Sustainable Development Update: Resilience Thinking

Feature excerpted from Sustainable Development Update, Issue 5, 2008, by kind permission of Albaeco : Stockholm, Sweden

Fredrik Moberg, Albaeco :: Earlier this year UNEP, UNDP and the World Bank teamed up with World Resources Institute to publish a report focusing on the concept of resilience “for cushioning the impacts of climate change and delivering continuing benefits to the poor”. Recently, the Volvo Environment Prize was given to the “father of resilience theory”, C.S. Holling. But what is this resilience-thing really all about? We thought it was about time to try to sort this concept out once and for all.

Building economic, social, and environmental resilience that cushions the impacts of climate change is becoming increasingly important. Photo by Annette Löf/azote.se: thunderstorm approaching over Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Resilience has become one of the new buzzwords of sustainability. This is not only due to the fact that the father of resilience theory, Canadian ecologist Crawford “Buzz” Holling, recently won the Volvo Environment Prize, it all started much earlier. The concept of resilience was introduced by Holling already back in 1973 as: “a measure of the ability of systems to absorb change… and still persist”. In an ecological context, resilience is generally described as the long-term capacity of an ecosystem to cope with and adapt to change and perturbation, such as storms, fire and pollution. Hence, it is both the capacity of a system to withstand pressures and to rebuild and renew itself if degraded.

– Resilience is the answer to the question: how can things change and persist at the same time, explains Steve Carpenter, Professor of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Loss of resilience tends to lead to more vulnerable systems, and possible ecosystem shifts to undesired states that provide fewer ecosystem goods (like fish and crops) and services (like flood control and water purification). Clear lakes can suddenly turn into murky, oxygen-depleted pools, grasslands into shrub-deserts, and coral reefs into algae-covered rubble. It is often caused by gradual loss of biodiversity making the ecosystem progressively more susceptible to disturbances like hurricanes or pollution.

Resilience is the capacity of a system to deal with change and continue to develop. It is both about withstanding shocks or disturbances and regaining functions afterwards. In human systems, this is closely linked to the ability to adapt to changing conditions through learning and innovation or even transformation.

International development cooperation
The report, World Resources 2008: Roots of Resilience: Growing the Wealth of the Poor, which we highlighted in SDU 4/08, is a clear sign that resilience thinking is becoming increasingly mainstreamed in the international development community. It is a joint effort produced by the World Resources Institute, UNEP, UNDP and the World Bank, which argues that properly designed ecosystem-based enterprises can create economic, social, and environmental resilience that cushion the impacts of climate change, and deliver continuing benefits to the poor.

– Economic and social progress rests on a healthy environment, from local ecosystems to the biosphere as a whole. Maintaining the resilience of ecosystems is not only a question of saving the environment. It is about securing human development, explains Carl Folke of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

A perspective – not a measure
In recent times, many resilience scholars have started to put much more emphasis on the social side of the resilience theory and also focused more on the adaptability and renewal of coupled systems of humans and nature – so-called social-ecological systems (SES).

Following this, the resilience concept has developed more into a perspective than a measure, a perspective recently defined to encompass the three aspects: (1) Persistence: the capacity of a system to maintain structure and function when faced with shocks and change (e.g. for a forest to withstand a storm); (2) Adaptability: the collective capacity of people in SES to adapt to changing conditions in order to stay within a desired state (e.g. the ability to safeguard current food production systems under climate change); and (3) Transformability: the capacity of people in SES to learn, innovate and transform in periods of crisis in order to create a new system when ecological, social or economic conditions make the existing system untenable (e.g. turning the current financial crisis into an opportunity to transform the global economy).

Learning from the old Greeks
In the Odyssey, the ancient Greek epic poem, the old and wise god of the sea Proteus can change his shape at will and so resist being caught. He combines a capacity to change with inner wisdom and persistence. Psychologists often refer to Proteus when discussing how modern humans can adapt to a constantly changing world. Likewise, sustainable development requires both change and persistence. It is about maintaining important structures in life-supporting ecosystems and societies while responding to and shaping change. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to do the opposite, according to Buzz Holling and other resilience experts. That is, we seek to control nature and subdue changes or uncertainties in order to create efficient production systems, in for example agriculture and forestry. However, there are risks with such “command-and-control” management. When small disturbances such as floods, pests and diseases are prevented by human interventions like dams, pesticides, and antibiotics, they tend to accumulate. Eventually, such small-scale solutions tend to push the problem upwards in a system, causing loss of resilience at much larger scales with severe impacts on natural resources, biodiversity and human well-being.

Farmers borrowing money to fund agricultural equipment is one example. They tend to need consistently high, predictable yields to meet loan payments. In order to achieve this they are often forced to replace old techniques, such as polyculture farming, with chemical fertilisers and pesticides. If these new agricultural practices fail, we have, so far, had a tendency to respond by inventing new kinds of pesticides and chemical fertilisers that harm surrounding ecosystems. Hence, the structure of our modern economy pressures farmers to apply increasingly intense controls that “simplify” nature. Unfortunately, such simplification has proven to lead to many negative environmental side-effects and erosion of resilience.

Resilience in agriculture

Agricultural resilience involves an ability to deal with everything from climate change and pest outbreaks to changes in policy and increased costs of inputs.
A number of recent global reports claim that future agriculture must be based more on diversity and local inputs than monocultures and fossil fuels to become resilient.

Such agriculture is about reducing energy consumption and preserving a variety of farming systems and crop diversity in order to increase resistance to pests and disease, and help farmers adapt to climatic changes. By reduced nutrient and water loss (through e.g. water harvesting, high organic matter content and soil covers) soils can become more resilient to floods and droughts.

Resilient farms never stop learning and adapting. They strive to ensure that the ecosystem services that underpin agricultural production do not collapse, e.g. services that maintain pollination, erosion control and soil carbon and water holding capacity.

Thresholds and surprise
More and more scientific evidence show that abrupt change and thresholds are normal features of ecosystems, but we still govern and manage fisheries, forests, water resources and agriculture as if they follow linear and easily predictable pathways. The recent discovery that the Arctic is projected to be ice free in the summer at least five decades earlier than the worst climate change scenarios predicted, is one of many examples of a system suddenly tipping over a threshold.

Brian Walker, the former chair of the research organisation Resilience Alliance, has written the most graspable book to date on resilience. It outlines the main concepts of “resilience thinking” and he shows in a convincing way together with his co-writer, science journalist David Salt, that complex social-ecological systems need a new type of management. This is because they seldom behave in a predictable linear fashion. Rather, they sometimes pass certain thresholds and abruptly shift to potentially undesirable states or entirely new systems. Such shifts tend to be novel and surprising, and not beneficial for human society. Predicting thresholds is therefore a key research focus for members of the Resilience Alliance.

When business as usual is no option
One aspect of resilience that is now gaining increased interest is the ability of humans to transform when a state shift has already occurred in a coupled system of humans and nature.

– Transformability is the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when conditions make the existing system untenable. In much of the world the need is to transform, not to make the existing system regime more resilient, Brian Walker explains.

One example is the problems of state-shifts caused by water hyacinths in lakes, ponds and waterways in many parts of the world. This beautiful flower produces large floating carpets of fleshy flowers that block waterways, clog irrigation canals, disrupt hydropower, decrease fishing and create habitat for disease-carrying mosquitoes. Instead of trying to combat this invasive species many now have started to show signs of transformability, that is, they innovate to making crisis an opportunity and have developed different ways to use water hyacinths, in agricultural or alternative energy systems. For instance, due to their copious growth and rich concentrations of nutrients, the hyacinths have great potential as fertiliser for the nutrient poor soils of Africa and as feed for livestock.

On a larger scale many now see the current financial crisis as an opportunity to transform the global economy. “We’re now on the threshold of a global transformation – the age of green economics”, said Ban Ki-Moon, the UN General Secretary, recently to Newsweek.

Avoid quick-fixes
Resilience can be both positive and negative (e.g. dictatorial regimes may be very “resilient”). Consequently, the first step towards sustainable development is sometimes to reduce undesired resilience, in order to allow for transformation into alternate and more desirable states.

The group of social and natural scientists behind the resilience concept say that in isolating a single resource type (both goods and services) and creating management regimes designed to optimize harvest of this single resource, we have made the world extremely vulnerable. On the contrary, we should acknowledge that variation and change are inherent characteristics of both natural ecosystems and human production systems. We must strive to preserve critical types of natural variation, learn to adapt to and shape changing conditions without losing future options, and develop flexible solutions.

Even though many problems, like the food price crisis, hurricane Katrina and the avian flu, require quick-fixes to minimize immediate suffering, the basic message of the resilience thinkers is that these kind of problems are often caused, in the first place, by the gradual effects of previous short-sighted policies. Hence, instead of spending money on quick fixes they argue that politicians must dare bearing the political costs of more fundamental (“resilient”) solutions.

In the case of New Orleans, where thoughtless management led to the 2005 flood catastrophe, this could imply restoring the river to its natural course and rebuilding the floodplains and delta that once gave the city protection. This strategy is based on the notion that working with instead of against nature by restoring ecosystem services is better in the long run. Similar choices between quick fixes and more resilient solutions exist for a number of other environmental problems.

Resilience for rich and poor
Resilience is, as mentioned above, increasingly being mainstreamed in the environment-development debate, but it takes time to fully understand the concept. Scientists in the field claim it can be used to answer what kind of knowledge, incentives and governance systems that will be required to deal with both the climate challenges and the ongoing erosion of our life-supporting ecosystems in an increasingly globalised world. In this respect, resilience is of special importance to the billions of poor people living in rural areas. They face increasingly tougher challenges due to climatic and ecological changes that threaten to destroy the ecosystems on which they depend.

It is, however, important to bear in mind that the future well-being in both developed and developing countries depends on our ability to manage environmental, social and economic shocks and non-return points – either to avoid crossing them, or to be able to delay, ease or learn to live with future change and shocks. This is what resilience is all about.

Sources:

• Holling, C.S. (1973) Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4, 1-23.
• Walker, B. and Salt, D. 2006. Resilience Thinking. Island Press.
• http://www.stockholmresilience.org
• http://www.resalliance.org