Resilience

From Water Wiki

A resilient system is able to adapt to change and still remain healthy, viable, and able to provide services that are critical to the organisms in the system; perhaps as importantly, a resilient system is able to shape change, not just to react. It avoids rigidity traps--resistance to outside ideas, to incremental changes, ignorance of feedback from the environment--and learns from the inevitable surprises in the adaptive cycle. Change is inevitable; rigid systems are more likely to collapse (lose their ability to provide social-ecological services) in the face of change. ^[1]

Many people today are trying to understand how the ecological idea of resilience can be used to evaluate and improve social-ecological systems (SES), systems in which humans make purposeful decisions that strongly interact with natural processes. Water management is a paradigmatic social-ecological system. Some interesting efforts to model and explain resilience as it applies to water management are:

• an agent-based model of water use in a river basin
• framing cross-disciplinary research on water use

See generally the online, open access Journal of Ecology and Society , the Resilience Alliance , the blog Resilience Science and the work of the Stockholm Resilience Center

Elinor Ostrom and others in the Resilience Alliance have worked hard to develop methods for studying an SES; in Ostrom's case, in particular,  methods for understanding the governance of common-pool resources (such as fresh water).

The authors of one of the major works of the Resilience Project list these as a summary of things to consider in times when past approaches to development are failing and possibilities for change are opened up.

• Identify and reduce destructive constraints and inhibitions on change, such as perverse subsidies.

• Protect and preserve the accumulated experience on which change will be based.
• Stimulate innovation and communicate the results in a variety of safe-fail experiments that probe possible directions, in a way that are low in costs for people's careers and organizations' budgets.
• Encourage new foundations for renewal that build and sustain the capacity of people, economies and nature for dealing with change.
• Encourage new foundations to expand and communicate understanding of change.^[2]

Water resource crises present just such times....

Notes

1. ↑ C. S. Holling, L. H. Gunderson and G. D. Peterson, Sustainability and Panarchies, p. 63-102 in Gunderson and Holling (eds.), 2002, Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, Washington: Island Press, see http://www.resalliance.org/593.php
2. ↑ Berkes, Fikret(Editor). Navigating Social-Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change. West Nyack, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2002.