Resilience Definition Environmental Science

The evolution of resilience thinking is coupled to social ecological systems and a truly intertwined human environment planet.

Resilience definition environmental science. Ecological resilience the ability of an ecosystem to maintain its normal patterns of nutrient cycling and biomass production after being subjected to damage caused by an ecological disturbance. A working definition of. The term resilience is a term that is sometimes used interchangeably with robustness to describe the. Measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables.

Resilience is about cultivating the capacity to sustain development in the face of expected and surprising change and diverse pathways of development and potential thresholds between them. Minimizing environmental risks associated with disasters quickly returning critical environmental and ecological services to functionality after a disaster while applying this learning process to reduce vulnerabilities and risks to future incidents. Resilience is an emergent phenomenon of complex systems which means it cannot be deduced from the behavior of the individual parts of a system. The index could be used to support disaster decision making.

Key workshop outcomes include. Most definitions of resilience include the overcoming of stress or adversity or a relative resistance to environmental risk bowes jaffee 2013. The broader systems framework definition of resilience is the capacity of a dynamic system to withstand or recover from significant challenges that threaten its stability viability or development sapienza masten 2011. Scientists understand complex systems to be self organizing i e positive reinforcements exist often between biota and abiotic processes such as fire to be hierarchically structured and to possess uncertainty nonlinear dynamics and emergent phenomena.