Resilience

Excerpt

Resilience: The capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by a different set of processes. A resilient ecosystem can withstand shocks and rebuild itself when necessary.

Resilience: Resilience in social systems is the capacity of humans to anticipate and plan for the future. In human and ecological systems, resilience is achieved through adaptive capacity.

Resilience: Systems with high adaptive capacity are able to reconfigure themselves without significant declines in crucial functions in relation to primary productivity, hydrological cycles, social relations, and economic prosperity. Potential consequences of a loss of resilience include loss of opportunity and constrained options during periods of reorganization and renewal.

I find myself thinking a lot about resilience lately. I think it all started a little over a year ago at the workshop SWCS held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for our Planning for Extremes project. That project focused on what conservationists need to do to manage the risks of a climate regime with more frequent and more severe storms. One of the important ideas that came out of the workshop was that the ultimate goal of conservation is to increase the capacity of agricultural landscapes to resist and …