Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

transformative resilience 43
• Persistence – the capacity to withstand drastic disruptions without
losing its basic structure and function. One example of persistence
is the way a forest or a coastal town manages to recuperate from the
effects of a hurricane.
• Adaptive capacity enables a social-ecological system like a
community or a bioregion to maintain key functions during periods
of change. For example, a sustainable community needs to maintain
the ability to produce enough food and generate enough electricity
as the effects of climate change and peak oil begin to disrupt
harvests and global supply lines.
• Transformability – the capacity to transform in response to change
in order to create more appropriate systems when ecological,
political, social or economic conditions make the existing systems
unsustainable. For example, the series of ever more rapid and
severe economic crises is forcing the conclusion that a profound
transformation of our economic and monetary system towards
a differently structured green economy is now urgently required
(Huitric, 2009).
The multiple and converging crises we are facing will increasingly require a
transformative resilience response. As these crises progress, we are gradually
losing our ability to persist in the face of change and maintain our adaptive
capacity. If we wait for these crises to cause widespread disruptions, we
run the risk of irreversible deterioration. The International Futures Forum
distinguishes Resilience 1.0 (based on adaptive capacity and the ‘bounce
back’ to business as usual) from Resilience 2.0 (based on fundamental
systemic transformation that increases the ability to respond creatively to
change). Resilience 2.0 is also called transformative resilience.
How Can We Cocreate Transformative Resilience
in Social-Ecological Systems?
In social-ecological systems (SESs) the effect of our actions can sometimes
only be observed after long-time delay. In such complex dynamic systems,
with diverse agents and processes all interacting, cause and effect can be
non-linear with feed-back loops leading to sudden escalations, unforeseen
consequences and side effects.
What determines change in SESs over time are mainly the underlying,
slowly changing variables such as climate, land use, nutrient stocks, human
values and policies, as well as systems of governance and interdependencies
between local, regional, and global scales. SESs never exist in isolation;
they are nested within a holarchical or scalelinking structure of other
SESs. Spatial scalelinking connects individuals, communities, ecosystems,
bioregions, nations, all the way to the planetary scale (and beyond). Temporal
scale-linking can be understood as the way slow processes and fast processes