Transcript Resilience for the future

A resilience approach to the future
Brian Walker
looming threats
- climate change
- peak oil, energy prices
-
food shortages and prices
water shortages and wars (Tibet / China)
new and old diseases, pandemics
social unrest /terrorism
increasing connectedness (globalisation,
financial risk correlation)
- increasing numbers of people with
increasing aspirations
“Rising Above The Gathering Storm”
(USA Academies 2008)
- the need for investment in science and
innovation
less and less room to manoeuvre
more and more need for ability to absorb
shocks – for resilience
Resilience
“the ability of a system to absorb
disturbance and re-organise so as to retain
the same structure, function, feedbacks
and identity”
resilience places an emphasis on the limits
to change
it puts a focus on thresholds (tipping
points) between alternate states, or
‘regimes’, of a system
the water table rises as trees are cleared
a threshold occurs at a depth of 2m
9 thresholds in the Goulburn-Broken catchment
Farm/ landscape
Landscape/catchment
Region/ nation
social
economic
biophysical
Tree cover and water table
equilibrium (E/T)
Water table
depth
Area salinized
Native veg cover
and biodiversity
Riverine ecosystem
condition
Water infrastructure
state
Farm financial
viability
Size of dairy & fruit
processing sectors
Shocks and
slow drivers
diseases
population
(demand)
markets
technology
long run
energy cost
climate
change
Values (e.g. environment vs.
agriculture) – water allocations
governance
Applying a resilience approach
- resilience is maintained by probing its
boundaries
- ‘specified’ (targeted) resilience, vs.
‘general’ resilience
- the cost of maintaining resilience vs. the
cost of not maintaining it
resilience vs. efficiency
what determines resilience?
- diversity
- modularity
- tightness of feedbacks
- openness – immigration, inflows, outflows
- reserves and other reservoirs (memory,
seedbanks, nutrient pools)
- overlapping governance/institutions
The Longford gas explosion
in Shepparton:
25 million litres of milk poured away
- no alternate power source for
pasteurisation machinery
(no “response diversity”)
“resilience” –
“adaptability” – capacity to manage resilience;
avoid thresholds
(leadership, trust, ‘social capital’, governance)
if a shift into a “bad” state has happened,
or is inevitable, the only option is
transformation
“transformability” - capacity to
transform into a different kind of system;
a new way of living, and making a living
(the first rule of holes!)
determinants of transformability
- preparedness to change
- capacity to change
- options for change
Where do we need to enhance resilience
of existing systems?
Where do we need to transform?
A resilience approach to the future
- don’t aim for some “optimal” state
- learn about thresholds and aim to avoid them
- let the system self-organise within the range of
acceptable states (‘command-and-control’ doesn’t work for
very long)
- maintain general resilience and embrace change
- promote and sustain diversity, of all kinds
- restrict control of environmental and ecological
variability
- be ready for and capable of transformational change
- encourage learning, innovation and experiments
- beware of partial solutions!