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You are here: Home Discuss Session 8 – 11.01.2010 Emergent properties of coupled human-environment systems Topic 2: The relationship of resilience and vulnerability

Topic 2: The relationship of resilience and vulnerability

Up to Session 8 – 11.01.2010 Emergent properties of coupled human-environment systems

Topic 2: The relationship of resilience and vulnerability

Posted by wclark at October 08. 2010

The second topic identified by the moderator and student group is the treatment in the chapter of resilience, vulnerability, and their interrelationships. Specifically, both resilience and vulnerability are frequently discussed as general properties of systems, but some literature (see recommended readings) contradicts this assumption and argues that measurement of resilience (and by extension, vulnerability) requires specification of the disturbance agent and the system property of interest. In addition, the chapter places resilience, defined as the capacity to withstand and adapt, as a component of vulnerability. Is this the appropriate relationship?

Re: Topic 2: The relationship of resilience and vulnerability

Posted by Amar at November 01. 2010

In fact, while I appreciate the question and have raised some more perspectives relating to this in the first topic listed for discussion today, I thought it would also be appropriate to situate this relationship against the definition of sustainable development and policy measures arising out of it. A highly resilient system could require enormous costs in implementation or difficulty in enforcement. Some of these issues have been discussed in the paper, "Resilience and Sustainable Development : Building Adaptive Capacity in a World of Transformations",  
Carl Folke, Steve Carpenter, Thomas Elmqvist, et al. , April 2002  - a scientific background paper on resilience for the process of The World Summit on Sustainable Development on behalf of  The Environmental Advisory Council to the Swedish Government.

Re: Topic 2: The relationship of resilience and vulnerability

Posted by lstokes at November 04. 2010

Just a quick comment to capture an idea which came up during the planning group's discussion (that I don't want to be lost!) 

Tara pointed out several times that the way we approach vulnerability in human systems and environment systems is somewhat different. In environment systems, when we talk about resilience, we are discussing losing parts of the system without breaking the overall functions (e.g. ecosystem services) of the system. For this reason, we could lose part of the system (e.g. a large stand of trees), and the outcome would still be acceptable provided the resilience of the system is still sufficient to regenerate this area (this is in line with the Perfecto and Vandermeer article on corridors and the resilience of overall landscape matrices).

In contrast, with human systems, when we talk about vulnerability we are also engaging with ethical considerations. We cannot, in the same way, justify losing part of humanity but still maintaining a resilient human system. I'm not sure what the implications of this analysis are, but I think it's an important point to consider when comparing these ideas in human and environment systems using measures including vulnerability and resilience (and the credit for the idea goes to Tara Grillos!)

 

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