Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

39 reefs to stewardship of the large-scale seascape. The transformation was triggered by a sense of urgency induced by threats to the reef of terrestrial runoff, overharvesting, and global warming. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority was crucial in the transformation and provided leadership throughout the process. Strategies involved internal reorganization and management innovation, leading to an ability to coordinate the scientific community, to increase public awareness of environmental issues and problems, to involve a broader set of stakeholders, and to maneuver the political system for support at critical times (Olsson et al. 2008). Multiscale resilience is fundamental for understanding the interplay between persistence and change, adaptability and transformability. Without the scale dimension, resilience and transformation may seem to be in stark contrast or even conflict. Confusion arises when resilience is interpreted as backward looking, assumed to prevent novelty, innovation and transitions to new development pathways. This interpretation seems to be more about robustness to change and not about resilience for transformation. The resilience framework broadens the description of resilience beyond its meaning as a buffer for conserving what you have and recovering to what you were. Beyond this concept of persistence, resilience thinking incorporates the dynamic interplay of persistence, adaptability and transformability across multiple scales and multiple attractors in SESs. Fruitful avenues of inquiry include the existence of potential thresholds and regime shifts in SESs and the challenges that this implies; adaptability of SESs to deal with such challenges, including uncertainty and surprise; and the ability to steer away from undesirable attractors, innovate and possibly transform SESs into trajectories that sustain and enhance ecosystem services, societal development and human well-being. CONCLUSIONS In a nutshell, resilience thinking focuses on three aspects of social–ecological systems (SES): resilience as persistence, adaptability and transformability. Resilience is the tendency of a SES subject to change to remain within a stability domain, continually changing and adapting yet remaining within critical thresholds. Adaptability is a part of resilience. Adaptability is the capacity of a SES to adjust its responses to changing external drivers and internal processes and thereby allow for development within the current stability domain, along the current trajectory. Transformability is the capacity to create new stability domains for development, a new stability landscape, and cross thresholds into a new development trajectory. Deliberate transformation requires resilience thinking, first in assessing the relative merits of the current versus alternative, potentially more favorable stability domains, and second in fostering resilience of the new development trajectory, the new basin of attraction. Transformations do not take place in a vacuum, but draw on resilience from multiple scales, making use of crises as windows of opportunity, and recombining sources of experience and knowledge to navigate social–ecological transitions from a regime in one stability landscape to another. Transformation involves novelty and innovation. Transformational change at smaller scales enables resilience at larger scales, while the capacity to transform at smaller scales draws on resilience at other scales. Thus, deliberate transformation involves breaking down the resilience of the old and building the resilience of the new. As the Earth System approaches or exceeds thresholds that might precipitate a forced transformation to some state outside its Holocene stability domain, society must seriously consider ways to foster more flexible systems that contribute to Earth System resilience and to explore options for the deliberate transformation of systems that threaten Earth System resilience.