A synthetic framework for understanding and managing resilience of social-ecological systems to natural disasters

Background/Question/Methods

Human-induced climate change leads to increased climate variability and more frequent extreme events as well as to changes in average conditions. Meanwhile, human actions have reduced the capacity of ecosystems to provide important benefits to society, including their capacity to regulate and buffer extreme events. The combination of enhanced climate variability and reduced capacity of ecosystems to absorb shocks (i.e., reduced resilience) contribute to the observed increase in global frequency of natural disasters. This talk draws on the literature about social-ecological resilience to suggest a strategy for proactively managing social-ecological resilience to reduce the frequency of, and vulnerability to, natural disasters.

Results/Conclusions

Sources of ecosystem resilience to natural disasters include maintenance of soil resources and biogeochemical cycles; biological, successional, and landscape diversity; and historical disturbance regime. In today’s human-dominated world, people (including managers) are integral components of regional systems. In addition to maintaining those ecosystem properties listed above, social-ecological resilience can be fostered through active experimentation to learn what works. At a deeper level, coordination across scales and experimentation with the management regime itself through adaptive governance increases adaptive capacity and the flexibility with which decision makers can respond to extreme events and natural disasters. Focused efforts to enhance resilience to cope with a specific stress (e.g., drought) can reduce resilience to a broad spectrum of other stresses, including both natural and socio-economic stresses. Finally, extreme events in a directionally changing world increase the likelihood of abrupt transitions to new states with different sensitivities to extreme events. Many of these potential future states can be anticipated and the probability of state change modified by proactive stewardship. Some state changes are inevitable (and even desirable) in a directionally changing world, and these possibilities should be explored through scenario analysis and adaptive management.