Realizing resilience for decision-making

Grafton, R. Q., Doyen, L., Béné, C., Borgomeo, E., Brooks, K., Chu, L., Cumming, G. S., Dixon, J., Dovers, S., Garrick, D., Helfgott, A., Jiang, Q., Katic, P., Kompas, T., Little, L. R., Matthews, N., Ringler, C., Squires, D., Steinshamn, S. I., … Wyrwoll, P. R. (2019). Realizing resilience for decision-making. In Nature Sustainability (Vol. 2, Issue 10, pp. 907–913). Springer Science and Business Media LLC. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0376-1

Researchers and decision-makers lack a shared understanding of resilience, and practical applications in environmental resource management are rare. Here, we define social-ecological resilience as a property of social-ecological systems that includes at least three main characteristics — resistance, recovery and robustness (the ‘three Rs’). We define socio-economic resilience management as planning, adaptation and transformational actions that may influence these system characteristics. We integrate the three Rs into a heuristic for resilience management that we apply in multiple management contexts to offer practical, systematic guidance about how to realize resilience.