Insight, part of a Special Feature on Managing Surprises in Complex Systems Ecological and Human Community Resilience in Response to Natural Disasters
By L. Gunderson. 2010
283 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Ecological resilience, adaptive cycles, and panarchy are all concepts that have been developed to explain abrupt and often surprising changes in complex socio-ecological systems that are prone to disturbances. These types of changes involve qualitative and quantitative alterations in systems' structures and processes. This paper uses the concepts of ecological resilience, adaptive cycles, and panarchies to compare ecological and human community systems. At least five important findings emerge from this comparison. 1) Both systems demonstrate the multiple meanings of resilience—both in terms of recovery time from disturbances and the capacity to absorb them. 2) Both systems recognize the role of diversity in contributing to resilience. 3) The comparison highlights the role of different forms of capital and 4) the importance of cross-scale interactions. 5) The comparison reveals the need for experimentation and learning to build adaptive capacities. All of these ideas have broad implications for attempting to manage complex systems with human and ecological components in the face of recurring natural disasters.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b28655a2649d73678d32710157c8a021dfdd5ce3
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Global and Planetary Change
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Coupled Vulnerability and Resilience: the Dynamics of Cross-Scale Interactions in Post-Katrina New Orleans (2011, background): “This analysis builds on scholarly works that have used urban ecosystem analysis in examining change and stability in patterns and processes of post-trauma social and ecological recovery (see Ernstson et al. 2010a, b, Gunderson 2010).”
- A Theory on Urban Resilience to Floods—A Basis for Alternative Planning Practices (2012, background): “Moreover, individual people matter in hazard management, although individual creatures are irrelevant to ecological systems that build resilience through system-level adaptation where less-fit individuals are continuously replaced (Gunderson 2010).”
- Pathways to Integrated Resilience Science (2015, background): “…economic crises, global warming, and disease pandemics have spurred great interest in the interconnected resilience of individuals, families, communities, countries, natural systems, and economies at many levels (Brown, 2014; Gunderson, 2010; Masten, 2014a; Masten&Obradovi c, 2008;Welsh, 2014).”
- Resilience in developing systems: the promise of integrated approaches (2016, background): “For example, efforts to prepare and respond to natural disasters or terrorism require attention to the interplay of multiple systems (Gunderson, 2010; Masten, Narayan, Silverman, & Osofsky, 2015).”
- Panarchy: Theory and Application (2014, methodology): “Panarchy has been used as a framework for managing change (Gotts 2007), identifying scales (Petrosillo and Zaccarelli 2010; Zaccarelli and others 2008), and identifying aspects of resilience (Angeler and others 2010; Gunderson 2010; Fraser and Stringer 2009; Fraser and others 2005), including causes”