience.

Building Resilience

• Response diversity: systems should have multiple ways to perform essential functions, with different capacities to handle various disturbances.
• Exposure to disturbances: protection from all disturbances can reduce resilience; exposure to manageable disturbances helps systems maintain their adaptive capacities.
• Modularity: systems need the right balance of connectivity to avoid rapid failures or slow reactions to crises.
• Quick response to changes: systems should be able to respond swiftly to shocks.
• Willingness to transform: sometimes, fundamental changes are necessary to continue delivering value.
• Multi-scale thinking: resilience cannot be understood or managed at a single scale; cross-scale interactions are crucial.
• Guiding, not steering: resilience involves keeping options open and learning to guide systems within a range of desirable states.

Conclusion and Key Points

• Resilience is about learning to change in order to avoid being changed in undesirable ways.
• It requires considering both specific and general resilience, allowing exposure to a variety of conditions, and sometimes making deliberate transformations.
• Building resilience requires a balanced approach, considering both specific threats and general capacities across all parts of the system.

Learn about the concept of resilience, its definition, and how it's often misinterpreted. Brian H. Walker's editorial provides a clear understanding based on decades of research.