Obura2009-IUCN Congress report - Resilience sessions

Workshop Discussion and Findings
Workshop discussions and findings
Coral reef ecosystems are under unprecedented threat from a combination of local and global
stresses. At stake are the livelihoods and wellbeing of hundreds of millions of people, and ecosystem
goods and services worth billions of dollars. Understanding the nature and strength of human
dependency on coral reef resources and implementing effective strategies to build resilience across
ecological and social systems is critical to alleviate the ‘coral reef crisis’. While there remain large
gaps in our understanding of the problem and potential solutions, policy development and
implementation lags behind current knowledge. This workshop aims to explore science-policy and
management-policy gaps to identify policy approaches and tools that can support efforts to build
resilience of coral reefs in the face of climate change.
Resilience is an emerging paradigm for understanding and
managing complex ecosystems and the interactions
between ecosystems and the people that depend on them.
With continuously increasing human population pressures
and changes in the earth’s climate, natural resource
managers face an urgent need to better understand how
the world is changing, from local to global levels, and how
to develop meaningful management strategies to cope with
change and maintain natural processes. This need is
particularly critical for coral reefs, which are highly complex
and diverse systems and vital to the welfare of large human
populations throughout the tropical world, and among the
most vulnerable ecosystems to global changes.
Resilience definitions.
For discussion in the workshop
sessions, and for consistency across
science, management and policy issues,
resilience was defined as “the ability of
an ecosystem to cope with change or
to recover to its original state
following a disturbance”.
‘Resistance is used here in the narrow
sense of corals’ ability to resist
bleaching and mortality during a hightemperature
stress event.
Assessing reef resilience
The purpose of discussion in this first session was to relate the science of resilience to its use in
management and policy frameworks.
A resilience framework for assessment
The IUCN-CCCR resilience assessment approach represents an attempt to operationalize this in a
monitoring/assessment context, thus provides a useful platform for this exercise. The presentations
covered general evidence for resilience and the key drivers that maintain it, how we have developed
assessment methods to measure some key components of resilience, and linkages to social
resilience. To be useful in understanding reef resilience in management and policy settings, it is
critical to simplify the complex dynamics and components of reef ecosystems into a minimum set, and
to specify ways to measure these and interpret the measurements simply and reliably.
Discussion circled around the need to distinguish
among the diversity of factors, species and
compartments that make up a coral reef and
associated ecosystems. As currently understood,
the primary compartments in the coral reef that
are amenable to visual assessment
measurements can be simplified to three parts
(fig. 1), namely corals, algae and fish/consumer
functional groups. In order to understand
community dynamics, in addition to having
information on these groups, it is important to
know;
Fig. 1. Resilience compartments model, coral
1) the ecological interactions that drive dynamics
within and among these groups, and ‘strong interactions‘ that influence them from other
compartments;
2) habitat and environmental influences that directly affect these compartments and the interactions
between them; and
3) external drivers, including anthropogenic and climate factors.
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