I am afraid we don’t have a good understanding of what a resilient world would look. We talk about the need to slow economic growth, to recognize natural limits, to re-localize ourselves, to reduce our overall consumerism and more, in order to be resilient, to be sustainable. But overall, it is difficult to picture a resilient world.
Brian Walker, author of “Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World“, offers the following visions or values for what a resilient world might look like:
1. DIVERSITY. A resilient world would promote biological, landscape, social and economic diversity. Diversity is a major source of future options and of a system's capacity to respond to change.
2. ECOLOGICAL VARIABILITY. A resilient world would embrace and work with ecological variability (rather than attempting to control and reduce it). A forest that is never allowed to burn loses its fire-resistant species and becomes very vulnerable to fire.
3. MODULARITY. A resilient world consists of modular components. When over-connected, shocks are rapidly transmitted through the system - as a forest connected by logging roads can allow a wild fire to spread wider than it would otherwise.
4. ACKNOWLEDGING SLOW VARIABLES. A resilient world would have a policy that focus on “slow,” controlling variables associated with thresholds. By focusing on the key slow variables that configure a social-ecological system, and the thresholds that lie along them, we have a greater capacity to manage the resilience of a system.
5. TIGHT FEEDBACKS. A resilient world possesses tight feedbacks (but not too tight). Feedbacks allow us to detect thresholds before we cross them. Globalization is leading to delayed feedbacks that were once tighter. For example, people of the developed world receive weak feedback signals about the consequences of their consumption.
6. SOCIAL CAPITAL. A resilient world promotes trust, well developed social networks and leadership (adaptability). Individually, these attributes contribute to what is generally termed "social capital," but they need to act in concert to effect adaptability - the capacity to respond to change and disturbance.
7. INNOVATION. A resilient world places an emphasis on learning, experimentation, locally developed rules, and embracing change. When rigid connections and behaviors are broken, new opportunities open up and new resources are made available for growth.
8. OVERLAP IN GOVERNANCE. A resilient world has institutions that include "redundancy" in their governance structures and a mix of common and private property with overlapping access rights. Redundancy in institutions increases the diversity of responses and the flexibility of a system. Because access and property rights lie at the heart of many resource-use tragedies, overlapping rights and a mix of common and private property rights can enhance the resilience of linked social-ecological systems.
9. ECOSYSTEM SERVICES. A resilient world would include all the unpriced ecosystem services – such as carbon storage, water filtration and so on - in development proposals and assessments. These services are often the ones that change in a regime shift – and are often only recognized and appreciated when they are lost.
We can use the above vision to start drafting our own version of such a world. It shouldn’t be that difficult. And for our own sake, and for the future of our children and grandchildren, we better start working on building such a resilient world.
