Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

35 Resilience Thinking: Integrating Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability by Carl Folke, Stephen R. Carpenter, Brian Walker, Marten Scheffer, Terry Chapin and Johan Rockström This article was originally published in Ecology & Society, 15(4), 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-03610-150420 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license ABSTRACT Resilience thinking addresses the dynamics and development of complex social–ecological systems (SES). Three aspects are central: resilience, adaptability and transformability. These aspects interrelate across multiple scales. Resilience in this context is the capacity of a SES to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds. Adaptability is part of resilience. It represents the capacity to adjust responses to changing external drivers and internal processes and thereby allow for development along the current trajectory (stability domain). Transformability is the capacity to cross thresholds into new development trajectories. Transformational change at smaller scales enables resilience at larger scales. The capacity to transform at smaller scales draws on resilience from multiple scales, making use of crises as windows of opportunity for novelty and innovation, and recombining sources of experience and knowledge to navigate social–ecological transitions. Society must seriously consider ways to foster resilience of smaller more manageable SESs that contribute to Earth System resilience and to explore options for deliberate transformation of SESs that threaten Earth System resilience. Keywords: adaptability; adaptation; resilience; social-ecological systems; transformability; transformation INTRODUCTION One of the most cited papers in Ecology and Society was written to exposit the relationships among resilience, adaptability and transformability (Walker et al. 2004). That paper defined resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks” (Walker et al. 2004:4). Discussions since publication of that paper have exposed some confusion about the use of the term resilience. The idea that adaptation and transformation may be essential to maintain resilience may at first glance seem counterintuitive, as it embraces change as a requisite to persist. Yet the very dynamics between periods of abrupt and gradual change and the capacity to adapt and transform for persistence are at the core of the resilience of social–ecological systems (SESs). We therefore strive to develop a theoretical framework for understanding what drives SESs, centered around the idea of resilience. We term this framework resilience thinking. Here we rephrase the three core elements of resilience thinking to embrace these ideas. RESILIENCE: THE HISTORY OF A CONCEPT Resilience was originally introduced by Holling (1973) as a concept to help understand the capacity of ecosystems with alternative attractors to persist in the original state subject to perturbations, as reviewed by e.g. Gunderson (2000), Folke (2006) and Scheffer (2009). In some fields the term resilience has been technically used in a narrow sense to refer to the return rate to equilibrium upon a perturbation (called engineering resilience by Holling in 1996). However, many complex systems have multiple attractors. This implies that a perturbation can bring the system over a threshold that marks the limit of the basin of attraction or stability domain of the original state, causing the system to be attracted to a contrasting state. This is qualitatively different from returning to the original state, and Holling’s (1996) definition of ecological or ecosystem resilience has been instrumental to emphasize this difference. The concept of alternative stable states with clear-cut basins of attraction is a highly simplified image of reality in ecosystems. Attractors may be stable points or more complicated cycles of various kinds. Intrinsic tendencies to produce cyclic or chaotic dynamics are blended in intricate ways with the effects of environmental stochasticity, and with trends that cause thresholds as well as the nature of attractors to change over time. Nonetheless, we observe sharp shifts in ecosystems that stand out of the blur of fluctuations around trends. Such shifts are called regime shifts and may have different causes (Scheffer et al. 2001, Carpenter 2003). When they correspond to a shift between different stability domains they are referred to as critical transitions (Scheffer 2009). All of these concepts have precise definitions in the mathematics of dynamical systems (Kuznetsov 1998, Scheffer 2009). However, despite their elegance and rigor, they capture only part of reality. One of the main limitations of the dynamical systems theory