A brief dip into Resilience Thinking and how it can be used to navigate climate change.

1. Resilience Thinking:
Preparing for the Unknown
Nathan Albritton

2. Background
• Earth is dynamic
– Change is inevitable
• Scientific inquiry has allowed us to
better understand our world
• However, there will always be surprises
– The world is inherently unknowable
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"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
"The fool doth think he is wise, but the
wise man knows himself to be a fool."
-William Shakespeare
-Socrates
“To know that you do not know is the
best. To pretend to know when you do
not know is a disease.”
-Lao-Tzu

3. What is Resilience?
• The ability of a system to perform its
desired function after a shock
• Equilibrium Resilience
– Maintain steady-state
• Engineering Resilience
– Time for system to return to normal
• Ecosystem Resilience
– How much a system can be disturbed
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Earth in Balance?

4. Are Stability and Balance Good Things?
• Two key (and faulty) assumptions:
– There is an ideal stable state or
situation that we have to maintain
– We know better than nature
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Seawalls and Sand Loss
(Pilkey et. al., 1996)
(Star Wars)

5. History of Resilience Thinking
• Ecologist C.S. ‘Buzz’ Holling ‘discovered’
the notion of resilience in the 1970s
• Major outbreak of spruce budworm
– Destroyed balsam fir trees in Eastern Canada’s
mature forests; yet left young trees alone
– Six major outbreaks since 1700s
• Canadian government reacted with
pesticide spraying
– Caused destruction of predator / budworm
relationship
– Whole forests on verge of outbreak
– Locked-in to using increased levels of pesticides
• Budworm outbreaks acted as natural
rejuvenator of spruce-fir forests
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Spruce-Fir Forest
(Wikimedia Commons)
Spruce Budworm
(Natural Resources Canada)

6. Resilience Thinking
• Resilience Thinking is based on two premises:
– Humans and nature are part of a strongly couple and coevolving
“social-ecological” system
– Systems do not respond to change in a linear, predictable fashion
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7. Adaptive Cycle
• Growth or exploitation (r)
– New opportunities and available resources
exploited
– Pioneers/opportunists successful
• Conservation (K)
– Energy stored, material accumulates
– Increasing dependence on existing
structure
– Increasingly stable/rigid, loss of flexibility
• Collapse or release (omega)
– Resources released
– Connections break
• Reorganization (alpha)
– Destruction opens up new options
– Novelty, invention, experimentation
possible (i.e. evolution)
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Adaptive Cycle
(resalliance.org)
Panarchy
(resalliance.org)

8. Panarchy
• Panarchy – A hierarchical set of
linked/nested adaptive cycles, and
their cross scale effects of different
levels of a system
• Smaller and faster adaptive cycles are
areas for experimentation
• Playing / experimenting with larger
and slower adaptive cycles can have
deep, long-term effects (e.g.
anthropogenic climate change)
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Scales and Panarchy
(Ecology and Society)

9. Basins of Attraction
• Regions in which a system tends to
remain
• More than one basin of attraction
for any given system
• Focuses on regime shifts and
tipping points, which can tip a
system into another state which
is difficult or impossible to recover
from
• “How much shock can a system absorb before it transforms into
something fundamentally different?” (Folke, 2009)
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Ball and Cup Heuristic of
System Stability
(Environmental Governance)

10. Stability Landscapes
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11. Stability Landscapes
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12. Dealing with Climate Change
• Holocene has been a period of flourishing human civilization
• Temperature unlikely to stay the same even if no anthropogenic effects
• Impossible to predict future
• However, we can learn, adapt, and evolve through experimentation in
smaller, faster scales in the panarchy
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Temperature Fluctuations over Human History
(SeedMagazine.com)

13. Dealing with Climate Change (cont’d)
12
• Climate change is a potential large-scale
source of change in many ecosystems
– Great potential to change stability landscapes
• Resilience Thinking can be used to help
systems maintain essential functions - guided
transition
– Humans are part of nature, evolving along with it
• Will require adaptive form of governance
– Experimentation at local level
– No ‘one-size fits all’ solutions
– Increased participation; not just rely on “experts”
– Increased information flow
– Bolstered social networks / social capital

14. Key Take-Aways
• Resilience Thinking is a form of systems thinking
– Everything is connected
• Resilience Thinking embraces uncertainty and accepts risk as inevitable
• Resilience is not just about absorbing disturbance
– Also about the capability to self-organize and the capacity to learn, adapt and
transform
• Resilience Thinking encourages a greater awareness of complex systems,
their interacting parts, and the ability to cope with changes without the
need to accurately predict what a change will bring
• Embrace change, nothing is static
– The key is not equilibrium but fluctuation and change
– There is no sustainable optimal state, change will happen
– Life is full of surprises; Embrace change and dance with it, no-one's in control
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15. Further Reading
• Stockholm Resilience Centre (http://www.stockholmresilience.org/)
• Resilience Alliance (http://www.resalliance.org/)
• Ecology and Society (www.ecologyandsociety.org)
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16. References
• Carpenter, SR, Folke, C., Scheffer, M., & Westley, F. (2009). Resilience: accounting for the noncomputable.
Ecology & society, 14(1). Retrieved from http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:432532
• Carpenter, Steve, Walker, B., Anderies, J. M., & Abel, N. (2001). From Metaphor to Measurement:
Resilience of What to What? Ecosystems, 4(8), 765–781. doi:10.1007/s10021-001-0045-9
• Folke, C. (2009, December). How much disturbance can a system withstand ? With roots in ecology and
complexity science , Resilience Thinking offers new ways to turn crises into catalysts for innovation . Seed
Magazine.com, 40–42.
• Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems. Annual Review of Ecology and
Systematics, 4, 1–23. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.hpu.edu/stable/info/2096802
• Lin, B. B., & Petersen, B. (2013). Resilience , Regime Shifts , and Guided Transition under Climate Change :
Examining the Practical Difficulties of Managing Continually Changing. Ecology and Society, 18(1).
• Rockström, J., & Steffen, W. (2009). Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity.
Ecology and Society, 14(2). Retrieved from http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/main.html
• Walker, BH, Anderies, J., Kinzig, A., & Ryan, P. (2006). Exploring resilience in social-ecological systems
through comparative studies and theory development: introduction to the special issue. Ecology and
Society, 11(1). Retrieved from http://www.ibcperu.org/doc/isis/8587.pdf
• Walker, Brian, & Holling, C. (2004). Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social--ecological
Systems. Ecology and Society, 9(2). Retrieved from http://profesores.usfq.edu.ec/fdelgado/Ecologia
Humana/articulosdigitales/Walker.pdf