Obura2009-IUCN Congress report - Resilience sessions

Workshop Abstracts
One of the major challenges for progressing resilience-based management lies in the application of
resilience principles. While general resilience principles are influencing the way practitioners approach
coral reef management and conservation, there remains an urgent need for protocols for assessing
and mapping resilience in coral reef ecosystems.
An operational framework for assessing resilience
The first step in practical application of resilience principles is to define resilience in operational terms:
resilience of what to what? This workshop deals with coral reef vulnerability to climate change, in
particular to rising sea surface temperatures. Hence we are looking at the resilience of coral
communities to increasing sea temperatures. The specific attributes of coral communities that
underpin key values include the abundance (cover) of corals, their contribution to reef accretion and
the amount of habitat they provide. Two general properties determine the ability of coral communities
to persist in the face of rising temperatures: their sensitivity and their recovery potential. Sensitivity is
a combination of resistance (ability to experience exposure without bleaching) and tolerance (ability to
survive once bleached); recovery potential is
the likelihood that a coral will be replaced in
Management goal
the community once killed. Together,
Sustain ecosystem goods
and services
sensitivity and recovery potential determine
the resilience of coral communities to rising
sea temperatures (fig. 4).
Management objective
Maintain healthy coral
communities
For conservation practitioners and managers
concerned with climate change, the capacity
of coral reefs to sustain key ecosystem goods
Reef attributes
and services in the face of increasing sea
Coral cover; reef accretion;
habitat complexity
temperatures is rapidly emerging as a focal
issue. The array of benefits coral reefs
provide human communities is vast, spanning
Exposure
recreational, tourism, fishing, shoreline
Anomalously high sea
temperatures
protection, spiritual and biodiversity values.
Ultimately, however, these values depend
largely or entirely on the maintenance of
Sensitivity
Recovery potential
healthy coral communities. One of the
Resistance and tolerance of
Larval supply, settlement
fundamental (although often implicit) goals for
corals to thermal stress
success and juvenile survival
coral reef management and conservation,
then, is to sustain the provision of ecosystem
goods and services through the maintenance
Resilience
of healthy coral communities.
Ability of system to maintain coral cover,
The purpose for measuring reef resilience is
to deconstruct the various reef attributes and
driving processes in order to focus our
understanding of reef health, and manager’s
attention on attributes and processes they
can actively manage, and thereby improve
accretion and habitat complexity in the face
of rising sea temperatures
Fig. 4. Conceptual diagram for operationalising resilience
in coral reef management. Italicised text provides
specific examples for each general concept
the prospects for reefs surviving climate change impacts. Despite the urgent need and obvious appeal
of resilience-based management, there remains much work to do in developing, testing and refining
guidance for practical application of resilience principles. Initial work in the Great Barrier Reef has
yielded encouraging results by demonstrating that resilience, at least when assessed at a local scale
using generic indicators, is a feasible framework for coral reef planning and management. Testing of
more detailed indicators by members of the IUCN Climate Change and Coral Reefs Working Group is
also showing promising progress.
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