Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
resilience emphasize the speed of recovery from a disturbance, highlighting
the difference between resilience and resistance, where the latter is the extent
to which disturbance is actually translated into impact e. It is argued by many
ecologists that resilience is the key to biodiversity conservation and that
diversity itself enhances resilience, stability and ecosystem functioning
Ecological economists also argue that resilience is the key to sustainability in
the wider sense. Certainly resilience is related to stability, but it is not clear
whether this characteristic is always desirable.,
Variability in ecological systems is in some ways inherently predictable,
but in other ways is always surprising. Holling's ‗theory of surprise' is based
on the notion of discontinuities and on the nature of ecological systems. More
recently Holling has intimated that the philosophical basis of managing the
environment is determined by the world-views of nature where people
managing resources conceive of the environment as either benign. Whichever
view is adopted of how ecological systems work, surprises are still inherent in
the system. In [24] it has been suggested that human intervention inevitably
leads to surprises which confound social expectations while not being
unpredictable from a scientific viewpoint; which are generally harmful to
social resilience and human welfare but also create windows of opportunity in
environmental management. Thus the resilience of social systems is related in
some (still undefined) way to the resilience of the ecological systems on which
social systems depend. This is most clearly exhibited within social systems
that are dependent on a single ecosystem or single resource. Simply taking the
concept of resilience from the ecological sciences and applying it to social
systems assumes that there are no essential differences in behaviour and
structure between socialized institutions and ecological systems. This is clearly
contested in the social sciences. Rather, the parallels between ecosystem
resilience and social resilience have been hinted at in several disciplines,
including human geography, human ecology and ecological economics [24].
There is no precise definition of resilience. In reality, seeking to analyze
the resilience of social systems by using analogies from the ecological systems
is akin to endogenizing the role of social institutions in the wider environment
. There are two elements in examining the applicability of social resilience in
terms of the physical environment. First there is the issue of dependency of
social systems on the environment itself - are communities and institutions
which are directly dependent on natural resources and themselves linked to the
resilience of the ecosystem? In other words, are there direct linkages between
ecological and social resilience? In this sphere research in the areas of human
ecology is relevant. The second issue concerns the resilience of institutions. As
