Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Australian, and his work in temperate places in northern America has defined an
important framework of modern population ecology, the non-linear dynamics of
predator-prey systems. However, there is also a significant heritage for the concept
of resilience in the boom-and-bust ecologies in the Australian desert and rangeland
country. Even a global science can have heritage from one or several very particular
places.
Because resilience is a concept that creates particular expertise useful in dealing
with global change, it is useful to look briefly at the history of global change itself.
Global change science is a suite of knowledge systems that include climate change
science, global economics, demography, biodiversity science and global environ-
mental change in all its facets. Resilience is closely allied with a range of global
projects including the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP) based
in Stockholm; Analysis, Integration and Modeling of the Earth's System (AIMES)
based in Boulder, Colorado, USA; and the International Human Dimensions
Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) based in Bonn, Germany.
These groups have been influential in framing research agendas and findings for the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading international
body assessing the current state of knowledge of climate change and its potential
environmental and socio-economic impacts. The IPCC was established under
the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and is
co-located with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva,
Switzerland. The IPCC does not itself conduct research or monitor climate-related
data or parameters, but it sponsors and directs research that informs its mission,
including drawing on the work of other global change brokers including IGBP,
AIMES, IHDP and the World Weather Research Programme, which has been part
of WMO since 1980 (Robin and Steffen, 2007). A common language is important
to discussions between different scientific groups and the policy advisors in IPCC.
Holling's resilience science in 1973
The prehistory of resilience and its role in global change science are complex. Here
I focus on its trajectory from ecology, because this did much to theorise the space
between science, policy and adaptive management. Holling's (1973) definition of
resilience added a crucial new concept to ecological systems thinking, arguably the
most important since the term ecosystem had been introduced (Tansley, 1935).
Instead of looking at the stability of species and associations of species, resilience
focused on measuring how ecosystems recovered or changed after shocks. No
longer was science concerned to measure balanced ecosystems, idealised climax
associations of biota or ecosystems in equilibrium. Rather, the new ecology focused
on the surprises and the imbalances: it looked at transitions rather than at steady
states.
Perhaps, too, the world was ready for this new idea in 1973. The year was sig-
nificant for the international political context that was all about shocks, particularly
the oil shocks that suggested that western society could not continue to grow
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