Resilience

Our world is being faced with unprecedented adversity. Profound environmental and social changes are threatening both the natural environment and its essential biodiversity, as well as human welfare and social justice for the world’s population. The increasing pressure to address these issues both locally and globally has led to a growing interest in the concept of resilience. Resilience is often defined as “the capacity [of a system] to tolerate, absorb, cope with, and adjust to changing social or environmental conditions while continuing to retain key elements of structure, function, and identity.”¹⁷ However, recent scholarship on resilience has identified that once a system is pushed beyond a certain threshold, it may have trouble retaining or returning to these key elements of structure and thus, resilience can be described as “the magnitude of change or disruption that a system can absorb before shifting to an alternative [or new] regime or state.”¹⁷ This updated conception of resilience puts forth a process similar to that of the aforementioned Two-Loop Model.

The concept of resilience in the natural world, in which growth and evolution result from adversity, has been widely accepted by scientists since the 1950s. Forest fires, for instance, are a prime example of a disturbance that stimulates new growth and regeneration. Following the destructive events of a forest fire,  valuable nutrients begin to collect on the forest floor, sunlight becomes more available, infant trees begin to grow, and the forest renews itself.¹⁸ This resilience in the face of disruption has allowed forests, like other natural phenomena, to survive and flourish over the course of history. In recent decades, however, resilience has come to be discussed across multiple disciplines, including psychology and social sciences. For instance, studying the resilience of government structures in the face of threats such as climate change is becoming more and more useful as it might trigger the rejection of regimes that no longer serve the current system and create new ones, which might better serve the system’s needs.

Resilience and Climate Change

While there are many efforts across Canada and globally to mitigate the most severe consequences of climate change, many of these have become unavoidable. Rural communities, in particular, may bear the brunt of climate disasters due to factors common in rural areas including limited transportation infrastructure, reliance on natural resources, and a lack of funding for social and physical infrastructure.¹⁹ While the situation is dire, it is important to note that much can be done by way of increasing resilience within communities, in both urban and rural contexts. The Centre for Climate and Energy Solutions defines climate resilience as “the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to hazardous events, trends, or disturbances related to climate.”²⁰

Understanding that while efforts to mitigate and stop climate change do exist, climate and ecosystem disruptions such as heat waves, flooding, and forest fires, are still a growing problem and are predicted to become more frequent. Resilience planning seeks to anticipate these changes and major events in order to minimize future economic, environmental, and social risks. This resilience planning includes policy adjustments, resource management, and infrastructure investments such as social services, transport, and energy with the goal of protecting communities and natural ecosystems from climate and ecosystem disruptions.²¹ It is important to note that there is no one-size-fits-all formula for resilience to climate change, and that resilience is based on the specific contexts and needs of the community in question. There are, however, some general community resilience planning essentials which are enumerated by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute as:

• “Providing continuous access to essential services: energy, food, water, shelter, healthcare, and transportation;
• Sustaining the functionality of modern systems and infrastructure;
• Maintaining the livability and comfort of systems which support modern lifestyles;
• Supporting populations which may be especially vulnerable, such as low income and aging populations;
• Planning land-use, system, and infrastructure strategies with the environment and natural forces in mind;
• Ensuring safety through improved emergency preparedness and strong communication between relevant agencies and first-responders;
• Offering diverse transportation and access options;
• Building structures and systems which are sustainable, flexible and durable.”²¹

Governments, both local and federal, play a key role in helping communities increase their resilience based on their unique contexts and needs in order to ensure the health and safety of all. However, successful resilience planning not only relies on governments, but also a wide range of stakeholders from local grassroots groups to international organizations, in both public and private sectors.²⁰

Resilience planning is taking on an increasingly valuable role as we move forward into an uncertain future that is threatened by the effects of climate change. Communities across the world have used COVID-19 as an opportunity to make structural changes that promote resilience to pandemics and infectious diseases, and the current effects of climate change can be used in the same way. Resilience to climate change can not only prevent displacement of people, financial distress, and fatalities, it can also improve social determinants of health by creating jobs, increasing social services, and better managing natural resources.²¹ Thus, climate resilience presents us with a promising path forward.

Essential Principles of Resilience

In the book, ‘Social-Ecological Resilience to Climate Change: Discourses, Frames and Ideologies’, scholar Anna Franca Plastina details four interrelated resilience-essential principles. Plastina explains the first principle as “learning to live with change and uncertainty.”²² Through this, resilience is achieved when communities at any scale can make constant adjustments to the uncertainty and change that comes with increasing climate variation. This adjustment might be achieved through learning from previous climate events and transforming our social structures and infrastructure based on the lessons learned, thus building future resilience.²²

Plastina describes the second principle as “nurturing diversity for reorganization and renewal” where reorganization is required after lessons are learned during a climate event, allowing the system to adapt and leading the process towards renewal. The notion of memory is important for this principle as it “acts as the bridge between the past and the future,”²² with the past representing a disturbance and the future representing resilience.

The third principle is “combining different types of knowledge and learning”, which emphasizes the importance of sharing knowledge in order to build resilience. For example, learning from and listening to stories told by Indigenous Elders allows us to build our understanding of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, which we can then apply towards building more ecologically resilient communities.²²

Finally, the fourth principle is “creating opportunity for self-organization”. This principle acknowledges that new opportunities can arise from disturbances. This may lead to the strengthening of resilience if lessons are learned from the past, allowing improvements to be made through these new opportunities.²² For example, an old and unsafe bridge washed away by flooding must be replaced; however, it can be rebuilt in order to withstand future flooding. These principles can be considered the main pillars of creating resilience in any system and, when applied to the context of adapting to climate change, can be very useful tools for resilient transformation.

Social-Ecological Resilience

The concept of social-ecological systems explicitly recognizes the intrinsic connection that humankind has with nature.²³ The resilience of this highly interconnected relationship depends on its ability to withstand threats from a number of disruptive factors. Changes that take place in these social and environmental situations are caused by factors that create stresses or disturbances in the social-ecological relationship.²⁴ A successful resilient system is considered to contain the capacity to tolerate, absorb, cope with, and have the ability to adjust to changing social and environmental conditions, all while retaining key elements of the system’s structure, function, and identity.²³

Tipping Points in Social-Ecological Systems

Continuous human appropriation of the biosphere is pushing the earth’s systems closer to climate-related tipping points.²⁵ Tipping points are defined as the phenomenon of regime shifts in ecological systems, where a system is moved past the point of its ability to recover from ecological stresses or disturbances.²¹ As a system nears a tipping point, the system loses its ability to cope with ecological change and thus, is pressured into shifting from one state into another. These regime shifts often occur unexpectedly and are sometimes impossible to reverse.²⁶

As this model suggests, the point in which the current state of an ecosystem, as illustrated by the ball, is pushed towards another regime is defined as the “tipping point”. As it enters this point, the ball has equal propensity to move back into its original regime, or it will be pressed into a new regime, changing both the ecosystem’s structure and function.²⁷ Once this change is made, it will take a considerable amount of energy, if the possibility even exists, to restore an ecological system back to equilibrium.

Absorptive, Adaptive, and Transformative Capacity

Scholar Tanner and colleagues outline resilience as a capacity that can be absorptive, adaptive, or transformative.²⁸ These three capacities lead to achieving resilient outcomes to varying extents, that is, the realization of health and safety in spite of shocks, stresses, and uncertainty.

Absorptive capacity, sometimes referred to as basic resilience, can be defined as taking intentional protective action that will help a system to cope with known shocks and stresses.²⁹ In other words, it is the ability to recover or ‘bounce back’ from adversity and in turn, maintain stability. Examples of factors that enhance resilience capacities include; accountable governing, informing, flexible planning, innovation, enhancing livelihood, and gender empowerment. Indicators that this capacity has been strengthened include; the presence of early warning systems, social protection schemes, and disaster risk/reduction laws.²⁹

Adaptive capacity is defined as the ability to intentionally adjust in anticipation of or in response to changes that can properly manage the situation.²⁹ Acceptance of change as ongoing and inevitable is a key component of adaptation. Characteristics of adaptive institutions include; having sufficient resources (financial, technological, and human) in place, having a culture of openness, accountability, and respect in a community, and thinking forward into the future and planning accordingly. Indicators that this capacity has been strengthened include; the sustainable use of natural resources, the generation of knowledge in diverse and inclusive forms as well as supportive legal and policy frameworks that support the adaptation of institutions.²⁹

Finally, transformative capacity is the capacity to make intentional change to stop or reduce the causes of risk, vulnerability, poverty, and inequality, and ensure the more equitable sharing of risk. This requires a transformation that addresses the systems and structures of inequity that perpetuate vulnerability for the most marginalized groups by taking a look at root causes.²⁹ Indicators that this capacity has been strengthened include groups who have previously been in conflict are working collaboratively together, engaging in actions of long term change that generate momentum for inclusive change, and uplifting lived experiences of vulnerable and marginalized groups.²⁹

Factors that Provide Resilience

Researchers have identified a number of social factors that provide resilience for systems when faced with social-ecological change. Identified in this domain are six social factors that build system resilience. These interlinked domains that contribute to a system’s adaptive capacity are: assets, flexibility, social organization, learning, socio-cognitive constructs, and agency.²³ The relationship between these domains can help determine a community’s opportunity for successful resilience.

1. Assets
   

   The assets that a community is able to draw upon can inform their resilience to social-ecological changes, especially when this involves a great diversity of resources. According to researchers, it is the general assumption that individuals of a wealthier status are more resilient and adaptable to change; however, social-ecological linkages that enhance the ability to exploit natural resources may be detrimental when undermining the long-term sustainability of ecosystems.²³ An example looks like this: as climate change disrupts natural fish ecosystems, fishers with access to more financial assets are able to easily adapt to lower catches by buying larger boats and taking longer trips to areas unaffected by climate disruption.²³ However, fishers who possess these assets but lack the flexibility to change could be likely to intensify fishing practices rather than acting in a flexible manner, thereby increasing exploitation of natural resources and further decreasing yields.²³

2. Flexibility
   

   The domain of flexibility informs the capacity of a community to adapt to changing paradigms that may follow social-ecological tipping points. A flexible system will enhance a community’s ability to evolve, leading to both robustness and transformation, which are two crucial parameters for a successful resilient system.³⁰ This is closely related to the idea of having an “insurance” that provides the ability for a system to manage shocks and an increased amount of options available for flexible solutions.²³

3. Social Organization
   

   Social organization has the opportunity to either inhibit or enhance resilience by supporting relationships beyond their immediate domain.²³ Diversity in participation across multiple sectors allows a community to have access to various perspectives and values. This will ultimately strengthen areas of resilience by including various needs, values, and “ways of knowing” as a community responds to paradigm shifts.³¹ These relationships range from social networks to institutions that are able to act as linkages across different scales and bridge diverse perspectives, thus enabling well-fitting solutions to the problems they seek to address.²³

4. Learning
   

   This domain of learning is not limited to access to information, but considers the interaction and processes that allow an individual to use learned information in addressing problems. Within a social-ecological context, learning can help build awareness of the complex linkages that exist between people and ecosystems that may work to build resilience over a period of time.²³ The ability for people to frame and reframe problems is essential for creating and maintaining resilient systems. Memory is also a critical part of these processes, which can provide experience from past experiences that can positively influence changing paradigms.

5. Socio-Cognitive Constructs
   

   Socio-cognitive dimensions can shape an individual’s perception of their ability to respond to ecological disturbances. Included in these dimensions are risk attitudes, personal experience, perceived social norms, and cognitive biases.²³ Researchers in social-cognitive theory suggest that individuals with high environmental self-efficacy are more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviour, especially when given strong contextual support.³² Thus, when considering these socio-cognitive constructs, attitudes regarding these perceptions can influence severity of risk associated with each domain in adaptive and resilience responses.

6. Agency
   

   Agency refers to an individual’s capacity to respond to social-ecological changes, manage their prospective situations, and control the events surrounding them.²³ When experiencing a strong sense of agency, an individual is more likely to consider change and engage in adaptive prospective behaviours. Thus, individual agency has been deemed highly important in factors leading to shifts in ecosystem-based and adaptive management.³³

Naturalist and Constructivist Views on Resilience

Crawford Stanley Holling’s socio-ecological systems (SES) approach to resilience has been a predominant theory since the 1970s, especially in the context of climate change. The SES approach asserts that human societies exist in a state of constant interactions with natural, social, economic, and technological environments, among many others.³⁴ Climate change, for example, is not just a product of natural processes, but also of social and economic processes. When speaking in terms of climate disasters due to climate change-related events, it has become clear that vulnerability is not solely a function of exposure to natural hazards, but also exposure to political, social or economic disadvantages.³⁴

Within resilience scholarship, two differing perspectives have emerged: naturalist resilience and constructivist resilience. Scholars Ossewaarde et al. explain in their article “Towards a context-driven research: a state-of-the-art review of resilience research on climate change”, that the main difference between these perspectives is that in naturalist resilience research, resilience is defined as a system property, while in constructivist resilience research, resilience is politically loaded and historically contingent.³⁴ In other words, the naturalist perspective describes resilience through natural science consisting of a system of physical properties. Contrarily, the constructivist perspective describes resilience as a historically contingent social construct, which is more critical and politically sensitive. In the context of climate change, naturalists would see resilience as the ability to adapt and recover from climate events caused by a changing natural environment. In contrast, constructivism sees resilience to climate change not only as a technical and scientific matter, but also a socio-political one.³⁴ As Ossewaarde et al. explain: “Constructivist resilience research has the great merit of providing a critical and most penetrating understanding of resilience as a political phenomenon that contains political intention and direction.”³⁴

In the early years of resilience research, the naturalist perspective was predominant; however, in recent decades, constructivist resilience has gained traction and now contributes equally to scholarship. Further, the bridging of naturalist and constructivist views presents us with a unique opportunity to enrich and renew our notion of resilience, which could prove critical for responding to the ecological and societal challenges of anthropogenic climate change.³⁴

Importance of Social Learning

Learning can be defined as “a change in knowledge, skills or attitudes, that may result in changes in behaviour.”³⁵ Social learning, on the other hand, as scholar Joop de Kraker details in his article “Social learning for resilience in social–ecological systems”, can be understood as “learning by social groups, resulting in changes at group level, through social interaction.”³⁵ As social-ecological systems consist of a close and active relationship between humans and nature, learning about negative environmental changes is vital for coping with these changes. Further, this learning is necessary for the ability of social groups to adapt to changes, rather than just individuals, generating wider-spread resilience.

Moreover, social learning can be seen as a change in understanding and a process that occurs through social interactions within social groups. The first step of the process consists of a setting allowing for communicative interaction between actors of a social group. The second consists of changes arising from the social learning process. Thirdly, outcomes will be achieved such as the development of a common understanding or greater trust among members of a social group. Finally, these changes may translate to greater system resilience which may appear in different forms, such as management or governance.³⁵ Thus, the notion of social learning is important for resilience research as it is considered a useful government instrument for building resilience in social-ecological systems.³⁵

In recent years, resilience scholarship has changed to include ‘transformability’, which de Kraker defines as “the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when the existing system has become unsustainable.”³⁵ This notion of creating an entirely new system, rather than altering an existing system, provides important possibilities for how climate change governance might be achieved. Rather than adapting systems that are currently unsustainable to be more sustainable, transformability allows for the complete overhaul of an existing system and the creation of a new truly sustainable system through social learning processes.