– whichfor
canassessing
be fairly
ATitle
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quite a
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DECEMBER
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bit of space a and
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PRODUCED BY [Consultants
Name and/or
Organisation]
DECEMBER
2011
PRODUCED
BY Steven
Cork
FOR the Department of Sustainability,
Environment,
Water,
FOR the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water,
Population
and
Communities
Population and Communities
ON BEHALF OF the State of the Environment 2011 Committee
ON BEHALF OF the State of the Environment 2011 Committee
Citation
Cork S. A framework for assessing resilience in SoE 2011 reporting. Report prepared
for the Australian Government Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water,
Population and Communities on behalf of the State of the Environment 2011
Committee. Canberra: DSEWPaC, 2011.
© Commonwealth of Australia 2011.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act
1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission
from the Commonwealth. Requests and enquiries concerning reproduction and rights
should be addressed to Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water,
Populations and Communities, Public Affairs, GPO Box 787 Canberra ACT 2601 or
email public.affairs@environment.gov.au
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do
not necessarily reflect those of the Australian Government or the Minister for
Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities.
While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure that the contents of this
publication are factually correct, the Commonwealth does not accept responsibility
for the accuracy or completeness of the contents, and shall not be liable for any loss or
damage that may be occasioned directly or indirectly through the use of, or reliance
on, the contents of this publication.
Cover image
Frog in rainforest near Cairns, QLD
Photo by Australian Heritage Commission
Australia ■ State of the Environment 2011 Supplementary information
ii
Preface
This report was developed for the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water,
Population and Communities to help inform the Australia State of the Environment
(SoE) 2011 report. As part of ensuring its scientific credibility, this report has been
independently peer reviewed.
The Minister for Environment is required, under the Environment Protection and
Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, to table a report in Parliament every five years on
the State of the Environment.
The Australia State of the Environment (SoE) 2011 report is a substantive, hardcopy
report compiled by an independent committee appointed by the Minister for
Environment. The report is an assessment of the current condition of the Australian
environment, the pressures on it and the drivers of those pressures. It details
management initiatives in place to address environmental concerns and the
effectiveness of those initiatives.
The main purpose of SoE 2011 is to provide relevant and useful information on
environmental issues to the public and decision-makers, in order to raise awareness
and support more informed environmental management decisions that lead to more
sustainable use and effective conservation of environmental assets.
The 2011 SoE report, commissioned technical reports and other supplementary
products are available online at www.environment.gov.au/soe.
Australia ■ State of the Environment 2011 Supplementary information
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A framework for assessing resilience in SoE 2011 reporting
A FRAMEWORK FOR ASSESSING RESILIENCE IN SOE 2011 REPORTING
Introduction
Resilience is a term used in virtually all disciplines and fields of human endeavour (van
Opstal 2007; Cork et al. 2008, Cork 2010). It has long been a key concept in engineering
(Holling 1996). It has become especially popular recently in business and economics and
in mental and physical health, as academics and practitioners are being asked to address
perceptions of growing risks and threats and an increase in the severity and frequency of
“surprise events” (Starr et al. 2003; van Opstal 2007). Across these disciplines and others,
the word “resilience” is used in widely different ways and is frequently not defined or
explained, even within disciplines.
Where “sustainability” was been a prime focus for policy relating to interactions between
the environment, society and economies for many years, the concept of resilience is
being introduced as a way to ensure that ecological and social systems are able to find
their way towards sustainability (whatever societies decide that is in the future) in the
face of potential shocks, some of which can be partly anticipated and some of which will
come as surprises.
The strength of the concept is the fact that most people understand resilience is about
the ability of something to respond to disturbance. The weakness is that most people
hold fuzzy ideas on what is the source of resilience or how we should manage for it. For
example, policy makers around the World have seen that building and/or maintaining
the ability of ecological, social or economic systems to cope with shocks is a perfect
strategy for preparing for uncertain futures but they have generally not thought very
deeply about what such a strategy might consist of.
The idea of building the ability to cope with change is not new but the depth of thinking
about how to operationalise the idea is focussing thinking about issues like adaptability,
capacity building, community engagement, adaptive governance, critical resource needs,
functional diversity, and thresholds or “tipping points” to a different, more integrated
level. Leading resilience researchers are quick to point out that resilience science is not a
panacea; that what is most important is the questions it poses and encourages us to
address that other wise can be overlooked.
As the field of resilience science has developed it has become apparent that there are
many challenges in implementing its lessons in the way we manage our systems. For
example: resisting change is more likely to make a system vulnerable to shocks than
make it resilient; few systems “bounce back” to exactly the same state they were in
before a shock; assessing the resilience of a system is more complex than measuring a
single biophysical parameter (e.g., soil acidity), because resilience is relative and
contextual on the scale you are looking at and the questions you are posing (eg, what it is
we want to be resilient, and what it needs to be resilient to); and, resilience is not always
desirable (e.g., some of the most resilient systems are ones we would like to change, such
as some farming systems that are unsustainable in the long term but are made
Australia ■ State of the Environment 2011 Supplementary information
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A framework for assessing resilience in SoE 2011 reporting
temporarily resilient by new technologies and favourable market forces (Allison &
Hobbs 2004).
What has become clear as researchers have investigated ways of operationalising
resilience theory is that it will rarely be possible or advisable to develop rigid
prescriptions for actions to manage resilience or to identify fixed targets for the optimal
amount of resilience. It is, however, possible to identify general principles for adaptively
managing systems to build or reduce resilience.
Definition of resilience
Different disciplines have developed different definitions of resilience. The following
definition is taken from Walker et al. (2004). It recognises the important lesson from a
range of research on ecological systems and coupled social-ecological systems, that
resilient systems don’t remain unchanged but that change occurs within limits.
“Resilience is the capacity of a system to experience shocks while retaining essentially the same function,
structure and feedbacks, and therefore identity.”
Often, people’s perception of resilience is more akin to the concept used by engineers.
Engineers define resilience as the speed with which a system can return to some
equilibrium state. Social-ecological resilience is more about a system retaining the
capacity to return to an equilibrium state. The rate of return is not the issue. Box 1
compares engineering resilience and social-ecological resilience. This is a key concept
when applying the findings of resilience research to SoE assessments.
Box 1: The nature of social-ecological resilience
Social-ecological resilience is the capacity of a (social-ecological) system to absorb disturbance and
re-organize so as to retain essentially the same function, structure and feedbacks – to have the
same identity. Put more simply, resilience is the ability to cope with shocks and keep functioning
in much the same kind of way.
A key word in this definition is “identity”. It is both important and useful because it imparts the
idea that a farm, a region or a community (all of which are social-ecological systems) can exhibit
quite a lot of variation, be subjected to disturbance and cope, without changing their “identity” –
without becoming something else.
Social-ecological systems are self-organizing systems. We can control bits of the system but the
system will then self organise around this change. Other bits will change in response to this
control. Sometimes we have a good idea how the system will respond to our actions, sometimes
it’s difficult to predict, and sometimes the response comes as a complete surprise.
Most of the time, the system can absorb the changes it experiences, be it human management or
some form of external disturbance like a storm. The system absorbs the disturbance, re-organizes
and keeps performing in the way it did – it retains its identity.
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There are limits to how much a self-organizing system can be changed and still recover. Beyond
those limits it functions differently because some critical feedback process has changed. These
limits are known as thresholds. When a self-organizing system crosses a threshold it is said to
have crossed into another “regime” (also called a “stability domain”) of the system, and now
behaves in a different way – it has a different identity.
Thresholds occur in ecosystems and in social systems. In social systems they are more often
referred to as “tipping points”. Tipping points might be changes in fashion, voting patterns, riot
behaviour, or markets.
Thresholds are often not easy to identify. Most variables in a system don’t even have them; that
is, they show a simple linear response to the change in underlying controlling variables and at no
point exhibit a dramatic change in behaviour. For the ones that do have thresholds it’s really
important to know about them, though achieving this is not always an easy process.
Grassy rangelands that sometimes turn into shrub thickets offer a good example of what can
happen when a threshold is crossed. If grazing pressure reduces the amount of grass and causes
shrub density to exceed some threshold amount, there then isn’t enough grass to carry a fire. Fire
kills many shrub species, but not grass. Without fire the woody shrubs take over as the dominant
vegetation. This further suppresses grass growth. The feedback from grass to shrubs via fire has
changed, and even if grazing pressure is then reduced the system stays in the woody shrubdominated state for a very long time before shrubs die and the grass returns in sufficient amounts
to allow fire to again play a role. And that delay might be enough to bankrupt the pastoralist.
The rangeland is the system. A grassy rangeland represents one regime. A shrubby rangeland
represents an alternate regime. The controlling variable is the amount of grass cover and the
threshold is the point along this controlling variable at which the system begins to behave
differently (ie, on one side of the threshold it has the identity of a grassland, on the other it has
the identity of a shrubland).
Another way that the resilience of social-ecological systems has been conceptualised is using the
ball in a cup analogy (Figure 1), sometimes referred to as a ball in a basin. The ball is the current
state of the system and the basin or cup is the set of states the ball can exist in.
Australia ■ State of the Environment 2011 Supplementary information
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A framework for assessing resilience in SoE 2011 reporting
Figure 1: The ball and cup (pebble and pothole) analogy of resilience (see text for
explanation)
Within a basin (where the system has essentially the same structure and function, and the same
kinds of feedbacks) the ball tends to roll to the bottom. In systems terms, it tends towards some
equilibrium state. In reality, this equilibrium is constantly changing due to changing external
conditions; however the ball will always be moving towards it. The net effect is that one never
finds a system in equilibrium (i.e., with the ball at the bottom of the basin). The shape of the
basin is always changing as external conditions change and so is the position of the ball. So the
system is always tracking a moving target and being pushed off course as it does so. From a
resilience perspective the question is how much change can occur in the basin and in the system’s
trajectory without the system leaving the basin.
Beyond some limit (the edge of the basin), there is a change in the feedbacks that drive the
system’s dynamics, and the system tends towards a different equilibrium. The system in this new
basin has a different structure and function. The system is said to have crossed a threshold into a
new basin of attraction – a new regime. These differences can have important consequences for
society and so some basins of attraction are deemed ‘desirable’, while others are not.
Why does resilience have to be so complex?
The following sections expand on the definition discussed above and reveal insights
from attempts to put the definition onto practice. Unfortunately, no matter how simple
the adopted definition of resilience is, a number of complexities arise when applying it in
practice. Table 1 summarises some of these complexities and why they are important
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A framework for assessing resilience in SoE 2011 reporting
Table 1: Some issues arising from practical applications of the concept of
resilience and their implications
Issue
Need to be clear
about what
system we are
talking about and
what is valued
about a system
The needs to
distinguish
between
specified and
general resilience
Links between
social and
ecological
systems
Distinctions
between
resilience and
adaptability
Adaptability and
transformability
Resilience is not
always desirable
Considering
resilience
requires a
systems
approach
Resilience needs
to be considered
at multiple scales
Implications
It is easy to say we want “the system” to be resilient but we need to be clear
what the system is (e.g., a farm, a landscape, a region, the natural resource
management system or Australia’s system of government). This entails
working with stakeholders in the system to determine the scales at which it
works, its governance, its values that we want to be resilient (the resilience
of what), the disturbances we want it to be resilient to, and its drivers and
trends.
Specified resilience is the resilience of some specified part of the system to a
specified shock; a particular kind of disturbance. General resilience is the
capacity of a system that allows it to absorb disturbances of all kinds,
including novel, unforeseen ones, so that all parts of the system keep
functioning as they were. When you prepare your system for a specific
disturbance, in a sense you’re optimizing your capacity for a specific threat.
In so doing, you may be eroding your system’s general capacity to absorb
other kinds of disturbances. In other words, there is a trade off between
specified and general resilience. Channelling all your efforts into one kind of
resilience will reduce resilience in other ways. So it is necessary to consider
both.
The social, economic and biophysical domains that make up socialecological systems are linked. The interplay between thresholds and linkages
between domains are critical to understanding the behaviour and resilience
of self-organizing systems. Many of the problems associated with managing
natural resources come down to the fact that our approaches don’t
acknowledge these linkages.
It is important to explain this distinction as a major sticking point in
understanding resilience for many people is their need to understand how it
related to adaptability. Resilience is an emergent property of the system: it’s
a measure of how much disturbance the system can absorb before it
changes its identity. Adaptability is the capacity of the system to manage
resilience, to stop it crossing a threshold (or engineer a crossing back into a
desired regime).
Transformability is the capacity of a system to become a different system, to
create a new way of making a living. It’s about changing the system when
the existing system is no longer working for us and it’s not worth adapting.
Adaptability is about sticking with the system you have. They are
complementary processes – managers often need to transform a lower scale
of system in order that a higher scale can remain resilient. (eg, portions of a
catchment might change their enterprise in order that the broader
catchment remains viable.
Resilience, per se, is not “good” or “bad”. Undesirable states of systems can
be very resilient. Rangelands choked by woody weeds, salinized catchments
and military dictatorships can all be highly undesirable system states that are
also highly resilient.
Resilience is an emergent property of a complex adaptive system.
Understanding and managing for resilience requires an engagement with the
broader system, not just an understanding of its individual parts. While this
is at first intimidating for some people, the aim of resilience thinking is to
help stakeholders focus on the important dynamics of their system.
Stakeholders cannot understand or successfully manage a system – any
system, but especially a social-ecological system – by focusing on only one
scale. Ignoring cross-scale effects is one of the most common reasons for
failures in natural resource management systems – particularly those aimed
at optimizing production.
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Self-organisation
is a key to
resilience
Being resilient requires changing within limits – in fact, probing those limits.
Holding a system in exactly the same condition erodes resilience because the
capacity to absorb disturbance is based on the system’s history of dealing
with disturbances.
Resilience of what to what?
To put the above definition of resilience into practice it is necessary to ask what are the
essential “function, structure and feedbacks” of a system, and what “shocks” might they need
to be resilient to. Thus the first question to be asked in a resilience analysis is “resilience of
what to what?” (Carpenter et al. 2001). Note that some resilience researchers distinguish
between specified resilience (resilience to challenges that are known or anticipated) and
general resilience (ability to cope with a range of unspecified challenges). This distinction
is discussed later.
One way to address the “resilience of what” part of the question is to focus on sets of
species and their relationships with the non-living environment, in which case a shift
from a grassland to a shrub land might be seen as a change of identity. Another way to
answer this question has been to identify a set of so-called “ecosystem services”. These
are the benefits that humans get from ecological systems, including regulatory services,
like regulation of water flows in rivers, regulation of water tables, regulation of pests and
diseases and regulation of atmospheric composition; provisioning services, like provision
of food, clean water, fibre, building material, pharmaceuticals; cultural services, like
maintenance of spiritual, educational and recreational values; and supporting services,
like maintenance of soil fertility, creation of soil and maintenance of genetic diversity
(Daily 1997; Binning et al. 2001; Cork et al. 2001; Abel et al. 2003).
The resilience of a system can only be considered in relation to what it might need to be
resilient to (“resilience to what?”), which means that it is never possible to say whether a
system has enough or more than enough resilience while there is uncertainty about what
shocks it might receive. It is, however, possible to identify signs that resilience might be
too low (for example, if characteristics known to contribute to resilience are declining
below levels that appeared to be critical in relation to past shocks). Across much of
Australia, there are reasons to believe that ecological and social resilience are in danger of
falling below levels required to cope with known and expected shocks, let alone possible
surprises (Walker and Salt 2006; Cork et al. 2008; Cork 2009; 2010).
Specified versus general resilience
In terms of the current state of any system, there are two complementary aspects of
resilience – specified and general (Walker & Salt 2006). Specified resilience is the
resilience of some specified part of the system to a specified shock. General resilience is
the capacity of a system that allows it to absorb disturbances of all kinds, including
novel, unforeseen ones. If all attention and actions are focused on managing for
specified resilience, you may inadvertently be reducing resilience in other ways –
resilience to novel “surprises”.
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The manager of a town in a fire prone area might make preparedness for fires a priority.
(S)he might consider things like fire fighting capacity, knowledge of fuel loads, fire risk
assessment and a raft of things specifically to do with being prepared for fires. But if this
manager was asked to cope when an unknown disaster– it could be a disease outbreak,
flood, earthquake, riot or something right out of left field; then the focus would be more
about the general qualities of the town. What are its food reserves, diversity of skills to
deal with different types of emergencies, levels of trust and the ability of the community
to pitch in to help itself, distance from the nearest hospital, friends in high places who
will mobilise resources to help when things get tough, and so on. These are all general
qualities and they all relate to general resilience.
Social versus ecological resilience
Most of those researching resilience in ecological systems over the past few decades have
been influenced by CS Holling and his ideas about adaptive cycles (Holling 1973; Figure
2).
These cycles of resource capture and release, organisational complexity and rising and
falling certainty were initially observed in ecological systems but collaboration between
ecologists and social scientists has concluded that the same cycles occur in social
systems. Indeed, much of the work of social scientists like Elinor Ostrom and Graeme
Marshall on institutions for dealing with uncertainty (Ostrom 2002; Marshall 2010) have
drawn on research on ecological resilience. Thus, in concept there are few major
distinctions to be made between ecological and social resilience. In fact, the strong
consensus among resilience researchers is that the resilience of social and ecological
systems cannot, and should not, be considered independently as the two types of
systems are almost always coupled and strongly influence one another.
Figure 2: Simplified version of the adaptive cycle (adapted from Walker & Salt
2006)
Adaptability and transformability
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Adaptability is the capacity of a social-ecological system to manage resilience – to avoid
crossing thresholds, or to engineer a crossing to get back into a desired regime, or to
move thresholds to create a larger safe operating space.
Transformability is the capacity of a system to become a different system, to create a
new way of making a living. An example comes from South Eastern Zimbabwe where,
in the 1980s, ranchers transformed their cattle ranches to game hunting and safari parks
when the livestock industry proved unviable.
On the surface, it may appear there’s a tension between adapting and transforming.
Should you adapt or transform? But the tension is resolved when you consider the
system at multiple scales, because making the system resilient at a regional scale, for
example, may require transformational changes at lower scales (Folke et al, 2010).
Adapting and transforming are actually complementary processes.
A good example of this is the current proposed change to water allocation in Australia’s
Murray Darling Basin. Huge cuts in many sub-catchments have been identified as
necessary for the basin as a whole to continue functioning – to retain its identity as an
agricultural region. It will require transformational changes in a number of its irrigation
areas, from irrigation farming to some other kind of agriculture.
The process of transforming is never without pain. However, if transformation needs to
take place, it’s better to do it sooner than later. The costs of delay can be extremely high.
The three ingredients necessary for transformation are:



the preparedness to change (as opposed to a state of denial);
having the options for change (possible new “trajectories”); and
the capacity to change (Transformative change needs support from higher
scales, and also depends on having high levels of all capitals – natural, human,
built and financial).
The importance of resilience in landscapes
A diversity of resources, functions and response types in ecosystems (and in social
systems) is one the keys to being able to adapt to change. Figure 3 shows an old but
good example of the importance of functional and species diversity in an ecosystem. The
duplication of functions in common and uncommon species in this rangeland means
that if conditions change and the common species can no longer thrive there is the
chance for less common species to take over their role. This has been called “functional
redundancy” and “response diversity”. It is essentially an insurance policy. Ecosystems
with low response diversity can survive if conditions remain constant but are vulnerable
to collapsing into different states if conditions change.
Diversity is one factor that allows an ecosystem to keep functioning throughout periods
of change without going through a threshold or “tipping point”. Thresholds occur
Australia ■ State of the Environment 2011 Supplementary information
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A framework for assessing resilience in SoE 2011 reporting
because some of the important drivers of a system change slowly until they get to a point
where a critical feedback changes and the system’s behaviour alters rapidly. For example,
many lake systems flip into a different regime when too much phosphorus (a plant
nutrient) enters the lake. A small increase in phosphorus (P) levels in the lake sediment
pushes the system over a threshold and it begins to behave very differently. Due to
changes in P solubility under changing oxygen concentrations in the water, the amount
of P in the water jumps much higher (it’s very soluble under anaerobic conditions) and
won’t come down till P in the sediment is much lower. Algal growth is stimulated and
the lake goes from a clear water regime to a regime of algal blooms and dead fish. In a
system like that depicted in Figure 3, slow changes in climate might cause subtle changes
in the species composition of the system but major functional changes would not occur
until the system had exhausted its redundancy. For example, when all the ‘A’ functions
have been exhausted due to change the system may have crossed a resilience threshold
losing its function, structure, feedbacks, and identity shifting it to an alternative state.
Because humans tend to pay much more attention to rapid change than slow change, we
are frequently caught off guard by threshold changes.
Figure 3: Functional similarities between dominant and minor plant species in a
savanna rangeland community in southwest Queensland. Columns are
different species and patterns indicate similar functions (Walker et al.
1999).
Insights from research and practice
Research on what gives ecosystems and coupled social-ecological systems the ability to
maintain their essential functions and identity in the face of disturbances has yielded
insights that challenge aspects of natural resource policy and management but also offer
clues to actions that can be taken to build and/or maintain resilience in social-ecological
systems (Carpenter et al. 2001; Walker et al. 2004; Olsson et al. 2006; Walker & Salt
2006; Walker et al. 2009):


It is not useful to think of resilience as resistance to change (resistance creates
brittleness and vulnerability rather than resilience)
There is a trade off between specified resilience (the resilience to specified
disturbances) and general resilience (the capacity to absorb disturbances of all
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







kinds). Channelling all your efforts into one kind of resilience will reduce
resilience in other ways. So it is necessary to consider both
Resilience is not always desirable, for example decision makers often want to
change a system but its resilience works against change
Resilience should be considered together with adaptability (the ability of a
system to maintain its resilience by changing within limits) and transformability
(the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic
and/or social conditions make the existing system untenable)
Ecosystems rarely, if ever, function in isolation from human social systems so
considering the coupled systems is important
Considering the dynamics of social-ecological systems is vital for understanding
and managing resilience, especially considering where there is potential for
change to build to a point where the system might suddenly flip into a different
regime (i.e., pass through a threshold), because such thresholds define the limits
of a system’s resilience
Resilience should be considered at multiple scales above and below the scale of
interest (e.g. the resilience of a landscape will be affected not only by processes
occurring at that scale but also by processes occurring at a paddock, remnant
scale or finer scale and processes occurring at catchment, regional, national and
larger scales)
Self organisation tempered by frequent perturbation increases the likelihood that
a system will be resilient - controlling a system too much risks reducing
resilience
The three key requirements for general resilience are:

Diversity (of functions, resources, skills, approaches etc);

Modularity (connections that mean collapse of one part of a system
won’t bring the whole system down); and

Tight feedbacks (mechanisms by which information about change is
gathered and transmitted through the system so that appropriate
responses can be taken at appropriate scales and in a timely fashion
Also important for general resilience are:

Openness (the ease with which things like people, ideas and species can
move into and out of your system)

Reserves (natural, social and economic)

Leadership, social networks and trust (sometimes referred to as social
capital)
Assessing resilience in an SoE context
Resilience of what to what?
To draw conclusions about how well a system might “experience shocks while retaining
essentially the same function, structure and feedbacks, and therefore identity” it is necessary to be
clear what those functions, structure and feedbacks are. Some essential biophysical
functions, structures and feedbacks are obvious (e.g., a wetland will only remain a
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wetland if it retains certain characteristics). Other characteristics are less clear (e.g., does
a forest that has lost its koalas still have the same identity as one that still has them).
For native ecosystems that are primarily valued for their wildlife it might be enough to
base a resilience assessment on the functions, structures and feedbacks that define the
“health” of recognised biomes (e.g., wetland, grassland, shrubland, rainforest) as these
characteristics underpin biodiversity.
When dealing with native ecosystems that are valued for other services they provide to
humans (e.g., pest control, erosion prevention, stream regulation in agricultural
landscapes, cultural values in cultural landscapes, or amenity in and around built
environments), however, assessment of whether essential functions, structures and
feedbacks are maintained depends on knowing what is valued. This may or may not be
known.
As pointed out by Robert Joy, the key functions, structures and feedbacks of
atmospheric systems are related to effects on human health and well being, and these
effects are well defined.
In some cases it will be possible to consider what a system needs to be resilient to (see
“Assessing specified resilience”, below) but most systems will also need to be resilient to
unknown pressures (see “Assessing general resilience”, below).
Assessing specified resilience
Specified resilience is the resilience of some part of the system to particular kinds of
disturbance. Of most importance, it’s about whether a disturbance might push the
system over a particular threshold where it changes the way it functions (e.g., stops
producing grain or timber or providing habitat). Assessing specified resilience is about
identifying known and possible thresholds between alternate states (or regimes) the
system can be in.
Thresholds occur on underlying, controlling variables that often change slowly relative to
the variables managers are concerned about. For example, the variable of concern might
be crop production and the controlling variable along which a threshold for crop
production lies might be soil acidity. Because controlling variables often change slowly,
the changes tend not to get noticed by managers, and so thresholds are often not
factored in.
The aim in attempting to assess specified resilience is to produce some form of
representation of the system that shows possible thresholds and how they might interact
with each other. Because self-organizing systems operate at different scales and in all
three domains – social, economic and ecological (biophysical), thresholds can occur in
each domain and at each scale.
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To begin with, it’s helpful to consider known thresholds and thresholds of potential
concern. Then it’s a matter of attempting to construct simple conceptual models of how
the system is operating. Finally, stakeholders might consider engaging experts and
developing analytical models.
Assessing general resilience
The literature suggests that assessment of general resilience should include, at least,
consideration of diversity, modularity, tightness of feedbacks, openness, reserves and
leadership (Table 2).
Table 2: Examples of considerations for assessing general resilience
Resilience
component
Diversity
Vulnerability of
connections and
networks
(modularity)
Tightness of
feedbacks
Openness
Reserves
Leadership and
social capital
Examples of assessment considerations
Trends in diversity of genes, species, ecosystems, and landscapes in ecological
systems and of skills, ideas, training opportunities, and institutions in social
systems.
Consider the structure and function of connections and processes in socialecological systems so that collapse of one part of the system does not cause
collapse of other parts (includes connectivity of habitat in ecosystems,
allocation of responsibilities for information gathering and sharing networks
and environmental management, and overlap between institutions)
Consider the nature of feedbacks, including the processes within ecosystems
for natural population regulation, response to climate variability and change,
response of fires and other perturbations, and processes within social systems
for detection of change and initiation of action at appropriate time and spatial
scales by appropriate people
Processes to monitor, experiment and evaluate to learn, anticipate and
develop shared mental understanding are important
There is no “optimal” degree of openness. Its effects depend on how resilient
or non-resilient the system is in other ways, and either extreme (too open or
too closed) can reduce resilience. What trends are occurring? Is there any
evidence (social or ecological) that the system is becoming (or is) too closed?
In general, more reserves means greater resilience, and the trend to look for is
often one of a loss of reserves, both natural (such as habitat patches,
seedbanks), social (memory and local knowledge) and economic (levels of
savings). Can you identify any reserves that have come into play in the past
and are any of them changing?
Leadership, social networks and trust are three, intertwined social attributes
that emerge repeatedly from case studies of resilience as being important
contributors to the “coping capacity” of a community. They are often referred
to as “social capital”. Without them the response capacity of the socialecological system to disturbances is low. Can you identify any trends where
these attributes are under threat?
An SoE resilience report card
Figure 4 illustrates how resilience might fit with other elements of SoE assessment,
especially the elements of a DPRIR framework.
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A framework for assessing resilience in SoE 2011 reporting
Figure 4: Schematic representation of where resilience fits with other elements of
SoE reporting. The elements of a DPSIR approach are shown as
white boxes.
It is proposed that reporting on resilience in the 2011 SoE report be under the following
headings:



Evidence of past resilience
Preparedness for known or anticipated future pressures (i.e., specified resilience)
Factors affecting potential capacity to deal with surprises (i.e., general resilience)
Table 3 gives examples of what information might go into this assessment.
Table 3: Examples of the sorts of issues that might be considered in developing a
resilience assessment in the 2011 SoE Report
Chapter
Evidence of past
resilience
Preparedness for
known or
anticipated pressures
Sorts of resilience questions to be asked
Are there examples of how the “system” (e.g., biodiversity, land, inlands
water, built environment, cultural heritage) has coped (or not) with
pressures in the past? Past performance does not tell us whether the
system is or is not resilient now, but it gives clues to what aspects of the
system made it resilient or not and therefore we can draw some
inferences about whether or not those elements are still in place.
Examples:
 Soils might have been able to cope with floods in the past due to
ground cover
 Animals in woodlands might have coped with foxes in the past due
to the size of patches and the structural complexity of understorey
 Regulators might have been able to control pollutants in the
atmosphere due to levels of staffing and certain legislation
 Cultural heritage might have been able to cope with population
pressures because people were not so close to financial limits that
cause them to use every bit of land available
How much anticipation has been done about future pressures? Have
potential thresholds been identified? How much preparation has been
made? How well resourced and supported are those preparations?
Examples:
 How much thinking has been done about future fire regimes and
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A framework for assessing resilience in SoE 2011 reporting
Factors affecting
potential capacity to
deal with surprises
their potential effects on biodiversity, are there thresholds in
climatic or other change that could see fire regimes change
dramatically, what plans are being developed and are they
adequately resourced and supported by the right people and
institutions?
 How much thinking has been done about the impacts of population
growth on cultural heritage, are there thresholds of population
above which pressure on cultural heritage might escalate, what plans
are being developed to cope with these pressures, and how well
resourced are they in terms of funds and suitably trained people?
What trends are evident in relation to the diversity and adequacy of key
resources and might these be approaching critical thresholds?
Are environmental and societal processes connected in ways that allow
the necessary processes to continue of parts of the system fail?
Are ecological and societal processes in place to collect and share
relevant information about change and act on it as appropriate scales?
Examples:
 Is there evidence that declining diversity of species, functions and
habitats and/or the adequacy of landscape connections might be
reaching (or have past) a point where recovery from unexpected
pressures might be compromised?
 What is happening with respect to the diversity of research, skills
and experience being brought to bear on understanding
atmospheric processes and are these sufficient to allow early
detection and action to address unexpected pressures on the
atmosphere?
 Are governance arrangements in place to ensure that appropriate
people are involved in monitoring for change and taking action
early to prevent escalation of unexpected problems?
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