New Resilience Research Institute seeks Program Director
SARAS (South American Institute for Resilience and Sustainability Studies) is an emerging transdisciplinary institute designed to generate critical insights allowing South America to build sustainable futures. Founding organizers are Marten Scheffer and Nestor Mazzeo. SARAS will integrate across a broad range of knowledge using innovative approaches and integrating social and natural sciences, mathematics and arts. See announcements page for more information on this position and other announcements.
Collaboration for Sustainability
The Stockholm Resilience Centre and World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) have formed a unique partnership to tackle the challenge of global sustainability. By applying the planetary boundaries framework to explore how WBCSD's Vision 2050 plan can create sustainability they aim to address critical environmental problems. "This is exactly the kind of innovative and strategic type of connections we need to co-create our Connector's program" says Gail Whiteman, Professor-in-Residence at WBCSD and Leader of the RA's Connector Program which aims to facilitate collaborative approaches and extend resilience practice.
Christo Fabricius appointed Science Leader of Resilience Alliance
Christo Fabricius, Professor at Nelson Mandela Metroplitan University (NMMU) in South Africa, is the Resilience Alliance's new Science Leader. With Christo's appointment, the RA enters a new and reinvigorated phase of its fifteen-year mission to be at the forefront of integrative research on social-ecological systems. Following his term as Campus Principal at NMMU, Christo will continue to develop and implement the RA's science program during his term from 2012-2014.
Gail Whiteman, Professor at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, appointed Professor-in-Residence at WBCSD, April 16, 2012
Gail's appointment at WBCSD follows on the heels of her joining the Resilience Alliance recently as part of the Dutch node that also includes Professor Marten Scheffer at Wageningen University. Gail's expertise in corporate sustainability and resilience thinking makes her ideally suited to provide academic advice and inform priorities at WBCSD.
Learning how to change in order not to change: Lessons from ecology for an uncertain world. Dr. Brian Walker delivered the annual Krebs 2012 lecture at the Institute for Applied Ecology, University of Canberra. View his lecture online.
Resilience Assessment Workbook for Practitioners Version 2.0. A fully revised workbook complete with new examples, updated framework, and an expanded section on synthesizing the assessment findings provides an alternative way of thinking about and practicing natural resource management.
Visit resilience assessment to download the workbook and browse new online resources including examples of key concept applications, an annotated bibliography, and an open database of resilience assessment projects.
BOOKS
Resilience Practice
Resilience Practice builds on the insights of Resilience Thinking published in 2006, extending the line of enquiry from how much in the way of shocks natural systems can handle to how can these systems that sustain us be managed to strengthen their resilience. Published in August 2012, Resilience Practice answers a growing call for the need to better understand how to implement resilience in the day-to-day management of social-ecological systems. For more information or to order the book, visit the publisher websites: Island Press andCSIRO.
Collaborative Resilience: Moving Through Crisis to Opportunity
Edited by Bruce Goldstein (2011). Contributors examine efforts to collaborate after natural disaster, technological failure, economic collapse, or acts of violence, and describe how communities have survived and even thrived by building trust and interdependence. Cases include environmental assessment in Cozumel, Mexico, governance of the Montana's Blackfoot Valley, fisheries management in Southeast Asia's Mekong region; and restoration of fire regimes in the U.S. Visit the author's website.
Social Network Analysis: A quantitative approach to the study of social relations
In this book, edited by Orjan Bodin and Cristina Prell (2011), the use of the SNA in studying natural resource management is explored. The authors show how the relational approach provides the means to uncover and analyze the complex patterns of interactions among actors that characterize most real-world governance settings and how this can be used to explain various governance outcomes. The book is available here on the Cambridge University Press website.
Spatial Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems By Graeme Cumming (2011). The first book to comprehensively cover the influence of spatial variation on the resilience of social-ecological systems. From the publisher's website "This book will become a shining star, a classic in the explosion of new ideas and approaches to studying and understanding social-ecological systems" Carl Folke, Science Director of the Stockholm Resilience and Director of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics.
Foundations of Ecological Resilience Edited by Lance Gunderson, Craig Allen, and C.S. Buzz Holling (2010). From the publisher's website "Foundations of Ecological Resilience is a collection of the most important articles on the subject of ecological resilience - those writings that have defined and developed basic concepts in the field and help explain its importance and meaning for scientists and researchers."
Principles of Ecosystem Stewardship: Resilience-Based Natural Resource Management in a Changing World. The first textbook to take a resilience-based approach to natural resource management is now available from the publisher’s website. Written for students, researchers, and practitioners, the textbook links current research with practical applications for managing ecosystems in times of change and uncertainty. Edited by Resilience Alliance members Stuart F. Chapin, Gary Kofinas, and Carl Folke.
Resilience Thinking A book by CSIRO scientist and RA Program Director Brian Walker and science writer David Salt provides an accessible introduction to resilience research and argues for a dramatic change in how natural resources are managed. The resilience framework is explored by way of five case studies that demonstrate how communities are better able to withstand cycles of change when ecological drivers are better understood and when natural change is embraced rather than controlled. Copies of the book can be ordered online from Island Press
RA RESOURCES
Resilience Assessment Workbooks - The RA has developed two workbooks for assessing resilience in social-ecological systems - one for natural resource managers and practitioners and a second for research scientists. Both employ strategic questions and activities designed to explore system parameters and management options for social-ecological systems from a resilience perspective.
Join the RA's researcher database, submit your own profile, and search the database to find others working in your field. Anyone may submit their information for review and inclusion in the database. Database fields include: name, institution, position, country, geographic area of research, keywords, brief summary of research interests, and contact information.
Join the RA's email group for graduate students and post-docs doing resilience-related research. The email group is open to all graduate students/post-docs who are interested in discussing resilience research and sharing information on events, conferences, literature, etc. Read More.