Evolutionary Resilience and Strategies for Climate Adaptation

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to develop a framework by drawing on three broad perspectives on resilience: engineering, ecological, and evolutionary, and to use this framework to critically examine the approach adopted by the draft London's climate change adaptation strategy. The central argument of the paper is that the Strategy's emergency planningcentred approach to climate adaptation veers between a standard ecological understanding of resilience and the more rigid engineering model. Its emphasis is on identifying 'exposure' and 'vulnerability' to risk from climate events and on bouncing back from the consequences of such exposures to a normal state, rather than on the dynamic process of transformation to a more desirable trajectory. The paper concludes that fostering resilience involves planning for not only recovery from shocks, but also cultivating preparedness, and seeking potential transformative opportunities which emerge from change.

Interrogating resilience: toward a typology to improve its operationalization

“…More recently, nonequilibrium views have emerged in response to arguments that equilibrium-based approaches are ill-equipped to explain the geographical diversity, variety, and unevenness of the resilience of places (Pendall et al 2010, Pike et al 2010, while nonequilibrium resilience is said to better account for the ability of urban systems to adapt and adjust to changing influences (Pickett et al 2004). Thus, an integrated and holistic, dynamic and evolutionary SER interpretation is proving more useful to urban planning (Davoudi 2012, Davoudi et al 2013). …”

Towards an Urban Resilience Index: A Case Study in 50 Spanish Cities

“…Over the last four decades, the term resilience has been used in many different ways [4][5][6][7][8][9] and in many different fields [3,9], to such an extent that some authors wonder if the concept has become meaningless or may be a bridging concept among disciplines [2]. At the local, national and international level, resilience has even become a priority in urban planning, having been included as a main objective in local strategies for climate change adaptation [8] or in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations Development Programme [10].…”

Sources of Resilience in Agricultural Cooperatives: Lessons Learnt From 25 Years of Experience in Murcia (Spain)

“…Moreover, in 2008, Perry Wears established as an antonym of the term resilience the term fragility due to the inability of a fragile system to adapt to the new situation. In particular, this research is based on the conceptual framework that defines resilience as formed by the aspects established by Walker et al (2004) and Folke et al (2010): persistence, adaptability and transformation, and the proposed Davoudi et al (2013): learning. The working model of Camposeven as cooperative and co-management in its decision-making process have also contributed to resilience.…”

“…The key is not that these three aspects are applied equally but that one or the other is applied depending on the situation. Other researches have included learning into the concept of resilience (Lloyd et al, 2013;Davoudi et al, 2013), both individual and social learning, due to their relevance when having to restructure a system in response to shocks. Thus, the conceptual framework of socio-ecological systems resilience consists of four dimensions: persistence, adaptability, processing and learning capacity.…”