Solutions Volume 5, Issue 5

September-October 2014, Volume 5, Issue 5

For a sustainable and desirable future

Solutions Resilience

Can Resilience Deliver a More Sustainable Future?

by Joseph Fiksel, Iris Goodman, and Alan Hecht How to Build Smarter Energy Systems for Cities

by Peter C. Evans and Peter Fox-Penner What the Ancient Maya Can Tell Us About Sustainability and Resilience

by Scott Heckbert, Robert Costanza, and Lael Parrott Designing Agriculture for the Future

by Elena M. Bennett et al.

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Black Swans and Ugly Ducklings

by David W. Orr

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Saundry, P. (2014). Disaster Resilience: Reflections from a National Conference. Solutions 5(5): 1. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/disaster-resilience-reflections-from-a-national-conference/

Editorial by Peter Saundry

Disaster Resilience: Reflections from a National Conference

F

or three days in January 2013, a thousand scientists, policy experts, and disaster-prevention practitioners gathered in Washington, DC to develop strategies to make communities more resilient and sustainable in the face of more frequent and severe environmental disasters.

Most of the authors in this issue of Solutions were present at this conference. As conference Chairman, I will highlight a few cross-cutting ideas that emerged from synthesizing nearly 200 recommendations from 23 workshops, as well as a special symposium on resilience and sustainability led by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and chaired by Joseph Fiksel and Alan Hecht.

Boundaries and Bridges Everyone is aware of the importance of working across traditional boundaries; engaging not just with scientists, engineers, policymakers, and practitioners, but also with those folks who are directly threatened by environmental problems. The heroes who make their communities resilient are the same ones who make them worthwhile places to live, and magically appear in a crisis to rescue, heal, calm, and help rebuild—your neighbors. “Bridging” organizations and processes work over the long term to produce resources such as preparedness plans for the next hurricane/tornado/drought/flood/ earthquake—you name it. When anticipating those possibilities, communities that actively engage science, policy, practice, and social capital become more and more resilient. January’s gathering produced

many specific examples of how this unfolds in different situations, but at their core is a recognition of the boundaries that exist and a deep commitment to bridging them.

Resilience’s Wisdom Hierarchy Resilience is wisdom applied to communities. We have all seen the pyramid—data is the base, then information, then knowledge, and at the apex, wisdom. If only it were that simple. The complexity arises because many different people, processes, and organizations are involved in each section of the pyramid. The wisdom of resilience requires integration of data and knowledge (just among government agencies would be a great start).

Scientists and other scholars mine the data to discern patterns and extract information. When they work together with practitioners (say biologists with urban planners) then the knowledge of “how to” is revealed (like how to use a wetland for storm protection). When they share that knowledge through public education, wisdom flowers—even politicians get smarter. Suddenly wetland “buffers” appear in zoning ordinances and your basement stays dry when the next storm hits.

Research and Development, Resilience and Seed Corn Who builds the lower levels of the “wisdom pyramid”? Just as farmers invest in seed corn to plant, successful societies invest in research and development because it creates the data, information, and knowledge needed to make a community resilient (as

well as safe and prosperous). While much of this involves scientists working in academia or government labs, critical parts of it involve practitioners and communities. Think about research on construction in fire, flood, earthquake, and coastal zones; or on infrastructure risk and vulnerability; or on lifeline services like electricity, water, and food.

The Time and Tide of Resilience Disasters are usually short term “surges” atop long term trends—the storm surge atop sea level rise; the wildfire atop long term suppression of fire; the drought atop increased aridity from climate change.

Resilient communities match these trends and surges through long term adaptation and preparedness for emergencies. Remember the Serenity Prayer? “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” Resilient communities recognize that while they must accept things like population growth, climate change, and dysfunctional politics that exist above their scale of operation, there is much—in fact, a great deal—that they can change. By planning, preparing, and adapting, and by enhancing and tapping the natural and social capital of their communities, they will become more resilient.

As the old Chinese proverb reminds us, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” The journey to resilience will be many, many steps. Those who gathered in January identified and committed themselves to taking steps together.

The pages of this issue of Solutions include many additional steps. It is our time to walk.

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Contents

September/October 2014

Features

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Resilience: Navigating toward a Sustainable Future

by Joseph Fiksel, Iris Goodman, and Alan Hecht

In a complex and turbulent world, communities and enterprises need to design systems that are resilient in the face of disruptive forces, enabling pursuit of long-term sustainability goals.

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Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructure for Urban Energy Systems by Peter C. Evans and Peter Fox-Penner Aging infrastructure systems are vulnerable to shocks such as natural disasters, but innovative technologies are available to improve energy resilience and sustainability.

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Ancient Maya: Lessons from Sustainable Societies of the Past

by Scott Heckbert, Robert Costanza, and Lael Parrott What factors eroded the resiliency of the highly organized and advanced ancient Maya? A computer simulation model provides some surprising insights that are relevant to modern civilization.

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Toward a More Resilient Agriculture by EM Bennett,

SR Carpenter, LJ Gordon, N Ramankutty, P Balvanera, B Campbell, W Cramer, J Foley, C Folke, L Karlberg, J Liu, H Lotze-Campen, ND Mueller, GD Peterson, S Polasky, J Rockström, RJ Scholes, and M Spierenburg Agriculture is essential for human survival, yet current practices are degrading the environment. To develop resilient and sustainable practices will require further innovation and experimentation beyond merely optimizing production.

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Resilience Metrics: Lessons from Military Doctrines by Daniel A. Eisenberg, Jeryang Park, Matthew E. Bates, Cate Fox-Lent, Thomas P. Seager, and Igor Linkov

Moving beyond risk assessment, agencies need new metrics to characterize the resilience of engineering, environmental, and cybersecurity systems.

Military research suggest that metrics be organized by physical, information, cognitive, and social domains.

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On the Web

Perspectives Managing Resilience for Ecosystem Restoration in a Changing Climate by Lance Gunderson

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Urban Resilience Thinking by Thomas Elmqvist

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Living and Breathing in a ‘Black Swan’ World by David W. Orr

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Introduction

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Why Resilience? by Joseph Fiksel www.thesolutionsjournal.org Explore the Solutions website for more content and interactivity. What are your solutions? Share your vision for a sustainable and desirable future and learn more about the Solutions community.

Envisioning

On the Ground After the Tornado Came to Town

by Jane Cage How can a community come back from disaster?

After Joplin, Missouri was hit by a devastating tornado in 2011, local citizens embraced the recovery process as an opportunity to rebuild as a more sustainable city. With the help of federal and state agencies, the Joplin Citizens Advisory Recovery Team is working with local government and citizens groups to enact a collaborative recovery plan.

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Energy Security as a “Wicked Problem”

by Pamela Sydelko, Sheila Ronis, and Leah Guzowski The global energy security system is a complex infrastructure managed by numerous stakeholders across nations. By engaging in visioning and foresight processes, policy makers can be made to “think the unthinkable” and develop a comprehensive grand strategy for energy security.

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Solutions in History

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French Resilience: Designing for Change on the Comtat Plain by Sander van der Leeuw When crises struck the Comtat Plain in the 19th and 20th centuries, the population responded with efforts to change the regional environment, to varying degrees of success.

The region’s experiences demonstrate the importance of addressing the root challenges of a threat and designing systems that can change in response to these threats, rather than designing for permanence and “stability.”

Idea Lab In Review

86 Interview

Practicing, Not Preaching: A Helpful Guide for Resilience Practitioners

An Interview with David Bresch by Joseph Fiksel David Bresch is the head of Sustainability and Political Risk Management at Swiss Reinsurance Company. In this conversation, he speaks about understanding ever-evolving global risks, how the reinsurance industry defines and integrates concepts of resilience, and how to make the global economy more adaptable and sustainable.

by Iris Goodman

Media Review

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Antifragile

Noteworthy R!SE Initiative 100 Resilient Cities and more

08 Editorial

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Disaster Resilience: Reflections from a National Conference by Peter Saundry To build collective wisdom about resilience, we need to bridge traditional boundaries and work together on innovative solutions. www.thesolutionsjournal.org | September-October 2014 | Solutions | 3

Solutions

Contributors 2

Editors-in-Chief: Robert Costanza, Ida Kubiszewski

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Associate Editors: David Orr, Jacqueline McGlade Managing Editor: Colleen Maney

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Senior Editors: Christina Asquith, Jack Fairweather History Section Editor: Frank Zelko Book & Envisioning Editor: Bruce Cooperstein

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Editor: Naomi Stewart Graphic Designer: Kelley Dodd Copy Editors: Maria Hetman, Hana Layson, and Barbara Stewart Business Manager: Sung Lee Interns: Victoria Clark Editorial Board: Gar Alperovitz, Vinya Ariyaratne, Robert Ayres, Peter Barnes, William Becker, Lester Brown, Alexander Chikunov, Cutler Cleveland, Raymond Cole, Rita Colwell, Robert Corell, Herman Daly, Thomas Dietz, Josh Farley, Jerry Franklin, Susan Joy Hassol, Paul Hawken, Richard Heinberg, Jeffrey Hollender, Buzz Holling, Terry Irwin, Jon Isham, Wes Jackson, Tim Kasser, Tom Kompas, Frances Moore Lappé, Rik Leemans, Wenhua Li, Thomas Lovejoy, Hunter Lovins, Manfred Max-Neef, Peter May, Bill McKibben, William J. Mitsch, Mohan Munasinghe, Norman Myers, Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir, Bill Rees, Wolfgang Sachs, Peter Senge, Vandana Shiva, Anthony Simon, Gus Speth, Larry Susskind, David Suzuki, John Todd, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Alvaro Umaña, Sim van der Ryn, Peter Victor, Mathis Wackernagel, John Xia, Mike Young

Subscriptions: http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/subscribe Email: solutions@thesolutionsjournal.com

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On the Cover Unexpected “black swan” events with significant impacts are becoming more common. Photo by Ida Kubiszewski Solutions is subject to the Creative Commons license except where otherwise stated.

1. Joseph Fiksel, Guest Editor—

Dr. Joseph Fiksel is Executive Director of the Center for Resilience at The Ohio State University, and a faculty member in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering. He is a recognized authority on sustainability and resilience, with over 25 years of research and consulting experience for government, industry, and international consortia. As Special Assistant for Sustainability at the U.S. EPA, he is helping to incorporate systems thinking into their research programs. Previously, he was Director of Decision & Risk Management at Arthur D. Little and Vice President for Life Cycle Management at Battelle. He holds a bachelor’s degree from M.I.T., a doctorate in Operations Research from Stanford University, and an advanced degree from La Sorbonne in Paris.

2. Iris Goodman, Associate Guest Editor—Iris Goodman works at the

U.S. EPA in the Administrator’s Office.

She began working in interdisciplinary teams at the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in the early 1980s. She was Deputy Director for EPA’s Ecosystem Services Research Program 2007–2010, and interim Deputy for EPA’s Sustainable and Healthy Communities Research Program, 2011–2012. She spent a decade working with state legislatures, EPA Regions, and large-area conservation projects in the western U.S.; this experience informs her approach to problem-solving. She holds a B.S. in Resource Conservation (Economics minor) U.MD, and an M.S. in Land Resources, Institute for Environmental Studies, U.W. – Madison.

3. Alan Hecht—Dr. Hecht, a recipient

of the Presidential Rank Award for Meritorious Service, is Director for Sustainable Development in the Office of Research and Development (ORD) at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Since 2003 he has actively advanced the concept of sustainability 4 | Solutions | September-October 2014 | www.thesolutionsjournal.org

within ORD and EPA. On detail to the White House, from 2001 to 2003 he was Associate Director for Sustainable Development at the Council on Environmental Quality (2002–2003) and Director of International Environmental Affairs for the National Security Council (2001–2002) where he served as White House coordinator for preparations for the World Summit on Sustainable Development. At EPA From 1989 to 2001, he served as the Deputy Assistant Administrator for International Activities and Acting Assistant Administrator for International Activities from 1992 to 1994 and was a key U.S. negotiator at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Dr. Hecht has a Ph.D in geology and geochemistry from Case Western Reserve University.

4. Peter Fox-Penner—Dr. Peter

Fox-Penner is a consulting executive and an internationally recognized authority on energy and electric power industry issues. He is a Principal and Director of The Brattle Group, a leading economic consulting firm, and author of dozens of articles, blog posts, and two books, including the highly acclaimed book Smart Power: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities.

In his consulting practice, Dr. Fox-Penner advises energy companies, government agencies, and their counsels on energy regulatory and market policy issues, including electric industry structure, climate change, and energy efficiency policies. His longest area of specialization has been electricity market policies and regulation.

5. Scott Heckbert—Scott Heckbert is

an environmental economist at Portland State University and previously worked at CSIRO, Australia. His research applies environmental economics using simulation modeling of integrated social-ecological systems. Research topics include the economics of greenhouse gas mitigation, modeling the rise and fall of ancient societies, developing market-based

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instruments for environmental management, improving water quality for tropical reefs, modeling patterns of urban sprawl, managing rangelands, and supporting indigenous land management for environmental and cultural benefits.

6. Robert Costanza—Robert

Costanza is a Chair of Public Policy at the Crawford School of Public Policy at Australian National University.

Costanza is cofounder and former president of the International Society for Ecological Economics. He has authored or coauthored over 350 scientific papers and reports on his work have appeared in Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, the Economist, The New York Times, Science, Nature, National Geographic, and National Public Radio.

7. Daniel A. Eisenberg—Daniel

Eisenberg is a Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering PhD Student in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University. Previously, he was a contractor for the Risk and Decision Science Team of the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi. In both instances, Eisenberg’s primary research focuses on bridging conceptual gaps across scientific disciplines in reasilience theory, and developing methods to assess the resilience of critical infrastructure systems. Eisenberg is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including: a Fulbright Scholarship, a National Science Foundataion (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship, a NSF Interdisciplinary Graduate Education and Research Traineeship, and a NSF East Asia and Pacific Scholar Institutes Fellowship.

8. Igor Linkov—Dr. Linkov leads the

Risk and Decision Science Team and Focus Area at the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center. He is currently leading several projects implementing resilience management for cyber systems, critical infrastructure, energy and

environment. He has published widely on environmental policy, environmental modeling, and risk analysis, including thirteen books and over 200 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. Dr. Linkov has organized more than twenty national and international conferences and continuing education workshops, including a 2014 workshop on Risk and Resilience in Berlin.

He is recipient of two Army medals for outstanding civilian service and Society for Risk Analysis Chauncey Starr Award for exceptional contribution to Risk Analysis and Fellow Award.

9. Elena Bennett—Elena Bennett

is an Associate Professor and Trottier Scholar at McGill University, where her work focuses on managing working landscapes for the resilient provision of multiple ecosystem services.

10. Lance Gunderson—Lance

Gunderson is an ecologist who is interested in how people understand, assess, and manage large-scale socialecological systems. He is a Professor of Environmental Studies at Emory University. He is Co-Editor in Chief of Ecology and Society. He has also served as the executive director of the Resilience Network and is currently Chairman of the Board of the Resilience Alliance. He is a Beijer Fellow with the Beijer International Institute for Ecological Economics, Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences.

11. David W. Orr—Dr. Orr is the

Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin College. He is also a James Marsh, Professor at large at the University of Vermont. He pioneered work on environmental literacy in higher education and his recent work in ecological design. He raised funds for and spearheaded the effort to design and build a $7.2 million Environmental Studies Center at Oberlin College, a building described by The New York Times as “the

most remarkable” of a new generation of college buildings and by the U.S. Department of Energy as one of thirty “milestone buildings” of the 20th century.

12. Thomas Elmqvist—Thomas

Elmqvist, PhD, is a professor in Natural Resource Management at Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University.

His research is focused on ecosystem services, land use change, urbanization, natural disturbances and components of resilience including the role of social institutions. He serves as associated editor for the journals Ecology and Society, Ecosystem services, and Sustainability Science. He has led the “Cities and Biodiversity project” (www.cbobook. org) and currently leading a Future Earth project “What is Urban” and part of the scoping expert group on regional and subregional assessments in IPBES. 13. Jane Cage—Jane Cage is a Joplin

businesswoman who led the Joplin Citizens Advisory Recovery Team in the wake of the May 2011 Joplin tornado.

She brought together government, local businesses, nonprofits and individuals to discuss the future of the community after the disaster. The group’s citizen listening process resulted in a long-term recovery plan adopted by Joplin. As a result, Jane was awarded the inaugural Rick Rescorla National Award for Resilience from the Department of Homeland Security She continues to be a community liaison for groups in Joplin and a recovery advocate interfacing with federal and state agencies. Jane has spoken across the country about Joplin’s recovery and is a national resource for communities impacted by natural disasters. Her book, “Joplin Pays It Forward”, contains essays written by 47 Joplin community leaders.

14. Pamela Sydelko—Pamela

Sydelko is the Director of the Systems Science Center, part of the Global Security Sciences Division at Argonne National Laboratory. She has 28 years

of experience in systems science and analysis and has led the development of numerous innovative modeling, analysis and decision support technologies, focusing on integrated multi-component software systems. Key modeling/ analysis domains include national security, sustainability, and critical infrastructures. Previously, she served as the Deputy Associated Laboratory Director for the Energy Engineering & Systems Analysis Directorate and Director for the Argonne’s National Security Program, developing strategies to build research capabilities and foster valuable science and technology research for the National Security Community. She earned her MBA from the University of Chicago, her M.S. in Soil Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and her B.S. in Botany/Ecology from North Dakota State University. She joined Argonne in October 1989, coming from the U.S. Army Engineering Research and Development Center – Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL) in Champaign-Urbana.

15. Sander Van der Leeuw—

Sander van der Leeuw is the founding director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU, and the emeritus dean of its School of Sustainability. He currently is a Foundation professor in both Schools.

Prior to joining ASU, van der Leeuw conducted archaeological studies in the Near East, the Philippines, Syria, Holland, France, and Mexico. Van der Leeuw’s expertise lies in the role of invention, sustainability, and innovation in societies around the world. He is a corresponding member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. In 2012, the United Nations Environment Program named van der Leeuw the “Champion of the Earth for Science and Innovation” for his work on human-environmental relations.

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Fiksel, J. (2014). Why Resilience? Solutions 5(5): 6-7. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/why-resilience/

Introduction

Why Resilience?

by Joseph Fiksel

W

hile it is clear that the pace and pattern of global economic growth is unsustainable, we are slow in responding to this challenge.

Sustainability advocates offer visions of a utopian future in which human needs are fulfilled and resource consumption is balanced with planetary capacity. But, in a turbulent world, the future seems increasingly unpredictable. Human societies are struggling to cope with present-day challenges ranging from climate change to political conflicts.

We have learned that the traditional tools of probability-based risk management are no longer adequate to cope with the complexity and turbulence of today’s world, in which disruptions are often unknowable and unforeseen. Unexpected crises seem to be arriving more frequently. As our global systems become more tightly coupled and volatile, we are increasingly challenged to maintain stability, let alone to pursue the transformative changes needed for sustainability.

This issue of Solutions is devoted to an emerging topic that may be a necessary condition for achieving sustainability. While there are many definitions of resilience, it can generally be defined as the capacity for a system to survive, adapt, and flourish in the face of turbulent change and uncertainty.1 In short, this means the ability to overcome adversity and bounce back.

For individuals, resilience implies resourcefulness and strength of character. For communities and corporations, resilience implies preparedness and agility. At a national scale, resilience is closely linked with the security and sustainability of critical resources, including water, energy, food, minerals, and other valuable ecosystem services.

Although resilience is sometimes confounded with sustainability, in fact they are complementary. Sustainability tends to focus on long-term goals and strategies, while resilience tends to focus on preparing for unexpected disruptions that may destabilize an otherwise sustainable system. Indeed, improving resilience is actually the first step on the journey to sustainability. Some basic principles of resilient systems are summarized in Box 1.

Resilience appears to be a fundamental characteristic of living systems, including both human and ecological systems. Nature is resilient at every level—from the functioning of a single cell, to the evolution of a species, to the intricate balance of a food web. Living things are resilient because they are able to adapt to both abrupt and gradual change.

Networks of living systems are even more resilient, although they may be vulnerable to cascading events such as disease epidemics.

In contrast, systems engineered by humans, including software, machines, buildings, and infrastructure, tend to be more brittle—vulnerable to sudden failure or gradual decay. We believe that one of the primary challenges faced by modern society is to “design for resilience”—to improve our capacity to cope with inevitable, often unforeseen disruptions. After all, a company or a city can also be considered a living system.

One source of inspiration is observing the natural world. Engineers have emulated nature’s ingenious designs through “biomimicry,”2 and likewise, companies are gaining insights about alternative business models from the study of ecosystems. This type of “ecomimicry” is exemplified in the practice of “industrial ecology,” whereby companies seek closed-loop solutions for beneficial re-use of waste materials—inspired by the patterns of energy and material flow in ecosystems where virtually nothing is wasted.3

Box 1. Principles of System Resilience •• Resilience is an intrinsic characteristic of all living systems. Living systems are purposeful, complex, adaptive, and self-organizing. They operate at many different scales—ranging from individual cells, to higher organisms, to sophisticated communities, to entire ecosystems.

•• Resilient systems exhibit awareness of and response to disruptions. A living system is able to sense gradual disturbances or sudden threats, and to respond via behavioral, functional, or structural adaptations that enable it to persist and preserve its identity (e.g., “fight or flight”).

•• The evolution of living systems is influenced by cycles of change at multiple scales.

Every system is coupled with subsystems (e.g., components), higher-order systems (e.g., environments), and related systems (e.g., competitors). The associated cycles of change may be fast (e.g., power failures) or slow (e.g., global warming).

•• Resilient systems typically have corrective feedback loops to maintain a dynamic equilibrium. Disruptions (e.g., flooding) can shift a system away from equilibrium, or cause it to collapse. In response to disruptions, a system may cross a threshold and undergo a “regime shift” that leads to a different equilibrium state.

•• Self-organizing, self-aware systems can design for inherent resilience. Humandesigned systems (e.g., cities or enterprises) can learn to identify potential disruptions and to design their assets so that they can better absorb extreme events (e.g., graceful degradation rather than shocks) and adapt to a changing environment.

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Introduction

U.S. Forest Service, Southwestern Region, Kaibab National Forest / CC BY-SA 2.0

Complex ecosystems provide valuable insight into resilient practices, exhibiting “adaptive cycles” of growth such as the periodic regeneration of forest floors through natural fires.

Resilience has been studied in many different fields including medicine, ecology, engineering, urban affairs, finance, supply chain management, and disaster preparedness.

Research suggests that complex, selforganizing systems continually evolve through an “adaptive cycle” of growth, crisis, transformation, and renewal; for example, mature forests are periodically destroyed by fire or vermin, and then regenerate.4 Ecologists define resilience as the capacity of a system to tolerate disturbances while retaining its structure and function.5 Similarly, psychologists define human resilience as the ability to transform adversity into a growth experience.6 By integrating knowledge from these

many fields, we can begin to develop a unified science of resilience.

The articles in this issue are authored by a diverse group of distinguished researchers and practitioners, spanning a variety of disciplines. They offer pragmatic approaches for strengthening the resilience of human and natural systems, including industrial enterprises, energy systems, supply chains, urban infrastructures, agricultural systems, and the ecological resources upon which all of these systems depend.

They describe emerging tools for better understanding resilience, and provide insights based on real-world experience.

They also carry a message of hope—that honing the basic characteristics of resilience, including foresight, adaptability,

and diversity, will make us better fit for the long and winding journey to sustainability.

References 1 Fiksel, J. Sustainability and Resilience: Toward a Systems Approach. Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy 2(2), 14–21(2006).

2 Benyus, J. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (William Morrow, New York, 1997).

3 Cimren, E, Fiksel, J, Posner, ME & Sikdar, K. Material flow optimization in by-product synergy networks.

Journal of Industrial Ecology, 15:2, 315–332 (2010).

4 Gunderson, LH & Holling, CS, eds. Panarchy (Island Press, Washington DC, 2002).

5 Gunderson, LH & Protchard Jr., L. Resilience and the Behavior of Large-Scale Systems (Island Press, Washington DC, 2002).

6 Werner, E & Smith, RS. Journeys from Childhood to Midlife: Risk, Resilience, and Recovery (Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 2001).

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Noteworthy. (2014). Solutions 5(5): 8-10.

Idea Lab Noteworthy Alliance for Resilient Campuses Presidents of colleges and universities from California to Maine, including community colleges, four-year colleges, and multi-campus research institutions, are joining together to endorse a new initiative to focus on climate adaptation and resilience on campuses.

The initiative, called the Alliance for Resilient Campuses (ARC), was developed by the non-profit organization, Second Nature, which leads efforts on college campuses to create a healthy, just, and sustainable society by transforming higher education.

Its flagship program, the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), has gained 684 signatory colleges and universities. While ACUPCC focuses on greenhouse gas mitigation and carbon neutrality, ARC will focus on climate adaptation and resilience.

“We recognize that there is an increasing likelihood of damaging climate impacts to many of our colleges,” said Anne Waple, Executive Director (acting) for Second Nature. “ARC will provide a platform for developing flexible and state-of-the-art guidance and support for assessment, learning, implementation, and evaluation with respect to adaptation and resilience, and will do so in full partnership with communities. As a nation, we have a lot of work to do to adapt to ongoing climate changes, and as higher education invests in its own resilience, it can also play a critical role in helping all of society prepare for, and even thrive in, the coming decades. This is the driving idea behind ARC.” ARC is working with other groups to incorporate the latest science into climate preparedness planning for campuses and communities, and will

Jeremy Wilburn / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The Alliance for Resilient Campuses unites institutions of higher education with a focus on climate adaptation and campus resiliency.

also work with the ongoing National Climate Assessment network to help fill gaps in knowledge, including how to effectively gauge our continued progress towards resilience.

In addition, ARC is partnering with the Resilient Communities for America (RC4A), a national initiative that is mobilizing local elected officials from cities, counties, and towns. ARC and RC4A will work together to encourage strong partnership between communities and campuses, and to share tools, information resources, and successes to support and highlight improved resilience. (See http://secondnature.org/ programs/resilience/alliance).

The R!SE Initiative A new global report by The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) teamed with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and others, provides compelling evidence of the growing impact of disasters on business, including escalating direct losses,

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supply chain interruptions and wider effects on performance and reputation.

The 2013 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction warns that direct disaster losses alone are at least 50 percent higher than currently reported, affecting business performance and undermining longer-term competitiveness and sustainability.

The report is issued by the R!SE Initiative, a new global collaboration involving public and private sector actors who are prepared to take leadership on disaster risk reduction. It consists of an alliance between UNISDR, PwC, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Florida International University, Principles for Responsible Investment, AECOM, and Willis, as well as other companies and institutions.

Despite increasing business awareness of disaster risk and investments in risk management, losses continue to rise. Moreover, the indirect impacts of disasters can ripple through economies and societies as a whole. At the same time, business depends on the capacity of the public sector to provide

Idea Lab Noteworthy the resilient infrastructure and urban systems which underpin competitive and sustainable economies.

The overall objective of the R!SE Initiative is to make all investments risk-sensitive, while building the resilience of local communities, and the global economy as a whole. It includes eight Activity Streams that address business strategies, risk metrics, disaster risk management, industry standards and investment principles, business education, city-level resilience, and the role of insurance. By bringing together six connected communities—business, investors, insurers, the public sector, education professionals and civil society—R!SE aims to convene stakeholders who have the ability and resources to influence the future direction of disaster risk management. (See www.theriseinitiative.org).

United Nations Global Resilience Project The United Nations Environment Programme launched a new initiative in June 2012 called Principles for Sustainable Insurance (PSI), in collaboration with leading insurers from around the world. One of PSI’s flagship activities is the Global Resilience Project, aimed at protecting communities from natural disasters. The first phase of the project assessed the effectiveness of a range of disaster risk reduction measures across the three most devastating types of natural hazard: cyclone, earthquake, and flood.

The findings show that widespread environmental degradation, climate change, and loss of natural ecosystems are exacerbating disaster risk, and that building resilience is integral to sustainable development. According to Butch Bacani, the PSI Programme

Leader, “Hard-won development gains can be undermined by a single disaster, and efforts to build a sustainable economy derailed.”

The Phase 1 report identified a number of beneficial solutions; for example, coastal ecosystems such as mangroves and sand dunes can act like protective sea walls to reduce risk from cyclones, while providing benefits for wildlife habitat and aquaculture. In terms of cost, conserving and restoring existing ecosystems is much more effective than creating new ones.

For all hazards, the report recommended an integrated, portfolio approach that includes educating the community and stakeholders, conducting risk mapping, and developing robust evacuation procedures. The project report, Building disaster-resilient communities and economies, can be downloaded at: www.unepfi.org/psi/ category/publications The next phase of the project will develop a global disaster map to identify individual communities most in need of risk reduction efforts.

The project will then seek to engage communities, governments, and other stakeholders in investing in disaster resilience, and in implementing the measures most effective for protecting lives and property.

National Research Council Report on Disaster Resilience Preparing communities to cope with potential disasters is a tricky challenge, particularly when no one can predict with any confidence either the likelihood or the impacts of disasters.

To address that challenge, an expert scientific committee has suggested a number of measures—including a ‘National Resilience Scorecard’—to help communities anticipate and prepare for potential disasters.

This National Research Council committee, chaired by Susan Cutter of the University of South Carolina, was formed by the National Academies in response to a request from nine U.S. federal agencies (see http://nas-sites. org/resilience/).

Henning Leweke / CC BY-SA 2.0

Phase 1 of the UN Global Resilience Project identified solutions for utilizing existing ecosystems in reducing risk of natural disasters, such as employing sand dunes to protect from cyclones. www.thesolutionsjournal.org | September-October 2014 | Solutions | 9

Idea Lab Noteworthy The resulting report, published in 2012, defines resilience as “the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, or more successfully adapt to actual or potential adverse events,” and views a community as a system composed of environmental, infrastructure, social, economic, and institutional elements working in concert.

The report suggests that flexible risk management strategies are needed, involving multiple stakeholders, and a mix of structural improvements and policy tools. To justify investments in resilience, communities will need assurance that there will be measurable benefits, including improved prosperity and quality of life, even in the absence of a disaster. This underscores the need for resilience indicators to assess issues such as infrastructure performance, building integrity, and social and business capacity for disaster recovery.

The report recommends the creation of a National Resilience Scorecard, although it points out that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy for enhancing resilience across the diversity of U.S. communities. Finally, the report outlines a vision of a resilient nation in 2030, with a culture of resilience supported at both Federal and local levels, availability of disaster-related information and insurance protection, proactive investment and contingency planning, and acceptance by communities of their responsibility to prepare for, and respond to disasters.

Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Challenge The Rockefeller Foundation has established a bold new project aimed at improving the resilience of cities around the world. They define

Richard Nyberg, USAID Asia / CC BY-NC 2.0

The Rockefeller Foundation is supporting several projects focused on resilience, including its 100 Resilient Cities Challenge and the recent launch of the Global Resilience Partnership in Asia and Africa alongside USAID.

resilience as, “the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience.”

In 2013, the Foundation launched the 100 Resilient Cities Challenge, inviting cities to apply for awards and technical assistance valued at about $1 million over three years. Out of nearly 400 applications, 32 cities were selected for the first round of awards. The selected cities span every continent, and range from familiar mega-cities such as New York, Rio de Janeiro and Rome to lesser-known places such as Mandalay (Myanmar), Ashkelon (Israel), and Dakar (Senegal).

The 100 Resilient Cities project offers each city financial and logistical guidance for appointing a Chief Resilience Officer, access to expertise and service providers who can help to develop their resilience strategies,

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and membership in a global network of cities who can learn from, and help each other.

No matter what their size and location, it appears that resilient cities share certain core capabilities—constant learning, rebounding rapidly from shocks, limiting the impacts of failure, adapting flexibly to change, and maintaining spare capacity. True resilience is not just about responding to disasters, but also dealing with stresses such as unemployment, urban violence, and food or water shortages.

One of the most important lessons emerging from this program is that resilient cities are able to turn tragedy into opportunity, rebuilding to become stronger than before. This includes awareness of the environmental and social factors that enable a city to remain healthy, vibrant, and diverse.

For more information: http:// www.100resilientcities.org/

Sydelko, P., S. Ronis, and L. Guzowski. (2014). Energy Security as a “Wicked Problem” – A Foresight Approach to Developing a Grand Strategy for Resilience.

Solutions 5(5): 11-16. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/energy-security-as-a-wicked-problem-a-foresight-approach-to-developing-a-grand-strategy-for-resilience/

Envisioning

Energy Security as a “Wicked Problem”—A Foresight Approach to Developing a Grand Strategy for Resilience

by Pamela Sydelko, Sheila Ronis, and Leah Guzowski

This article is part of a regular section in Solutions in which the author is challenged to envision a future society in which all the right changes have been made.

M

any definitions of energy security have been proposed in the literature, each developed from within a particular set of perspectives.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) defines energy security as the uninterrupted availability of energy sources at affordable prices. This broad, commonly used definition primarily emphasizes economic security. Daniel Yergin states that the objective of energy security is to assure adequate, reliable supplies of energy at reasonable prices and in ways that do not jeopardize major national values and objectives. His definition considers the cultural and political aspects of the energy security system.

Agusdinata and DeLaurentis describe a system-of-systems approach to the highly complex energy sector. We build upon their description and approach the definition of energy security from the perspective of a “wicked problem” that supports the idea of developing resiliency in energy systems.

The term “wicked problem” was first used by Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber (Rittel, H.W.J. and M.M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4 [1973]: 155–169) to address social planning problems that were open-ended, contradictory, and had ever-changing requirements that were often difficult to recognize.

The global energy security system involves myriad stakeholders and countless interdependencies among nations and regions. That no single entity is responsible for the entire system is not surprising, given the vast reach of the system. Ultimately, every nation addresses energy security in its own way. Within some nations, the government owns many components of the energy system and has a dominant role in energy-related decision making. In others, energy supply and distribution infrastructure are privately held, and authority is distributed. For instance, in the United States, more than 80 percent of the energy infrastructure is owned by the private sector. The need for the overall system to be resilient is essential.

In the United States, the responsibility for the nation’s energy security system spans many federal, state, and local governments, as well as private industry and consumers. At the national level, the administration developed a Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future in 2011 and has emphasized innovation for clean energy, the development of domestic sources, and demand reduction through energy efficiency. One year later, a progress report was submitted to the President by Secretaries from the following departments: Energy, Transportation, Interior, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, in addition to the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Deputy Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change. The report highlighted progress in “increasing American energy independence; expanding domestic

oil and gas production; setting historic new fuel economy standards; improving energy efficiency in one million homes; doubling renewable energy generation; developing advanced, alternative fuels; and supporting cutting-edge research.”

In March 2013, the President called for the creation of an Energy Security Trust to invest in future technologies.

Congress influences energy security through how it directs energysecurity–related funds to different federal agencies and organizations to perform the research, management tasks, and decision making needed for the operation of the various aspects of the system.

The mission of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is to ensure America’s security and prosperity by addressing its energy, environmental, and nuclear challenges through transformative science and technology solutions. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also significantly influences energy security, with its mission to lead the national effort to protect critical infrastructure, including energy-related infrastructure, from all hazards by managing risk and enhancing resilience.

The U.S. Department of Defense, with its need to provide reliable energy to its forces, provides leadership (in partnership with DOE) in advancing innovative energy technologies. Regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulate different parts of the system. State and local governments also exert regulatory controls.

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Envisioning

U.S. Army RDECOM / CC BY 2.0

The Pentagon Energy Security Event 2012 featured US Army Research, Development and Engineering Command’s contributions to energy security. The Department of Defense is one of the many actors responsible for ensuring energy security in the US.

Internationally, the U.S. Department of State and various national security entities handle responsibilities for assessing international energy issues as well as the impact of those issues on the security of the United States and its allies.

Despite significant efforts by these stakeholders to coordinate and collaborate, several critical factors delay the progress in achieving our energy security goals and render it virtually impossible to design the system to be resilient. These factors include the way agencies are funded, the special interests of various stakeholders, and the overall lack of a national “grand strategy.”

Using Strategic Visioning and Foresight Although wicked problems are very difficult to define, proposing a definition or vision to start a discussion or dialog on energy security is often necessary. Thus, to apply systems thinking and strategic foresight to the energy security system, we propose the following working definition: The Energy Security System should be an agile, resilient, global network designed to provide reliable and affordable energy to customers. The system must be able to accomplish a number of objectives: protect citizens, minimize disruptions,

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develop and implement policies, incentivize conservation, cause no undue environmental impacts, and identify key organizations.

The system is composed of many diverse and interdependent sets of system elements: public policy, domestic and international politics, economics, science and technology, climate change and other environmental issues, physical infrastructure vulnerability, cyber issues, competing demands, and social/ cultural/human behaviors and values.

In a workshop conducted as part of the “Energy Security as a Grand Strategy Conference” held at the National Defense University (NDU) in May 2012,

Envisioning participants were introduced to strategic visioning and foresight as well as the application of these concepts in the energy security system. Workshop participants included experts from a diverse set of disciplines and a wide variety of government agencies, industry, academia, and international organizations.

Working in small groups, the workshop participants were led through an exercise to synthesize information, apply strategic foresight and visioning methodologies to a scenario, and develop recommendations for a grand energy strategy. The scenario for the conference was based on the visioning process developed by one of the authors of this paper (Ronis).

Within our context, a vision is defined as a description of a future state and the role one will play in that future. For the 2040 scenario used at the 2012 conference, the scenario author defined the system (i.e., energy security) to address and then identified the following five sets of questions about the United States energy system to explore in the situation: • Sustainability • Improved Efficiency • Environmental Considerations • Distributed Networks • Reduced Risks The conference exercise tested assumptions and/or questions by requiring participants to develop plausible scenarios that explore each one. Lacking the time at the conference to fully develop a comprehensive vision of the future, the participants were guided in using a shortcut to establish the critical elements for a better energy future and define steps the nation could take to realize the energy security vision. This kind of tool is an example of what could be used to develop grand strategies such as “energy system security and resilience.”

A Grand Strategy for Energy Security: 2040 Scenario What follows are major elements of the scenario used at the workshop: a serious, wicked problem.

The year is 2040. The United States has made tremendous progress in moving toward energy independence and reducing its use of fossil fuels. Global environmental problems, both disruptive weather patterns and rising sea levels, are not yet under control, but as India and China have adopted new environmental standards, the ozone hole is no longer getting larger, and global warming is beginning to abate. Nevertheless, many countries around the world are struggling to prevent their low-lying regions from being swallowed by the sea, including much of the east coast of the United States, particularly Washington, D.C. The strategy laid out in 2014 is finally beginning to show signs of working more than 25 years later…

In 2040, the energy policies of the United States include every conceivable energy source that can increase efficiency, effectiveness, or sustainability and help improve our nation’s prospects of achieving an independent energy capability.

All sectors of society are included: residential, commercial, industrial, governmental, and transportation elements are actively participating in using alternative sources of energy and reducing traditional fossil fuel usage.

Most communities now control the power sources that provide electricity. The distribution of energy down to individual facilities is the norm; most facilities now provide 100% of the energy they use.

Although many facilities still work

off the original energy grid, they typically augment grid-supplied power with their own self-generated power; many residences and commercial facilities generate more energy than they use and then sell it back to the utility. Utilities have become major partners in this process. Life-cycle analyses are also currently used to understand true costs, thus changing all the equations.

Everything changed as a result of a crisis in 2014. All national assets were mobilized to determine solutions quickly, and it worked. Today, in 2040, energy is diversified and includes sources such as biomass, nuclear power, natural gas, solar energy, wind energy, water flow technologies, coal, and geothermal generation. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicle technologies are commonly used.

Improved efficiency is sought everywhere. After the 2014 crisis, land developers began to design completely sustainable communities, and inner-city revitalization projects resulted in retrofitting of buildings and homes with energyefficient solutions. Intelligent, automated building technologies began to enable more efficient building operations. Most homes, offices, commercial buildings, factories, schools, and hospitals use high-efficiency insulation to insulate roofs as well as seal off window and door frames. Stationary fuel cells are widely used in construction.

Energy use and economic prosperity are positively correlated.

A positive correlation is likewise indicated between the growth of the population of the planet and the carbon dioxide (CO2) content of the environment. Changing attitudes regarding energy awareness were essential to realizing the improvements made over the 25 years since the crisis.

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Envisioning

David Dodge, Green Energy Futures / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The strategic envisioning scenario used outlined a future US in which energy sources are diversified, including sources such as biomass, as pictured.

What, you might ask, could have possibly happened in 2014 that led to the world we have just described in 2040? As it turns out, a significant shock to the “system”— particularly the energy distribution and security system—occurred!

In 2014, several crises occurred simultaneously. The first occurred when Israel, feeling an immediate threat, bombed several Iranian facilities, leading to increased instability all over the Middle East, with ripple effects experienced

globally. The price of gasoline in the United States exceeded $7 a gallon, prompting Americans to panic as they tried to keep their vehicles fueled. At the same time, the instability in the Middle East affected Japan’s ability to import oil from that region, causing economic problems. Making matters worse, Chinese Navy captains, upset with decisions being made in Beijing, decided to “redirect” the few remaining shipments of oil bound for Japan to China because China’s oil imports were being disrupted as well.

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Japan faced a major energy crisis because soon only a few shipments of oil were coming into the country. This situation was made more difficult when China publicly denied that the Navy captains were Chinese; most within the Chinese government were willing to do anything to keep their engine of growth fueled. Complicating matters further, China was pressuring Canada privately to ship most of the oil supplies bound for the United States to China. In response, Canada told China publicly that it would not redirect energy shipments bound for the United States.

Envisioning Within a few weeks, gasoline prices soared to more than $10 a gallon in the United States, crippling the US economy and sending the western world into a deep recession. Canada, Japan, and the United States officially claimed that China had perpetrated “acts of war” on them, precipitating major diplomatic initiatives aimed at resolving the conflicts and avoiding war with China. Both Canada and Japan asked the United States for protection in accordance with their respective agreements. To comply with the various treaties, the United States began to develop a new grand strategy related to energy security.

Unfortunately, there was no way to prevent the war. Two of the United States’ closest allies had declared war, and the United States itself had been similarly attacked. Having Chinese officials respond by stonewalling was not helpful.

The cyber attacks then began, aimed at the critical infrastructure of the United States, Canada, and Japan. Clear evidence showed that the attacks were coming from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in China. Once again, Chinese officials denied any knowledge and announced that the West was seriously jeopardizing its relationships with China based on its “unfounded accusations.”

Energy grids in the United States, Canada, and Japan and global positioning satellites (GPSs) were hit and taken down. Although China had not fired a shot, without the energy grids or GPS, neither the military nor civil society could function on any level in the three countries.

China “asked” the three countries to “share” their energy supplies to reduce the risks of an unstable China emerging.

Chinese officials fully expected the three countries to comply; however, they had miscalculated the resolve of their adversaries. Communities in

all three countries pulled together to rebuild their energy infrastructure, first by building distributed and networked energy grids and micro-grids and then by taking control of local electricity generation. The transition took place very quickly considering the catastrophic loss of the grid. As communities recovered, they were determined to control their own power sources in the future.

Chinese leaders were frustrated and angry. They had hoped to unite their people against a common foe to stave off a revolution that was fomenting as expectations of numerous Chinese citizens were not being met. The efforts of their Navy and the PLA backfired as the world turned against China—resulting in boycotts of Chinese products worldwide. This unanticipated response further destabilized the country, driving capital investment from China, blunting the nation’s growth curve, and defeating its original aim.

Knowing that a destabilized China would be highly dangerous, countries in the West ensured that China did not fail; however, the crisis in the United States, Japan, and Canada would change everything because it led to the development of a grand strategy to address energy security.

Workshop Results Given the preceding “wicked” scenario, workshop participants formed eight cross-disciplinary groups to discuss the strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, and threats associated with the scenario. They provided a vision for a better U.S. energy system in 2024 and shared the assumptions they made to get to that system. System stakeholders, characteristics and attributes were identified, both inside and outside the system boundaries. Participants then identified system strengths and weaknesses, as well as variables across the entire “STEEP” spectrum—social, technological, economic, environmental,

and political. Finally, they developed implementation steps that would be taken over the next three years to achieve the group’s vision for the 2024 energy system.

Although the scenario represented a situation in 2040, the groups were asked to think strategically about goals, recommendations, and requirements for the energy system in time increments leading up to 2040. For purposes of reporting to the larger group, the workshop focused on what the energy system would require by 2024. A number of ideas emerged, and the authors developed the following key conclusions.

1. Realize the urgency.

Recent natural disasters have only magnified the critical need for affordable, reliable, sufficient, and sustainable energy sources. New challenges and threats cannot be met with 20th-century infrastructure and without a comprehensive energy policy. With such need for energy sources being one of the most challenging and pressing issues of our time, a national energy security strategy must be developed immediately.

2. Ask difficult questions.

Energy security involves complex interdependencies that are difficult to identify and characterize using traditional research methods. We must ask questions that, for example, acknowledge the geopolitical and social factors associated with understanding energy from a global perspective.

3. Underpin energy security policy decision making with analysis and information.

As emphasized by many participants and speakers, we lack a substantive national energy policy. Natural, and potentially manmade, incidents are likely to create increased pressure to respond to energy security situations and make preventative decisions.

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Envisioning 4. Move toward a systems approach.

Reconciling the global context as well as the technological challenges and policy considerations previously outlined will require an interdisciplinary approach with a foundation in systems science. Given the difficulty of even defining and describing “energy security,” a systems approach will be needed to grasp the complexities, competing priorities, and challenges we must address to achieve national security and resilience.

Summary Our national security and economic prosperity depend increasingly on our ability to develop a grand strategy for energy security. The grand strategy we develop must be aimed at creating an agile, resilient, and global network designed to provide reliable and affordable energy to customers. The workshop conclusions demonstrate how effective and thought-provoking decision support tools such as foresight and strategic visioning can be used to navigate a wicked problem and ultimately develop a grand strategy (Ronis, S.R., Timelines into the Future: Strategic Visioning Methods for Government, Business, and Other Organizations, Lanham, Maryland: Hamilton Press, 2007). Visioning and foresight processes are excellent tools that can be used by policy makers to learn more about the complex energy security systems they are trying to manage and to understand more clearly the concepts that underlie the system. Every government should be engaged in this kind of thinking when making energy plans and policies. The crucial part of visioning is the process of opening the eyes and minds of decision makers to potential events that are ordinarily never considered; literally, to “think the unthinkable.”

Ian Muttoo / CC BY-SA 2.0

Continuous envisioning of potential scenarios and threats is integral in developing a comprehensive grand strategy for energy security.

Developing a comprehensive grand strategy for energy security would ideally involve the creation of dozens of scenarios over a broad range of issues.

The process would be driven by a team to stress-test assumptions under the various scenarios to see how changes in policy might affect outcomes. Our conference used only one scenario and a short-cut process, but we found the process extremely useful. We believe that the process produced a deep, richer understanding of energy security as a system.

On the basis of the initial findings generated from the conference exercise, together with recommendations

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outlined in the n the workshop report, we highly encourage the use of strategic foresight as a robust approach to helping address the wicked problem that is energy security.

Above all, strategic foresight for the creation of an energy security grand strategy needs to be a continuous endeavor that creates an adaptive learning environment in which critical thinking and creativity thrive; conventional wisdom is always questioned; and systems thinking, “visioning,” as well as incorporation of new information and structures are staples of the ongoing process to ensure resilience.

Fiksel, J. (2014). An Interview with David Bresch, Head of Sustainability and Political Risk Management, Swiss Reinsurance Company (Swiss Re). Solutions 5(5): 17-20. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/an-interview-with-david-bresch-head-of-sustainability-and-political-risk-management-swiss-reinsurance-company-swiss-re/

Idea Lab Interview

An Interview with David Bresch, Head of Sustainability and Political Risk Management, Swiss Reinsurance Company (Swiss Re) Interviewed by Joseph Fiksel

The annual Global Risks Report published by the World Economic Forum has changed significantly over the years. It seems that our understanding of global risks keeps evolving—they are complex, highly interdependent, and difficult to quantify. Since Swiss Re is involved in producing this report, can you explain more about these challenges?

I’ve been involved with the Global Risks process during the last few years, and I think the key is to keep the dialogue going. The scope is enormous, and we realized that each year we have to focus on selected aspects. Given the high level of complexity and connectedness that you mentioned, it is best to dig deeper on certain aspects each year, and reserve the right to come back later to other aspects. We found that one of the major challenges is time scale. If your organization looks out over a five-year horizon, then many of the largest risks, such as the impacts of climate change, are unlikely to materialize in that time frame. For a risk to be relevant to decision makers, it needs to be within their time horizon.

Is the insurance industry as a whole responding somehow to this changing perception of risk, or is it just business as usual?

The world looks very different after the 2008 financial crisis, and I think that some of the key propositions of the Global Risks Report have been taken up by the insurance industry—more foresight, trying to be more holistic, and putting risks

on the table that cannot easily be quantified. I think that there is more scenario thinking and an emergent use of “storytelling” in order to better understand the issue before jumping into action. And then, of course, you have the challenge that with some of these complex risks, none of the players—private or public—can tackle it alone, so there is an urgent need for collaboration. In certain times you need to meet short-term targets in order to survive, and it’s a huge stretch for the corporate world to take a longer-term perspective.

Yes, I have noticed that there is a lot more collaboration going on nowadays.

Why do you say that they can’t do it alone? Why is it important for companies to work together on these kinds of macro issues?

The reinsurance industry is good at understanding risk, but when it comes to making a change we are at the end of the value chain. A reinsurance company does not implement any preventive actions. We are not issuing policies to homeowners nor putting zoning laws in place or enforcing building codes. Many different stakeholders have key roles to play in order to increase society’s resilience to natural catastrophes.

Our role is putting a price tag on risk, thus providing transparency, and creating a fact base for decision makers that states: this amount of risk you can avoid, this amount you can better prepare for, and this amount is

World Economic Forum / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Swiss Reinsurance is involved in producing the Global Risks Report annually.

most economical for you to transfer or diversify. Only on the last piece do we actually write the business, so we have a keen interest in seeing that this risk “value chain”—these different elements in a holistic risk management approach—are taken up by the respective stakeholders.

How does Swiss Re define resilience, and how does it fit with sustainability?

Sustainability, for Swiss Re, in essence means taking a long-term view, and therefore sustainability is a guiding principle of the company. That means when we develop strategy, we ask the question: “Does it not only work for next year—will it also work five years, ten, or even twenty years from now?”

We are even beginning to ask “it might work for us, but for whom might it not work?” We should be aware of it and we should at least mitigate the consequences or even revise the strategy if we believe that it is not truly viable for other stakeholders.

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Idea Lab Interview such a system, where can reinsurance play a role?” That was the reason for us to engage so much on climate change because by putting a price tag on risks, we raise awareness for the issue and its complexity, and we incentivize prevention and preparedness. Prevention means primarily greenhouse gas emissions reduction; that’s why Swiss Re is carbon-neutral, and we have reduced our per employee footprint by more than 50% since 2003. Preparedness doesn’t just mean putting up higher barriers against floods but rather, thinking about how we should build and develop to be more adaptable to future events. In short, strengthen climate resilience.

2014 Swiss Re

Swiss Re is advanced in the economics of adaptation, considering challenges expected to emerge 20–40 years in the future while making decisions for today.

Then we started to realize that in many cases, risk management of the first kind—avoid it or build defenses against it—will not work. You need at least a dynamic approach to risk, and that was our initial interpretation of resilience—dynamic response to a challenge. Only in the last two years or so did we realize that resilience, the adaptive capacity of a system, also includes the ability to transform. It goes beyond

buffers and spare capacity; it enables the system not just to react but actually to reconfigure itself in response to a shock.

As a physicist by training I come from a “complex adaptive systems” perspective. It’s one thing to study complexity, but in order for the system to survive, to respond to shocks, one should focus at least as much on strengthening adaptive capacity—i.e., resilience. This leads me to ask, “In

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How is Swiss Re integrating these ideas into its business?

Swiss Re has a five-year strategy built on a long-term outlook. We are mindful of these resilience concepts and we do employ scenario techniques to stress-test our strategies, but we are still wrestling with it. One area where we are relatively advanced is in the economics of adaptation—we look out 20 to 40 years into the future at emerging challenges and some of the defining changes that may happen.

We try to describe the risk landscape of today, chart out economic development for the next few decades, develop scenarios of how the environment could change over that time scale, and then take it back to today’s decisions.

We do so by comparing the potential impacts, i.e., damages, to the actions that you could take to be better prepared. We discount costs (the actions) and benefits (the averted damages) in order to make them relevant for today’s decision makers.

We have worked in more than 20 places around the planet to apply this methodology to different hazards,

Idea Lab Interview sectors, societies, and cultures. It is sobering that risks are increasing between 60% and more than 100% by 2030; this is due partly to economic development that puts higher values at risk and is further aggravated by climate change. But we have found that about 40% to 60% of the risk can be dealt with cost-effectively. It doesn’t mean that the risk goes away and adaptation doesn’t come for free, but it’s cheaper than just waiting for the impacts to hit us. We are still at an early stage, the methodology is constantly developing, and we are planning to apply it more broadly than just climate and natural catastrophe risks.

our decisions. But this is a very narrow framing of the problem because societal resilience starts with education, not with building dams.

From your experience with multinational companies, do you think that enterprise resilience is different from the conventional approach to risk?

Does it represent a new element of enterprise risk management?

Swiss Re insures a large number of multinationals, in addition to our reinsurance business, and so we are well acquainted with enterprise risk management. I think that the concept of enterprise resilience has

It’s one thing to study complexity, but in order for the system to survive, to respond to shocks, one should focus at least as much on strengthening adaptive capacity— i.e., resilience.

Do you think there is hope for us to eventually quantify the value of resilience improvements and perhaps even to influence how you make insurability decisions?

If you can define the system and its boundaries sharply enough, then you should be able to find a way to quantify the value of resilience. The problem is that in trying to come up with a precise number you might define the system too narrowly, and that would defeat the original purpose. I think it can be helpful to go at least some steps on this pathway to see what matters more or less. As I said before, if we at least give natural catastrophe impacts a price tag, it starts to make climate change and the world around us relevant to

a liberating effect because it makes it more tangible for risk managers to think beyond the enterprise “fence line.” In essence, it helps them to embrace the boundaries of their influence and to think about how to transcend them.

For example, they might ask “What are the actions we can take, together with our stakeholders, to better manage risk for the system as a whole. It helps to involve the surrounding community before an event rather than afterward, and often it would really help if you increase their resilience in order to protect yours. This is a new concept to some, but the leading companies in the field are thinking this way.

Do you see evidence that there is growing awareness of this new way of thinking?

This is my hope, and I do see evidence in some pockets. One example is the work of the Resilience Action Initiative, a group of companies that are working jointly to investigate how we can improve the resilience of the system in which we operate. We’re currently working on a project to put a “resilience lens” on enterprise risk management.

With that, we aim at bridging the gap between systems science and a risk practitioner’s approach.

Let me give you an interesting example of a climate resilience study that we’ve conducted in the Gulf of Mexico.1 Together with Entergy, an energy utility company, we’ve investigated how to flood- and surge-proof the company’s installations. We’ve realized that the real opportunity goes beyond avoiding damage; it is about being better organized to rapidly detect problems and to best serve their customers.

This way, they’ll gain market share after the event, as it will take competitors longer to be back in business. It is not necessarily about protecting a substation; it is more about how you engage with customers to be prepared for an emergency. Serving a customer by bringing in a generator may succeed just as well as flood-proofing a substation, and may be a more economical use of resources. The question is “What helps to best serve the joint interests of both the company and its customers?”

This study provided good insights into how companies can organize to weather these types of challenges.

So you are saying that resilience is not just about avoiding losses, but it is also a strategic opportunity for differentiation in the marketplace.

Indeed it is, that’s why we are starting to look at the transformative

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Idea Lab Interview piece. It could well be that the energy utility business model shifts from selling power to providing a service.

There are examples in California where a power company offers energy service contracts, where the customer simply says “I would like to get a certain quality of heating in my building, but I do not need to own my heating device.” The company might decide to hook up the neighborhood on a district heating system. This is a huge investment, but the contract model would allow them to amortize the investment. Meanwhile, the individual homeowner just cares about being warm in winter and cool in summer and does not need to know the means by which that service is provided.

Secondly, I think we need to recognize that the global economy is a means to achieve something. Do we (still) know what it is we want to achieve? Economic growth above a certain threshold of well-being becomes quite hollow or too narrow a proposition. I think it is important to strengthen the political process so that people can express their preferences as to what type of economy they want.

We have a lot of challenges in the global economy, including stresses on natural resources, population growth, the desire to alleviate poverty, and rapid industrialization of emerging economies. From a global perspective, what do you think are the key factors that will enable the economy to become more resilient to future stresses and disruptions, including climate change?

This is a big question, but one important element that I see is to internalize known externalities.

We know quite a lot about this planet, and we are not acting on it.

For example, putting a price tag on carbon will help us to better allocate resources. This is the low-hanging fruit, but we need political consensus to take action. The key players in the economy could make that happen, and many large corporations have already set targets for reducing carbon emissions, since they know it will eventually make economic sense for decision making.

Are you suggesting that rather than blind pursuit of economic growth, there are different styles of economic models that may be suitable for different countries?

Blind pursuit of GDP growth is not really pursuit of happiness—perhaps, for some but not for everyone. We are working with scientists like Brian Walker to rethink what we really intend when we allocate resources and what set of values should guide our journey. In sustainability language we might say that we value environmental integrity. Resilience is more complex because we do not value a state but rather, an attitude. I think it may liberate us from the ideological discussions around sustainability.

The right level of disturbance for the switched-on brain, the way we are wired, is something what we seek. So the right level of turbulence should be perceived as a positive, healthy condition.

The more you plan for turbulence, the more you improve your ability to deal with it, the more fulfilling is that experience. It’s tough because there are probably large parts of the global

The more you plan for turbulence, the more you improve your ability to deal with it, the more fulfilling is that experience.

Resilience is not just about rate of growth; it is also about the capacity to resist disruptions and adapt to change.

Does that suggest some other factors that we need to work on?

It’s interesting—if everything runs super-smoothly, it quickly gets boring.

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population that are not in such a relaxed position to muse about this. Only when a certain level of basic needs is being fulfilled can this be seen as positive.

If I may paraphrase, are you saying that for any living organism, it is healthy to have a certain level of turbulence and variety rather than a purely static condition?

Yes, and to take it a step further, under an egocentric, or “winner-takes-all” approach, it is much harder to deal with turbulence. The powerful winners may not be disturbed by turbulence and may not have a keen interest in helping those in more trouble. If you move toward a more collaborative model, then you can increase your resilience, and you can view turbulence as more of a positive challenge than a threat.

References 1 http://www.entergy.com/content/o ur_community/ environment/GulfCoastAdaptation/Building_a_ Resilient_Gulf_Coast.pdf

Gunderson, L. (2014). Managing Resilience for Ecosystem Restoration in a Changing Climate. Solutions 5(5): 21-25. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/managing-resilience-for-ecosystem-restoration-in-a-changing-climate/

Perspectives Managing Resilience for Ecosystem Restoration in a Changing Climate

by Lance Gunderson

Grand Canyon National Park / CC BY 2.0

The development of management systems along the Colorado River have radically transformed the river’s ecosystem, decreasing sediment flow and dropping water temperatures.

A

cross the US, billions of dollars are devoted towards large scale ecosystem restoration programs. The Everglades in Florida is the recipient of a $15 billion program over 30 years; Chesapeake Bay $7 billion over a decade. The list goes on: the San-Francisco Bay Delta, the Grand Canyon, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Missouri River. These projects add up to one of the biggest shifts in how we view natural resources and manage major ecosystems in the United States.

For decades, governments have sought to contain rivers and waterways, whether to control flooding or meet the demands for agriculture, energy production, or urban development.

These large scale infrastructure

projects—like dams and levees—have largely met objectives of flood control or water supply, but at the same time, have eroded ecological resilience that threatens the very development they have enabled. After decades of dam and levee building, there is now a gradual shift back towards a more holistic approach to ecosystems— one which aims to restore natural processes in order to mitigate against climate change.

Whether ecosystem restoration can become one of the guiding principles of this century will depend on how quickly we can dispense with traditional ways of thinking about the environment. During the 20th century, development of management systems

accelerated, as dams and levees were constructed to constrain flood effects and provide water and energy for human activity.1 Dams were built along the Colorado River to store water in reservoirs and allow for the control of water flow to supply water for economic development. Similarly, levees and canals in southern Florida facilitated the supply of water and flood protection for urban, agricultural, and environmental needs. One of the challenges facing ecologists is that these man-made alterations have led to radical transformation of ecosystem structures and functions, often signaling a loss of resilience, and making it harder to restore their original states.2

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Perspectives

Master Sgt. Mark Olsen, US Air Force / CC BY 2.0

The costs of weather related disasters in the US are steadily increasing, with hurricane Sandy in 2012 running up a bill near $60 billion.

Such transformations have been documented in all types of ecosystems: aquatic (clear or turbid lakes), terrestrial (grassland or shrub land), wetlands (open water or vegetated marshes), and marine (coral or algal reefs).3 More specific examples facing ecosystem restoration managers include the transition of the Colorado River from one where sediment, flow, and temperature pulsed on an annual basis to a river that is sediment starved, clear, and cold. Indeed, the name ‘Colorado’ refers to a blushing river—one that changed from green to red. Such

broad scale ecosystem regime shifts are also responsible for the extirpation and endangerment of a few species, such as the humpback chub in the Colorado. In the Everglades, landscape level vegetation shifts and decline of key bird populations are due to declines in long term flows associated with upstream water diversions, increases in nutrients from agricultural runoff, and changes caused by disturbances such as fire, drought, freezes, and cyclones. Thus, many of these large-scale restoration programs are attempting to shift or flip ecosystem states. Perhaps one of

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the largest concerns is the inherent uncertainty in facilitating regime shifts. Due to the number of the variables involved, and the complexity of interactions among variables, scientists and managers have great difficulty in predicting outcomes.

Another issue is that there is little experience of solving such complex problems; many managers will admit that they are attempting to achieve results that have never been done before. In response to this inherent uncertainty, most of these large-scale restoration programs have taken an adaptive management approach.4

Perspectives Adaptive management programs in the Grand Canyon and the Everglades have been ongoing for well over a decade. In these programs, management actions have been proposed as tests or trials to see if these actions will help facilitate regime transitions. In the Canyon, short flow releases have been largely successful at helping the managers learn how to restore extant sediment to portions of the river ecosystem, as have predator control experiments to benefit endangered fish taxa. In the Everglades, an active adaptive planning program is underway—while a few system wide experiments have been planned, no experimental manipulations have yet to be realized.

In both the Everglades and Grand Canyon, managers are trying to manage for a variety of social objectives. Ecosystem restoration is but one of many, including water supply, flood control, endangered species, water quality, and recreational benefits to name a few. Due to recent executive orders, federal agencies now must also add adapting to climate change to this growing list of objectives.

Adapting to Climate Change While linkages between a changing climate and cumulative weather events are debated, the costs of such weather related natural disasters in the United States are increasing substantially. In 2011, over 55 billion dollars were spent recovering from weather events.1 Estimates of damage from the storm Sandy in 2012—a marginal hurricane—are in the range of 60 billion. Some of this rise in fiscal impact may be due to more frequent and more intense storms, but other factors such as development in disaster-prone areas, including flood plains or coastal areas, contribute to the increasing social costs. While discrete weather events are causing

impacts, other longer-term climatic changes such as increasing recurrence and intensity of flood and drought cycles are creating economic hardships across scales—from farms to regions to the nation. Perhaps one of the reasons for a renewed focus on adaptation to climate change in the US is because of the recent, dramatic rise in economic impacts from weather events. Such events have helped to bring discussions about resilience and adaptation to the forefront of public discourse, and especially to the minds of those charged with managing public lands, public waters, and other natural resources.

Instead of viewing these as disturbances to be managed against, they could be viewed as ways for managers to test ideas (i.e., passively experiment) as to how to achieve management objectives. Two illustrative examples of such learning opportunities have occurred in the past, as described in the following paragraphs.

excess freshwater. But rather than play politics with the environment, thirty years ago managers requested that the excess water be delivered to Everglades National Park. Such a change in policy required an act of Congress. As a result, Congress passed the Experimental Water Delivery Act, which—as a test—redirected the flow to the park.

The result of this experiment was resolution of three chronic problems with water management that had persisted for decades. The first problem involved the fact that the park was receiving less than its fair share of the water, and moreover the pattern of delivery was harming resources.

In other words, water managers had been delivering a set amount of water to the park, regardless of rainfall or ambient conditions. From the findings of the flow test, managers developed a rainfall-based formulation to deliver water in sync with the weather. As a result, the park has gotten more water in wet years and less water in

Whether ecosystem restoration can become one of the guiding principles of this century will depend on how quickly we can dispense with traditional ways of thinking about the environment.

Florida Makes Use of Waste Water In the early 1980s, high rainfall over south Florida saturated the Everglades.

The general management strategy was to discharge this water as quickly as possible to the ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Indeed a similar issue is occurring as I write this, as the Governor of Florida is blaming the federal government for ruining estuaries and degrading tourism by discharging

dry years—much more like the way the ecosystem functioned prior to intensive development.

The second lesson revealed by this experiment was that water quality and water quantity were intimately linked, as scientists and managers realized that any sources of upstream water would carry nutrients that could cause unwanted flips in vegetation communities. The third lesson was that passive experiments such as

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Perspectives

Phil’s 1stPix / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In the 1980s, water management issues in Florida’s Everglades National Park were partially resolved through an act of Congress.

this one could be used to determine solutions to long-term problems such as how much water should be delivered to the park.

Colorado Stays Cool Another example of a learning opportunity is occurring in the Grand Canyon portion of the Colorado River. Managers in the Grand Canyon Adaptive Management Program are using an ongoing drought to resolve questions around mitigating impacts from the Glen Canyon dam.

Built in the early 1960s, the dam was constructed in such a way that cold, clear water is taken from Lake Powell

reservoir and discharged downstream.

As a result of the dam, the river ecosystem has undergone an ecological regime shift from one that fluctuated between hot and cold on an annual basis to one that is consistently cold water. For many years, managers have proposed a costly solution: to retrofit the dam with a temperature control device to be able to deliver water of varying temperatures. Managers feared detrimental impacts from warmer water discharges in the river system that had adapted to the cold water.

The ongoing drought has lowered the reservoir to the point where warmer surface waters have and are

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being released downstream. Managers have thus been able to simulate the effects of warm water, without building a multi-million dollar temperature control structure.

Using Climate Change to Help Ecosystem Restoration Both the examples of Florida and Colorado suggest that variability from a changing climate will produce opportunities for experimentation, but will also require frameworks that allow for institutional learning and policy reorientation that respond positively to the changing climate and other global drivers.7 Recurring

Perspectives

Al_HikesAZ / CC BY-NC 2.0

The Glen Canyon Dam shifted the Colorado River ecosystem to one with constantly cold water, until water managers harnessed a natural fluctuation in the dam to serve as temperature control rather than implementing further artificial systems.

knowledge assessments of resources, plus visioning and scenario processes, should help managers to prepare for and manage such changes. They will also require the continuation of research and monitoring programs that focus as much on learning about the complex dynamics of these systems as they do on collecting more data. Managers will need to be flexible and opportunistic as these events emerge, often with little or no forewarning. Whether these pieces can be put in place is a challenge, but at least

these discussions have the potential to increase awareness of the value of ecosystem restoration and the opportunities afforded by climate change to change our mindsets and learn our way into a more desirable future.

in ecosystem management. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 35, 557–581 (2004).

4. Hughes, TP et al. Adaptive Management of the Great Barrier Reef and the Grand Canyon World Heritage Areas. Ambio 36, 586–591 (2007).

5. Baron JS et al. Options for National Parks and Reserves for Adapting to Climate Change.

Environmental Management 44, 1033–1042 (2009).

6. National Academy of Science. Disaster Resilience:

References

A National Imperative. Committee on Increasing

1. Gunderson, LH, Holling CS & Light SS. Barriers and

National Resilience to Hazards and Disasters;

Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions

Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public

(Columbia University Press, New York, 1995).

Policy; The National Academies. (National

2. Holling, CS. Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 4, 1 (1973).

Academies Press, Washington DC, 2012).

7. Gunderson, LH & Holling, CS. Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Systems of Humans

3. Folke, C et al. Regime shifts, resilience, and biodiversity

and Nature (Island Press, Washington DC, 2002).

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Elmqvist, T. (2014). Urban Resilience Thinking. Solutions 5(5): 26-30. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/urban-resilience-thinking/

Perspectives Urban Resilience Thinking

by Thomas Elmqvist

Michigan Municipal League / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

As parts of global and more resilient financial systems, modern cities are able to go into economic decline without collapse. A recent example of this is Detroit.

W

e are entering a new urban era where the planet is increasingly influenced by human activities and where cities have become a central nexus of the relationship between people and nature, both as crucial centers of demand for ecosystem services, and as sources of environmental impacts.1,2 However, in the next two to three decades, we have unprecedented chances to vastly improve global sustainability through designing urban systems for increased resource efficiency, as well as through exploring how cities can be responsible stewards

of biodiversity and ecosystem services, both within and beyond city boundaries.1 Two central concepts for achieving this—urban sustainability and urban resilience—have, however, until now rarely been applied beyond city boundaries and have often been constrained to either single or narrowly defined issues (e.g., population, climate, energy, water).4, 5, 6 Although there is often an aim to optimize resource use in cities, increase efficiency, and minimize waste, cities can never become fully self-sufficient.5 This means that individual cities

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cannot be considered “sustainable” or “resilient” without acknowledging and accounting for their dependence on ecosystems, resources, and populations from other regions around the world.2 There is therefore a need to revisit the concept of sustainability and resilience in the urban context.

Here I try to contribute to more clarity around the concepts, discuss common problems with misinterpretations, and offer some solutions and reflect on difficulties that remain when applying these concepts in urban development.

Perspectives Problem I Resilience and Sustainability— What is the Difference?

How are the two concepts of resilience and sustainability related? Do they mean approximately the same thing, or are they distinctly different and can misunderstandings lead to undesired outcomes?

Currently the two concepts are too often used interchangeably.4 Resilience may now be more frequently in use, meaning what we perhaps ten years ago meant by the concept sustainable development. More clarity is definitely needed here. The classic definition of sustainable development focuses on how to manage current resources in a way that guarantees the welfare of current and future generations, while resilience on the other hand addresses the capacity of a system to change in order to maintain the same identity (Table 1). While sustainable development is inherently normative and positive, this may not necessarily

be true for the resilience concept. The desirability of specified resilience (Table 1) in particular, depends on careful analysis of resilience “of what, to what, and for whom” since many examples can be found of highly resilient systems (e.g., oppressive political systems) locked into an undesirable system configuration or state with high levels of environmental inequity.7

Solution I Resilience and sustainability complement each other where resilience is an important attribute of the system (non-normative) to meet the challenges of sustainable development (normative goal).

Problem II Resilience: A Property of a System, not of a Locality The resilience concept is frequently applied to specific locations, and numerous attempts have been made to analyze the resilience of

individual cities. However, these attempts are misleading, as the city scale often is too narrow, and since resilience is an attribute of a system not of a locality.1, 8 Urban inhabitants are today reliant on resources and ecosystem services—everything from food, water, and construction materials to waste assimilation— secured from locations around the world.3 To become meaningful, urban resilience therefore has to address appropriate scales, which most often would be larger than an individual city. A narrow focus on a single city is often counterproductive and may even be destructive, since building resilience in one city often may erode it somewhere else with multiple negative effects across the globe. Also, from historical accounts, we learn that while there are some individual cities that have gone into precipitous decline or actually failed and disappeared (e.g., Mayan cities), our modern era

Table 1. Definition of Concepts 9, 10 Sustainability

Manage resources in a way that guarantees welfare and promotes equity of current and future generations

Resilience

The capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, and feedbacks, and therefore identity (i.e., capacity to change in order to maintain the same identity)

General resilience

The resilience of a system to all kinds of shocks, including novel ones

Specified resilience

The resilience “of what, to what”; resilience of some particular part of a system, related to a particular control variable, to one or more identified kinds of shocks

Transformation

The capacity to transform the stability landscape itself in order to become a different kind of system, to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social structures make the existing system untenable

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Perspectives

Mans Unides / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Urban resilience must do more than respond to sudden impacts, such as Typhoon Haiyan, which ravaged the Philippines in 2013. Rather resiliency must incorporate persistence, recovery, and transformative capacities.

experience is that contemporary individual cities are unlikely to collapse and disappear.1 Rather, they may enter a spiral of decline, becoming non-competitive and losing their position in regional, national, and even global systems of cities.

Through extensive financial and trading networks, cities have a high capacity to avoid abrupt change and collapse.

localities. We need to move away from using a narrow analysis of resilience of urban locations and instead analyze the larger open urban system including the impact and dependence on distant ecosystems connected through multiple teleconnections (i.e. longdistance connections often invisible)

Solution II

When most people think of urban resilience, it is generally in the context of response to sudden impacts, such as a hazard or disaster. With the recent

Urban resilience analyses need to focus on cities as parts of nested, multiple-scale systems rather than discrete

Problem III Resilience and Transformations

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memories of natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes Sandy and Haiyan affecting large cities such as New York and several cities in the Philippines, and recent floods across densely populated places in Europe), there has been an enormous increased interest in the urban resilience concept. However, if we go back to the definitions in Table 1, resilience clearly goes far beyond recovery from single disturbances, and rather represents a multidisciplinary concept that explores persistence, recovery, and the adaptive and transformative capacities of interlinked social and ecological systems and subsystems.11

Perspectives At a first glance, building resilience seems counterintuitive to transitions, given the definition of transformability as the capacity to transform and become a different kind of system, to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social structures make the existing system untenable.

Aren’t transitions about large-scale changes of a system, and resilience about maintaining what is? Key to understanding the role of transformability in resilience is distinguishing between specified and general resilience, and to remember that systems have multiple scale levels.9,11 The contradiction is real when discussing specified resilience at a specific scale level. But when analyzing general resilience of a nested system, transformation at lower scale levels are often necessary to maintain resilience on a larger scale. For example, numerous small scale transformations may be represented by urban planning targeting restoration of wetlands or forests, conservation of sand dunes, fresh water marshes, coral reefs, and mangroves throughout an urban landscape to provide cost-effective solutions to coastal protection instead of using conventional hard engineering solutions such as higher levees, sea walls, etc. A concrete example is the restoration of the Berlin-Tempelhof Airport into an urban green space of more than 300 hectares, resulting in a transformation of a brownfield into areas for rainwater management, enhancement of recreation, and biodiversity protection of importance for the larger Berlin Metropolitan area.12

Solution III Strategies need to include an approach, which view multiple transformations on lower scales as necessary to maintain resilience on a larger scale.

Problem IV Resilience, Governance and Urban Planning Urban planning practitioners see insights from resilience thinking as providing a new language and metaphors for the dynamics of change and new tools and methods for analysis and synthesis.13 For example, it has often been pointed out that one of the basic tenets of resilience and systems thinking is that too strong an emphasis on efficiency (maximising outputs) can erode resilience through a deliberate reduction in redundancy, where the system may become brittle due to too few links among actors. In governance, an increase in efficiency is often achieved through reduction of redundancy (degree of overlap among institutions and organizations).

However, this may at the same time lead to increased vulnerability through failure to address novelties (surprises where responsibilities and mandates are unclear, e.g., related to climate change).

A resilience approach therefore confronts modes of governance based on assumptions of predictability, controllability, and efficiency with a mode based on dynamics, non-linearity, and redundancy. This is an emerging field where new, innovative means of planning that deal with urban complexity and sustaining urban ecosystem services are needed. However, resilience thinking and social-ecological theory alone can provide little guidance for prioritizing or addressing tradeoffs between different strategies. This highlights the inherently political character of urban governance.13

Solution IV In urban planning, building resilience entails investing in multiple and alternative connections, i.e. redundancy, in governance and institutions at the local scale and at the global scale engaging in collaboration in systems

of cities to create a framework that manages resource chains for sustainability through resilience. Resilience analyses can help us understand some of the true costs of sustainability (i.e., the cost of investing in redundancy and the cost of engaging in global cross-scale interactions).

Conclusion The United Nations’ current proposals for Sustainable Development Goals includes proposed goal 11, on Cities and Urbanization, which states: “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.” I argue, based on this overview, that for the concepts sustainability and resilience and the proposed SDG goal to become truly relevant in a rapidly urbanizing world, the definitions and derived policies must urgently address four important issues: 1. Urban sustainability and urban resilience are not the same, but they do complement each other where sustainability represent the normative goal for society and resilience a (non-normative) property of a system.

2. In light of urban dependence and impacts on distant populations and ecosystems, there is an apparent danger of applying too narrow an urban scale for these types of policies. For example, building resilience in one city may lead to erosion of resilience elsewhere.1 3. In urban planning, building resilience should entail investing in multiple alternative connections, i.e. investing in redundancy in governance and institutions at the local scale.

4. Collaborations across a global system of cities should provide a new framework to manage resource chains for sustainability through resilience.2

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Perspectives

Noema Pérez / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The restoration of the Berlin-Tempelhof Airport into an urban green space contributes to the resiliency of the larger Berlin metropolitan area.

References 1. Elmqvist T et al. (eds.) Urbanization, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: Challenges and Opportunities: A Global Assessment. Springer Open

Society [online] 19(2), 37 (2014) (dx.doi.org/10.5751/ ES-06390-190237).

5. Elmqvist, T, Barnett G & Wilkinson C in Resilient

[online] (2013) (doi: 10.1007/978-94-007-7088-1_33,

Sustainable Cities (Pearson, L, ed.) (Routledge, in

2013).

press).

2. Seto, KC et al. Urban land teleconnections and

6. Folke, C, Carpenter, S, Elmqvist, T, Gunderson, L,

sustainability (Proceedings of the National

Holling, CS & Walker, B. Resilience and Sustainable

Academy of Sciences of the United States of

Development: Building Adaptive Capacity in a

America 109, 7687–7692, 2012) (doi:10.1073/

World of Transformations. AMBIO: A Journal of the

pnas.1117622109).

Human Environment 31(5), 437–440 (2002).

3. Seitzinger, S. Planetary Stewardship in an

7. Carpenter, S, Walker, B, Anderies, JM & Abel, N.

Urbanizing World: Beyond City Limits. AMBIO

From Metaphor to Measurement: Resilience of what

[online] 41, 787–794 (2012) (doi:10.1007/s13280-012-

to what? Ecosystems 4(8), 765–781 (2001).

0353-7).

4. Redman, CL. Should sustainability and resilience be combined or remain distinct pursuits? Ecology and

8. Holling, CS. Understanding the Complexity

9. Folke, C, Carpenter, SR, Walker, B, Scheffer, M, Chapin, T & Rockström, J. Resilience thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability. Ecology and Society 15(4), 20 (2010).

10. Tuvendal, M & Elmqvist T in Resilience and the Cultural Landscape (Plieninger T & Bieling C, eds.)

(Cambridge University Press, 2012).

11. Walker, B, Holling, CS, Carpenter, SR & Kinzig, A. Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social– ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9(2), 5 (2004).

12. Kabisch, N & Haase, D. Green justice or just green?

Provision of urban green spaces in Berlin, Germany.

Landscape and Urban Planning 122, 129–139 (2014).

13. Wilkinson C. Social-ecological resilience insights

of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems.

and issues for planning theory. Planning Theory

Ecosystems 4(5), 390–405 (2001).

11(2), 148–169 (2012).

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Orr, D.W. (2014). Living and Breathing in a ‘Black Swan’ World. Solutions 5(5): 31-37. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/food-and-faith/

Perspectives Living and Breathing in a ‘Black Swan’ World

by David W. Orr

Mike Weightman, IAEA Imagebank / CC BY-SA 2.0

True resilience means the ability of society to respond to and recover from “Black Swan” events such as the Fukushima disaster contribute to changes and turbulence across various levels of society, driving the need for more resilient systems.

A

Marine Corps friend of mine defines resilience as the ability to take a gut punch and come back swinging. More formally, it is said to be the capacity to maintain core functions and values in the face of outside disturbance. Either way, the concept is elusive, a matter of more or less, not either/or. The combination of slow, cumulative changes like soil erosion, loss of species, and acidification of oceans with fast, Black Swan events, such as the Fukushima disaster, like intersecting ocean currents, will create overlapping levels of unpredictable turbulence at various depths.1 Against that prospect, the idea that we can improve resilience at scales ranging from cities to global civilization is becoming an important part of policy discussions, but mostly in reaction to crises like the global economic crisis of 2008 and the prospect of rapid climate

change. If we are serious about it we will have to improve not only our capacity to act with foresight but also develop the wherewithal to diagnose and remedy the deeper problems rooted in language, paradigms, social structure, and economy that undermine resilience in the first place.

The theoretical underpinnings of the concept go back to the writings of C. S. Holling on the resilience of ecological systems and to metaphors drawn from the disciplines of systems theory, mathematics, and engineering. More recently, scholars such as Joseph Tainter, Thomas Homer-Dixon, and Jared Diamond have documented the histories of societies that collapsed for lack of foresight, competence, ecological intelligence, and environmental restraint.2 The concept of resilience is related to that of sustainability, but differs in at least one crucial respect. Sustainability

implies a stable end state that can be achieved once and for all. Resilience, on the other hand, is the capacity to make ongoing adjustments to changing political, economic, and ecological conditions. Its hallmarks are redundancy, adaptation, and flexibility, as well as the foresight and good judgment to avoid the brawl in the first place.

In the section below I will discuss some of the causes of brittleness, the opposite of resilience.3 The subject is large and perplexing, but we are inclined to whittle it down to simpler issues of technology. While better technology is certainly a large part of societal resilience, the definition of ‘better’ is seldom obvious. The reason is that we do not simply choose to make and deploy single artifacts, but rather, unknowingly, we select devices as parts of larger systems of technology, power, and wealth.4 The plow, for instance, represented the ingenuity of John Deere, but also an emerging, yet seldom acknowledged agro-industrial paradigm of total human domination of nature with commodity markets, banks, federal crop insurance, grain elevators, long-distance transport, fossil fuel dependence, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, crop subsidies, overproduction, mass obesity, soil erosion, polluted groundwater, loss of biological diversity, dead zones, and the concentrated political power of the farm lobby representing oil companies, equipment manufacturers, chemical and seed companies, the Farm Bureau, commodity brokers, giant food companies, advertisers, and so forth. The upshot is a high output, ecologically destructive, fossil-fuel dependent, unsustainable and brittle food system that wreaks havoc on the health of land, waters, and people alike. Farmers did not just buy John Deere plows, they bought into a system and the resilience of that system had nothing to do with their choices.

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Perspectives There is little in the modern world that is either resilient or sustainable.

The idea of resilience is largely alien to our cultural DNA. As a result, the drive toward globalization, more economic growth, faster communication, robotics, drones, ever more interconnectedness, and so forth, has created a global world without firebreaks or even fire departments.

While there are some obvious things we can do at the national5 and international level to improve resilience, such measures are no more than temporary stop-gaps that conceal deeper flaws rooted in our paradigms and worldviews. We are prone to tinker at the edges of the status quo and then are puzzled when things do not improve much and even larger disasters occur. My point is that if we are serious about designing and building resilience, we will face a long and difficult process of rebuilding not just our hardware and infrastructure, but rooting out the ideas hidden in our paradigms, language, political systems, economy, and education that undermined resilience in the first place. Perhaps when we come to a fuller understanding of the discipline and restraint that sustainability and resilience will require of us, we may, like Thelma and Louise, prefer to go off the cliff in a blaze of glory. If we decide otherwise, the conversation about resilience must advance from a focus on the coefficients of change to the structure of larger systems and ideas of human dominance, which is to say from symptoms to root causes. Among other things, this will require revisiting earlier conversations that go back to the likes of Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Herman Daly, John Ralston Saul, and further back in time to Frederick Soddy, Karl Marx, John Ruskin, and John Stuart Mill, as well as others who first noticed the cracks in the hard-shell presumptions of the modern project.

Stephen Melkisethian / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Existing political systems provide little hope for protecting future generations while serving the interests of wealth and power.

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Perspectives I Aside from the permanent threat of nuclear war, rapid climate change resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels tops many lists of global fears. The scientific evidence supporting that fear has grown dramatically in recent years. There is little doubt that if business as usual continues, we are heading for a 2 degrees C warming sometime around mid-century.

Recent evidence suggests temperature increases of 4–6 degrees C by the year 2100 or even sooner are possible.6 Somewhere along that trajectory, many things will come undone starting with water and food shortages, but eventually entire economies and political systems. Nearly everything on earth behaves or works differently at higher temperatures. Ecologies collapse, forests burn, metals expand, concrete runways buckle, rivers dry up, and people curse and kill more easily.

Climate deniers, of course, remain unmoved by science and the evidence before their eyes, but they are doomed to roughly the same status as, say, members of the Flat Earth Society.

More serious problems arise from those who presumably know what lies ahead, but choose not to speak about the harsh realities ahead for fear of alarming the public. As a result of both denial and evasion, there is a large chasm separating the science and the public discourse about planetary destabilization now well underway. Whether we face it or not, we will have to contend with the remorseless working of the big numbers that govern the biosphere.

The ‘long emergency’ ahead is caused by the fact that carbon from the combustion of fossil fuels will stay in the atmosphere for a very long time. As a result, temperatures and sea levels will continue to rise for hundreds or even thousands of years.7

The problem is not solvable in any way that we would normally use that word. What we can do, and must do, is to head off the worst of what lies ahead by making a rapid transition to energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Humans have never faced a more vexing and dire problem. Why have we ignored increasingly urgent and detailed scientific warnings for so long?

prospects. As those inexorable slow variables work over decades or centuries, baseline expectations and memories of better things shift downward to a new normal and we forget what once had been. And, mesmerized by ever more powerful technology, we fail to notice vulnerabilities silently multiplying and ramifying all around us.

The idea of resilience is largely alien to our cultural DNA. Historian Ronald Wright describes our autism as the result of a progress trap. “Technology,” he writes, “is addictive. Material progress creates problems that are, or seem to be, soluble only by further progress.”8 It is an old story, “Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilizations which fell victim to their own success.”9 The problem, Wright believes, is the inherent “human inability to foresee long-range consequences.”10 We are preoccupied with the here and now. What lies beyond is confusing and veiled and so we procrastinate. We exist amidst the interlocking systems of different temporal and spatial scales and navigate by often conflicting and competing value systems that direct our attention to one thing while making us blind to another. The headlines report the fast news from the latest scandal to the daily jiggles of stock market trends. The brown color of the local river, on the other hand, reports the slow movement of topsoil seaward.

The former captures most of our attention, but soil erosion, literacy rates, and retreating Arctic ice say much more about our long-term

Looking ahead even a few decades, the progress trap will lead to more difficult and unprecedented problems for which we are ill-prepared. Ray Kurzweil, for example, happily forecasts the singularity, when carbon-based intelligence (you and I) will merge with silicon-based intelligence (computers) to create something beyond, or below, human.

Yet, there is almost no inquiry into whether this is a desirable future or not and who has the right to make such decisions. We are sleepwalking toward seismic and irrevocable changes in virtually everything we have heretofore regarded as fundamental to our humanity. Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, once called for a moratorium on the deployment of technologies with the capability to self-replicate and hence displace human agency, specifically artificial intelligence, nano-technology, and genetic engineering,11 but any such moratorium is unlikely. We are unpracticed in foresight, precaution, and the discipline necessary to restrain and redirect our technological drive.12 The merest suggestion of caution has become the modern version of religious heresy. We now have new and more powerful gods.

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Perspectives A still more fundamental progress trap is inherent in the dynamism of a continually growing, energy- and resource-intensive, consumptionoriented market economy. The market economy has also attained a kind of divine status—worshipped, worried over, and appeased with sacrificial offerings (e.g., Detroit). There is good reason to believe that the economy has already exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth. But the ideas that there are any limits to growth or fundamental differences between quantitative and qualitative growth are still incomprehensible to most economists, corporate chiefs, bankers, financiers, managers of the economy, media talking heads, and all of the nabobs who gather to preen and be seen at the annual séance at Davos.

Few of these, or their acolytes, seem to notice the accumulation of ironies piling up all about them. Since the 1950s, for example, economies in developed countries expanded 3 – 8 fold, but indicators of happiness did not budge.13 Beyond some fairly low income level, we are no happier with more stuff than we are with less, but rates of suicide, crime, and mental illness suggest that we are considerably more distraught and distracted.

Accumulating wealth is increasingly offset by what John Ruskin once called “illth,” in the form of pollution, climate change, unpaid social costs, and ugliness in its many guises. We are wealthier than ever, but the gap between the super wealthy and all of the rest of us continues to widen and the collateral effects of inequality and demoralization infiltrate every sector of modern society.14 Once, we confidently presumed that our legacy was an unalloyed stream of benefits to our progeny, but the truth is that we cast a lengthening shadow of biotic impoverishment, deforestation, acidic oceans, toxic pollution, and declining

climate stability on our descendants.

What would a sustainable, fair, and resilient economy be? What energy sources will dependably and benignly power it? How large an economy can be sustained within the limits of the earth? How large an economy can fallible humans safely manage? What would it mean to give up our fatal obsession with the domination of nature? How will we distribute wealth? What would it mean to develop an economy for ‘Gross National Happiness’? How will we subtract the $20 trillion of fossil fuels that cannot be safely burned from corporate balance sheets? Who will decide such things? Such questions have been shunted aside in the manic phase of economic expansion, but if not for the wellbeing of all of the people and all of those to come, what is an economy for?

Such questions are first and foremost political, not economic. They have to do with how we provide food, energy, shelter, materials, transport, healthcare, and livelihoods, and how we distribute the risks and benefits resulting from those choices, but these issues are often excluded from public deliberation and democratic control.

From the beginning, the deck was stacked to protect wealth, individual rather than collective rights, and perversely, the rights of corporations as much or more than those of flesh and blood people. Further, it gives little or no protection to future generations even when their life, liberty, and property are put at risk because of the actions of the present generation. In short, the system is rigged to protect power and wealth and not to foresee or to forestall obvious risks such as climate disaster looming dead ahead.

Our manner of governance seems incapable of reforming itself, let alone dealing proactively and constructively with the scale, scope, and duration of

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the perils ahead. Even at their best, however, it is debatable whether democratic societies are capable of exercising the foresight and precaution necessary to make resilience a priority in difficult circumstances.15 Here is the nub of the issue. The founding ideals of America had to do with equality, liberty, and justice but these have always competed with other values embedded in the American dream, which were mostly about individuals getting rich quick. We were, in historian Walter McDougall’s view, predominantly a nation of hustlers and deal-makers, now breathlessly puffed up as ‘job creators.’ Pursuit of the American dream led to the indiscriminate exploitation of land, wildlife, waters, soils, forests, minerals, and people. Our laws, regulations, taxes, and subsidies were designed to accelerate economic expansion and to make it easy for the lucky ones to make lots of money.

At the same time, we made it much harder than it had to be for minorities, native Americans, the underprivileged, women, workers, unions, immigrants, the poor, and now, increasingly, the middle class. We have made it still harder to exercise economic and technological restraint, foresight, and precaution, even as the scale and scope of risks they incurred became global and the damages irrevocable.

Do we have the right stuff for resilience? What is to be done?

II “Resilience arises” in Donella Meadows’ words, “from a rich structure of many feedback loops that can work in different ways to restore a system even after a large perturbation.”16 Some of the first steps to improving resilience are obvious. The engineering principles and technology for a more resilient electrical grid, for example, are well

Perspectives

Tim Rich and Lesley Katon / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

To solve climate change, societal systems must be changed and cultural norms shifted to look beyond the present to the impending and drastic ecological changes lying ahead.

understood. A resilient power system would be distributed among many renewable energy sources. It would be highly efficient, carbon neutral, and organized around interlinked ‘smart’ micro-grids with two-way communication between the grid and end-users.

Energy prices would be based on the full life-cycle costs of energy including its externalities.17 Consequently, it would use a fraction of the energy we presently use while providing higher quality service.

The principles of resilient urban design are also well known. In Eric Klinenberg’s words, resilient urban

areas consist of communities with “sidewalks, stores, restaurants, and organizations that bring people into contact with friends and neighbors.”18 Healthy neighborhoods have many people watching the streets as Jane Jacobs once said, and many overlapping connections between churches, businesses, civic organizations, schools, and colleges. More resilient communities are pedestrian and biker friendly with close proximity between housing, schools, jobs, theaters, clubs, coffee shops, and health facilities.

They have multiple and interconnected layers of ‘social capital,’ an ugly

way to say competent, caring, and engaged citizens who work and play together and understand the meaning of common wealth. Urban communities intending to improve their resilience recycle wastes, minimize their carbon footprints, grow by in-fill, and are stitched together by pedestrian walkways, bike trails, and dependable, clean, safe, and affordable light rail systems. Resilient cities will also have a growing percentage of locally owned businesses and community-generated wealth that stays put to create still more prosperity where it can be watched, tended, and nurtured.

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Perspectives At the national level, resilient economies have diversity, redundant supply chains, and the good sense to place controls on monopoly and the scale of enterprises for the public good.19 In the realm of national policy, resilience will require a larger definition of security than heretofore. We have spent trillions for defense against often exaggerated external military and terrorist threats while ignoring self-generated dangers that jeopardize access to food, energy, clean water, shelter, physical safety, health care, and economic livelihood.

In short, we do not lack for ways to improve the resilience of our infrastructure and our capacity to adapt and foresee coming challenges, but these are only the first steps toward resilience. In Andrew Zolli’s words, “None of these is a permanent solution, and none roots out the underlying problems they address.”20 Moreover, our increasingly complex technical solutions may often cause more problems than they solve. We are increasingly vulnerable to more and more severe Black Swan events as a result of increasing complexity, interdependence, and globalization.21

III It is impossible to make an unsustainable system resilient. Sooner or later, the careless exploitation of land, water, forests, biota, and people will lead to disaffection, overshoot, and collapse.

There are many variations on the theme but the point stands. No system can be made resilient or durable on the ruins of natural systems or on the backs of exploited people. Design dictates destiny, but not in a straight-line way. The upshot is that if we intend to improve resilience, we will have to remedy the systemic flaws that have rendered our future increasingly precarious.

A second point is that the challenge of improving resilience must begin by

re-forming structures of governance and political processes by which we decide issues of war and peace, taxation, education, research and development, healthcare, economy, environmental quality, and the basic issues of fairness. The political reformation, I think, must begin in the United States in ways somewhat reminiscent of the revolution we led in the years 1776–1790. In Al Gore’s words “The decline of U.S. democracy has degraded its capacity for clear collective thinking, led to a series of remarkably poor policy decisions on crucially significant issues, and left the global community rudderless.”22 Corporations and markets do many good things, but seldom without rules, structures, oversight, enforcement, and the countervailing power of government. Our inaction in the face of climate destabilization and virtually every Black Swan event and virtually every source of ecological, social, and economic fragility is rooted in failures of regulation, politics, foresight, and leadership that are attributable to the corrupting power of money that infects governments and the political process at every level. As a result, a small group of well-funded interest groups hold our common future hostage.

There are deeper structural issues as well. The path toward resilience will require a substantial upgrading of our collective capacities of foresight, coordination, and enforcement while also improving fairness within and between countries and entire generations. The key to good governance requires constraints on consumerism and “institutionalized feedback arrangements that favor the long-term and counter the ethos of immediate gratification.”23 Policy expert Leon Fuerth proposes reforming the Executive Office of the President to build “anticipatory governance…a

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systems-based approach for enabling governance to cope with accelerating, complex forms of change.”24 This requires no heroic leaps, only the development of rational procedures of planning and policy development.

Both would require a smarter citizenry and governing elites alike that understand systems, ecology, the importance of the long-term, and are motivated to act for the common good.

Thirdly, there are no purely national solutions to systemic problems of fragility. In an interdependent world, we will have to evolve institutions, laws, procedures, and ‘habits of heart’ that make resilience the default at both the local and regional scales and evolve formal institutions, non-governmental organizations, and networks at the global scale. In fact, an efflorescence of civic capacity is emerging in diverse ways from ‘slow’ movements (food, money, cities) to organizations tracking carbon emissions of corporations, to women planting trees in Kenya, to transition towns, to the growing role of elders in tempering our adolescent enthusiasms.

Finally, we tend to equate solutions with technology without expecting or requiring any particular improvement in our behavior or institutions. As important as better technology is to a more resilient future, real solutions will also require the rediscovery of old ideas, traditions, techniques, design strategies, and, even those quaint and mostly forgotten qualities of wisdom and humility in an age much enamored of self-promotion, surface appearances, and busy with trivialities.

We are caught in a trap of our own making. If we are to escape the worst of it, we will have to disenthrall ourselves from our own unleavened cleverness and wean ourselves from the faith that even more of the same will somehow work differently this time.

Perspectives Postscript Conferences on the subject of resilience might best be held in places like Detroit or Easter Island where there are ruins that remind us of our fallibility. Perhaps they might begin with a reading…something like Shelley’s sonnet, “Ozymandias.” Alas, they are almost always convened in fairyland places like Aspen or Davos, or expensive hotels in Washington, DC amidst the trappings of power, wealth, and aggrandizement. The well dressed and expensively coiffured speak assuredly of endless opportunities in the comforting faith that tinkering at the margin of the status quo will suffice— a slight policy adjustment here and a better technology there, responses that are neither robust nor resilient.

References 1. Taleb, N. The Black Swan 2nd edn (Random House, New York, 2010); and Taleb, N. Antifragile (New York: Random House, 2012). In the latter, Taleb writes that: “the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable. Now, for reasons that have to do with the increase of the artificial, the move away from ancestral and natural models, and the loss in robustness owing to complications in the design of everything, the role of Black Swans is increasing.”

2. Holling, CS, Walker, B & Salt, D. Resilience Thinking (Island Press, Washington, DC, 2006).

3. Lovins, A & H. Brittle Power (Brick House, Andover, MA, 1984).

4. Ellul, J. The Technological Society (Vintage, New York, 1964); Ellul, J. The Technology System (Continuum, New York, 1980).

Kindra Clineff, MOTT / CC BY-ND 2.0

Resilient urban communities create spaces in which community members shop, dine,and participate in civic organizations alongside one another.

5. The National Academies, Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative. Washington: The National Academies Press, 2012.

6. National Climate Assessment (draft). Washington, D.C., National Academies Press, 2013.

7. Archer, D. The Long Thaw (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009); McNutt, M. Climate Change Impacts. Science 341. (August 2, 2013).

8. Wright, R. A Short History of Progress (Carrroll & Graf, New York, 2005); Costanza, R. Social Traps.

Bioscience 37 (1987); and Taleb (2012).

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Joy, B. Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us. Wired Magazine (April, 2000).

12. Sunstein, C. Worst-Case Scenarios (Harvard

Washington, DC, 2010).

18. Klinenberg, E. Adaptation. The New Yorker (January

University Press, Cambridge, 2007).

13. Pretty, J. The Consumption of a Finite Planet.

7, 2013).

19. Lynn, B. Built to Break. Challenge (March–April,

(unpublished manuscript, 2013).

14. Wilkinson, R & Pickett, K. The Spirit Level (Penguin

2012).

20. Zolli, A. Learning to Bounce Back. The New York

Books, London, 2010).

15. Burnell, P. Climate Change and Democratization

Times (November 2, 2012).

(Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Berlin, 2009); Kurlantzick,

21. Ibid.

J. Democracy in Retreat (Yale University Press, New

22. Gore, A. The Future (Random House, New York,

Haven, 2013).

2013).

16. Meadows, D. Thinking in Systems (Chelsea Green Publishing,White River Junction, 2004).

17. Fox-Penner, P. Smart Power (Island Press,

23. Ibid.

24. Fuerth, L. Anticipatory Governance: Practical Upgrades. (October, 2012).

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Fiksel, J., I. Goodman, and A. Hecht. (2014). Resilience: Navigating Toward a Sustainable Future. Solutions 5(5): 38-47. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/resilience-navigating-toward-a-sustainable-future/

Feature

Resilience: Navigating Toward a Sustainable Future

by Joseph Fiksel, Iris Goodman, and Alan Hecht

emivel2003 / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

One year after the Boston Marathon bombings, the site of the blast on a busy Boston street is back to business as usual. But is a quick return to normalcy demonstrative of a truly resilient system?

In Brief Twenty-first century pressures such as climate change and global urbanization are intensifying the potential for unexpected disruptions, ranging from natural catastrophes to terrorist attacks. Even minor disruptions may have cascading effects, with severe consequences for both communities and business enterprises. Traditional risk management methods are helpful for routine events, but are inadequate for dealing with rapidly changing threats and opportunities.

Instead, managers need to strive for resilience, defined as “the capacity to survive, adapt, and flourish in the face of turbulent change.” This article describes how we can anticipate potential vulnerabilities and deliberately design for resilience by improving the diversity, adaptability, and cohesion of critical urban and industrial systems. Strengthening resilience today is a prerequisite for achieving long-term sustainability in the future.

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W

henever a disaster strikes, such as the 2011 Fukushima meltdown or the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, our instinctive response is to overcome the shock, assist the victims, and return to normal as quickly as possible. But perhaps returning to normal is the wrong strategy.

Perhaps, instead, we should try to understand the changing conditions that triggered the disaster, and adapt to the new normal.

In today’s tightly connected global economy, a business-as-usual mindset will be challenged by chaotic external pressures and turbulent change.

There has been a sharp increase in the number of natural catastrophes during the past 32 years—a trend that has been linked to climate change.1 Other destabilizing pressures include rapid urbanization, resource depletion, and political conflicts. As planetary systems become more tightly coupled and volatile, the incidence of ‘black swan’ events seems to be increasing.2 Given these challenges, we need to expand our notion of ‘resilience’.

Resilience is not just the ability to bounce back quickly from a disruption. Rather, we define resilience as the capacity for a system to survive, adapt, and flourish in the face of turbulent change and uncertainty.3 Consider the example of ecosystems such as forests and wetlands, which can recover from severe damage and evolve in response to changing conditions. In contrast, systems designed by humans are more ‘brittle’, and subject to catastrophic failures. We can learn a lot about resilience by studying natural systems.

The National Academy of Sciences has underscored the need to build resilience in U.S. communities, including flexibility, adaptive capacity, and infrastructure redundancy.

One recent study4 recommends that the Federal government “incorporate national resilience as a guiding

principle,” while a second study5 identifies community resilience as one of four priority areas for interagency collaboration to improve sustainability.

This article describes a variety of solutions for strengthening both resilience and sustainability in urban communities and industrial

Key Concepts • As the world grows hyper-connected and the rate of change accelerates, decision-makers are faced with increasing complexity and uncertainty. To ensure a sustainable future, we must adopt a systems approach for anticipating change and avoiding unintended consequences.

• While resilience and sustainability tend to be synergistic, there can be trade-offs. For example, lean production tends to reduce waste, but may increase the risk of supply chain disruptions. In such cases, companies must improve their agility and reserve capacity.

• Systems thinking offers greater insight into external forces and hidden feedback loops that can threaten the stability of existing communities, infrastructures, and business enterprises. This enables the application of basic design principles to improve the resilience of these assets.

• Leading government and business organizations are beginning to adopt resilience strategies; for example, the U.S. EPA is addressing climate adaptation on a watershed scale, while major companies are systematically strengthening the resilience of their global supply chains.

enterprises. Understanding the dynamic relationships among human and natural systems will help planners to develop more resilient strategies that reduce vulnerability to unforeseen catastrophes, enable continued growth and prosperity, and respect ecological resource capacity. In short, we can design for resilience.

Sustainability: A Hopeful Yet Distant Vision The need for a transition to a sustainable economy is becoming ever more urgent.

The productive capacity of the planet is already stressed in meeting current demand for energy, goods and services, while billions of people remain mired in poverty, lacking even basic hygiene.

According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, global ecosystems are severely degraded,6 and many believe that we have already overshot the Earth’s ecological capacity.7 Responding to these warning signals, various sustainability principles have been proposed by organizations such as CERES,8 UNEP,9 and the Natural Step.10 These principles share many common elements, including waste elimination, natural resource protection, and equity assurance for present and future generations.

Some futurists paint optimistic scenarios of a cooperative, harmonious global economy, with advanced technologies enabling efficient utilization of resources.11 The Rocky Mountain Institute claims that investing in energy efficiency and renewable resources can eliminate fossil-fuel use for electricity, vastly reduce demand for liquid fuels, generate $5 trillion of economic value, and enhance U.S. competitiveness, resilience, and security.12 Similarly, McKinsey has projected that improvements in resource productivity can lead to a more prosperous and sustainable economy.13 However, human foresight is imperfect, and unforeseen circumstances could invalidate these projections.

As the world grows hyper-connected and the rate of change accelerates, it becomes increasingly difficult to predict the future with confidence. To anticipate disruptions and ensure a sustainable future, we and others have argued for purposeful collaboration between business and government: “…it is essential to anticipate change, understand early warning signals, and take steps to avoid, reduce, and mitigate future problems. A new,

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more systemic approach to problem solving is needed to avoid unintended consequences, anticipate alternative future scenarios, and strengthen resilience in the face of uncertainty.”14

Limitations of Risk Management Risk is a powerful concept for dealing with uncertainty, and has proven useful in many fields such as insurance and geological exploration. For the U.S. EPA and other agencies, risk assessment has become the cornerstone of regulatory decision-making.15 In the business world, it is standard practice to appoint a Chief Risk Officer and establish an ‘enterprise risk management’ process that involves risk identification, risk assessment, and risk mitigation.16 Unfortunately, the most damaging disruptions tend to result from lowprobability, high consequence events that are difficult or impossible to anticipate, let alone quantify.

In the face of complexity and turbulence, disruptions are often unforeseen and traditional risk-based practices may be inadequate. The World Economic Forum publishes an annual report on risk factors that may hinder global economic development, ranging from climate change to technological failures to political unrest.17 In recent years, the report has shifted

humbly from quantifying specific risk factors to portraying the interdependencies among these factors. The 2013 report acknowledges the importance of resilience for addressing systemic risks that are difficult to predict or to manage effectively.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, risk-based methods are not adequate to address complex problems such as climate change and loss of biodiversity, and more sophisticated tools are available that go beyond risk management.18 Nevertheless, risk management remains an important methodology for dealing with familiar issues such as fires, accidents, diseases, and currency fluctuations. To address less tractable uncertainties, risk management must be supplemented with new methods for building systemic resilience.

World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org) / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Taking a Systems Approach

An annual report on global risk factors published by the World Economic Forum has shifted in recent years to focus on the importance of addressing systemic risks with resiliency approaches.

A systems approach is essential for understanding resilience and sustainability in complex systems.

Resilience can be seen as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances and reorganize, retaining essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks.19 Table 1 illustrates structure and function in different systems whose feedback loops reinforce their resilience. For example, by pollinating flowers, bee colonies create a

positive feedback loop that reinforces the production of nectar. Similarly, by supporting social and philanthropic activities, corporations strengthen the vitality of the communities to which their employees belong. Companies like Wal-Mart and Microsoft have been compared to an ecological keystone species, improving the overall health and robustness of their business network.20

System Type

Structural Components

Functional Performance

Urban community

Built environment, infrastructures, and commercial, residential, or other occupants

Provide goods and services to support occupants’ economic and social activities

Enterprise supply chain

Network of assets, suppliers, manufacturers, logistics providers, and customers

Fulfill customer demand through physical, informational, and financial transactions

Cattle-grazing rangeland

Organisms (cattle, vegetation) and vital resources (air, soil, water, sunlight)

Nourish and sustain the web of interdependent living organisms

Table 1. Examples of structure and function in living systems 40 | Solutions | September-October 2014 | www.thesolutionsjournal.org

Economy

Society

Human Development

Infrastructures

People Governments

economic value

Enterprises

Communities

Shared Value

Biotechnology & Biomimicry Health & Well-being

natural resource value

waste & emissions

Nourishment & Comfort

Harmony & Symbiosis

ecosystem services value

Ecosystems Minerals

Organisms Climate

Environment Figure 1. Interdependencies among resilient systems

The U.S. EPA has begun to use a systems approach called the Triple Value (3V) Model,21 depicted in Figure 1. This model shows how industrial supply chains and human communities utilize ecosystem services to create value, while generating waste and emissions that flow back into the environment. The yellow lines indicate critical linkages among the economic, environmental and social spheres, including shared value between communities and enterprises.22 To achieve sustainability, we must protect critical natural capital, improve resource productivity, and avoid environmental pollution. However, unexpected disruptions can impair our ability to pursue this vision. To achieve resilience, we must encourage diversity, robustness, and adaptability in both

natural and human resources, as well as in governing institutions and supporting infrastructures.

This paper illustrates the practical application of a systems approach to resilience in both communities and supply chains. Table 2 lists typical resilience indicators applicable to real world systems. There are many quantitative metrics corresponding to these indicators; for example, recoverability can be measured in terms of the time required to recover, the cost of recovery, or the maximum tolerable degree of disruption. Also, these indicators may be correlated; for example, stability, vulnerability, and recoverability are all dependent upon the fundamental attribute of precariousness,23 which indicates how close the system is to a critical threshold.

Generally speaking, sustainability and resilience are mutually reinforcing. However, there can be trade-offs, as illustrated in Figure 2. Some technologies and business practices are neither sustainable nor resilient; for example, corn ethanol provides an inferior return on energy and competes for agricultural resources that are critical to food security.24 Other energy technologies, such as ‘smart grid’, hold the promise of both increased efficiency and improved recoverability through distributed generation.25 Rainwater harvesting is an appealing sustainability practice, but is vulnerable to droughts.

Likewise, leaner production methods may reduce waste, but achieving resilience typically requires investment in reserve capacity.

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Indicator

Urban Community

Enterprise Supply Chain

Diversity

Variety of economic sectors, resource channels, and workforce skills

Variety of markets, suppliers, facilities, and employee capabilities

Cohesion

Strength of community identity, social networks, and local coordination

Strength of corporate identity, stakeholder relationships, and collaboration

Adaptive capacity

Ability to rapidly modify urban services, standards, or management practices

Ability to rapidly modify key products, technologies, or business processes

Resource productivity

Quality of life (security, fulfillment) relative to ecological resource footprint

Shareholder value (profits, assets) relative to ecological resource footprint

Vulnerability

Presence of disruptive forces that can threaten public safety and well being

Presence of disruptive forces that can threaten business continuity

Stability

Ability to continue normal community activities when disruptions occur

Ability to continue normal supply chain activities when disruptions occur

Recoverability

Ability to overcome disruptions and restore critical public services

Ability to overcome disruptions and restore critical business operations

Table 2. Examples of resilience indicators in human systems

Resilient Solutions in Urban Systems Cities are perhaps the most complex and turbulent of all human systems, yet they remain extraordinarily resilient. Like living organisms, cities have survived, adapted, and flourished through the centuries, overlaying different cultures, lifestyles and technologies in a rich and evolving mosaic.

Today, cities are a crucible of change, where social, economic, and environmental pressures are intensified and sustainability challenges converge.

More than 50 percent of the planet’s inhabitants now live in cities, due to steady migration away from rural areas and traditional lifestyles. Dozens of megacities support over 20 million inhabitants, where wealth flourishes alongside poverty, crime, and despair,

and infrastructure systems are severely stressed. In the U.S., some cities have achieved revitalization, while others are plagued by urban decay and a flight to the suburbs. What all cities share are two basic challenges: balancing economic prosperity with quality of life (i.e., sustainability), and overcoming disruptions that threaten human safety and/or business continuity (i.e., resilience).

Many promising urban initiatives have emerged, including smart growth, waste-to-energy conversion, greener buildings, and vertical farming.26 Innovative companies are entering this space and discovering new markets; for example, IBM has launched a worldwide ‘smarter cities’ campaign using information technology to provide real-time

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intelligence. ‘Smarter cities’ can serve as ‘living laboratories’ to test innovative technologies or policies aimed at improving health, education, neighborhood stability, economic vitality, security, and safety.

Federal agencies, including Housing and Urban Development and Homeland Security, are also investigating community vulnerabilities and resilience improvement strategies.

They recognize that national security is no longer merely concerned with defense of U.S. interests against hostile attacks, but also includes protection of our sources of food, energy, water, and materials, which are the foundation of community prosperity.27 In particular, many cities are concerned about the ‘stress nexus’ that connects water, energy and food.

More sustainable (resource productivity)

Less resilient

Nuclear energy

Smart grid

Rain harvesting

Grey water use

Lean production

Distributed assets

Corn ethanol

Diesel backup

Bottled water

Desalination

Business as usual

Redundancy

More resilient (adaptive capacity)

Less sustainable Figure 2. Examples of synergies and trade-offs between sustainability and resilience

Dwindling water resources threaten to disrupt energy and food production, while rising energy prices threaten to increase the costs of supplying both food and water. Moreover, all three of these critical resources depend on the availability of land, materials, and infrastructures. There are also hidden feedback loops; for example, few people foresaw that corn ethanol use might drive up food prices in Mexico, or that floods in the Mississippi basin might cause biofuel shortages.

These examples illustrate how short-sighted decisions can lead to unexpected consequences and destabilization of existing systems.

One recent report has proposed that governments can take a more adaptive approach called ‘anticipatory governance.’28 This will require improving foresight in the face of uncertainty, coordination of governance bodies to develop cohesive policies, and monitoring of consequences for purposes of adaptive management.

The U.S. EPA is exploring how a systems approach can help to anticipate change and solve complex problems.

For example, a Triple Value Simulation (3VS) model was developed for the Narragansett Bay watershed in New England to evaluate alternative

strategies for coastal sustainability and resilience.29 Excessive releases of nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater, agriculture, and stormwater runoff can cause algae blooms that degrade aquatic ecosystems and interfere with fishing, recreation and tourism. The 3VS model is designed to help policy makers and stakeholders develop robust solutions, taking into account urban development and climate change. By evaluating key indicators such as nutrient concentrations, beach visits, and tourism revenue, the model has shown that traditional point source controls (e.g., wastewater treatment) can be supplemented with alternative technologies (e.g., green infrastructure).

Resilient Solutions in Enterprise Systems Most leading corporations have adopted corporate social responsibility and sustainability principles, helping to protect their reputation and license to operate. Nevertheless, many have found it difficult to translate broad goals and policies into day-to-day decision-making. The barriers to progress include perceptions that sustainability conflicts with growth or that sustainability investment will

diminish profits. Another important barrier is turbulence—the inevitable short-term crises that distract businesses from their long-term goals.

Companies are increasingly expected to disclose ‘material risks’ that could affect their operations, but many firms are slow to respond until they reach a state of urgency.

In the wake of disruptions such as natural disasters and power failures, a resilient enterprise can recover quickly and sometimes gain a lasting advantage over less agile competitors.

A classic example is Nokia’s success in overcoming a March 2000 supply interruption that crippled its competitor, Ericsson, enabling Nokia to increase its market share in cellular phones. Business scholars have defined strategic resilience as the ability to dynamically re-invent business models and strategies as circumstances change.30 Others define resilience in terms of business continuity: “the ability to recover from unexpected disruptions” including chemical spills, information technology failures, natural disasters, or terrorist attacks.31 The 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos was marked by a new emphasis on ‘resilient dynamism’ as a business imperative. Evidently, multi-national corporations have recognized the need for resilience in a world of ever-increasing complexity, connectivity, and turbulence. The trends toward globalization and outsourcing have created complex supply networks that are vulnerable to many types of disruptions.32 Economic volatility and international security concerns have only increased the likelihood of such disruptions.

Automotive firms, for example, have discovered that the adoption of lean production systems, which are highly efficient in a stable environment, has increased susceptibility to schedule delays (see Figure 2). The solution is to design supply chains that are both lean and agile, with reserve capacity at strategic locations.

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Stefano Corso, Forum PA / CC BY-NC 2.0

Companies including IBM have taken advantage of markets for resilient urban systems. IBM’s worldwide “smarter cities” campaign uses information technology to provide real-time intelligence that can be used to test innovative technologies and policies.

Major disruptions are not always triggered by catastrophic events. In a complex supply network, small disturbances can cascade into massive discontinuities with lasting impacts.

For example, a 2002 labor dispute in California shut down West Coast ports for several weeks, costing U.S. companies roughly $1 billion per day.

Unfortunately, the complexity that causes these disturbances makes it virtually impossible to predict their nature or timing. Smooth changes can usually be handled by mid-course adjustments, but real systems do not have smooth curves—sudden shifts may occur when a tipping point is reached. The real challenge is for companies to design their products, processes, and operating practices to be inherently resilient, as discussed in Box 1.

Design for Resilience Improving resilience in both communities and enterprises will depend upon innovation in the design of products, processes, and infrastructure systems. Over the last several decades, the scope of design has broadened from a focus on the artifact (building or product) to an integrated view of the system in which it operates, including broader concerns about unintended environmental and social consequences. Design for resilience (DFR) is a further step in that evolution, concerned with the fitness of products, processes, buildings and infrastructure for a changing environment. 35 There are many possible approaches for companies and communities to pursue DFR innovations. For example, a collection of distributed electric generators (e.g., fuel cells) connected

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to a power grid provides structural resilience, since it can compensate for disruptions to a central power station. Similarly, a geographically dispersed workforce is less vulnerable to catastrophic events that might disable a centralized facility. Flexibility of operating facilities and versatility of employee skills are examples of functional resilience, strengthening the ability of an organization to overcome interruptions in critical resource flows.

DFR will help an enterprise or a community to strengthen its position with respect to the network of interdependent systems in which it operates.

As observed by strategy expert Michael Porter, growth and prosperity are linked to the health of the competitive context, the social and environmental assets that provide employee talent, market demand, and a reliable supply

of materials and energy.36 Any type of product, process, or service innovation can influence these linkages in numerous ways. Thus, design is more than just creating an artifact; it is a deliberate intervention within a complex set of relationships.

One important design principle for DFR is ‘inherency’—making resilience a natural property of the design rather than an added feature. For example, in emergency operations, a decentralized, multi-agent communications system is inherently less vulnerable to disruption than a centralized system, even though the latter may incorporate costly fail-safe technologies.

Possible targets for DFR interventions include the following: • Improving the foresight, productivity, agility, and effectiveness of business processes, from order fulfillment to knowledge management. An example is demand forecasting using data analytics to interpret early warning signals.

• Improving the quality, reliability, productivity, capacity, and adaptability of enterprise assets, including human, ecological, structural, and technological capabilities. An example is closedloop production processes that recycle waste, thus conserving resources while reducing dependence on external supplies.

• Improving creativity, credibility, and collaboration in the context of stakeholder relations, including employees, suppliers, contractors, customers, investors, regulators, communities, and advocacy groups.

An example is public-private partnerships to foster climate resilience and adaptation strategies.

Above all, DFR requires systems thinking , since the health and vitality of a community or enterprise depends on the three types of capital identified in the Triple Value Model—human,

Box 1. Supply Chain Resilience in a Global Enterprise The weakest link can disrupt an entire supply chain. Such disruptions can cause an immediate sharp decline in shareholder value, and some companies never fully recover. The Ohio State University (OSU) has developed a framework for supply chain resilience based on a ‘business fitness’ index that compares vulnerabilities to capabilities.33 Vulnerability factors include turbulence, deliberate threats, external pressures, resource limits, sensitivity, and connectivity.

Capability factors include flexibility, capacity, efficiency, visibility, adaptability, anticipation, recovery, dispersion, and collaboration. OSU’s research suggests that supply chain performance can be improved when the portfolio of capabilities is correctly balanced to match the pattern of vulnerabilities. As shown in Figure 3, highly vulnerable companies with inadequate capabilities may be at risk. Conversely, companies with unnecessarily high investment in capabilities may erode their profitability. This approach has been successfully adopted by Dow Chemical and others.34 Systems thinking helps these companies go beyond traditional risk management and consider how investing in key capabilities will create inherent resilience to hitherto unknown threats.

Increasing Capabilities

Increasing Vulnerabilities Figure 3. Supply chain resilience framework

natural, and economic capital.

Companies and communities that wish to ensure their resilience must reach beyond their own boundaries, develop an understanding of the intricate systems in which they participate, and strive for continuous innovation and renewal.

Conclusion: Toward a Sustainable Future Sustainability is often misinterpreted as a goal to which we should collectively aspire. In fact, sustainability is not a reachable end-state, rather, it is a characteristic of a dynamic, evolving

system. Long-term sustainability will result not from movement along a smooth trajectory, but rather from continuous adaptation to changing conditions. Therefore, a sustainable society must be based on a dynamic world-view in which growth and transformation are inevitable.

Resilience is a fundamental attribute of living systems, enabling them to resist disorder and thrive in an everchanging world. As systems grow larger and more structured, their resilience can wane, making them vulnerable to external disruptions and internal decay. A resilience mindset involves

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Box 2. Principles of Design for Resilience 1. The resilience of human systems, including communities, infrastructures, and enterprises, may be jeopardized by biophysical and socio-economic constraints and/or disruptions.

2. Human interventions, including new policies and technologies, can improve the ability of a system to remain in a desired state or enable the system to shift to a preferred state.

3. Indicators of relative resilience can be defined for specific categories of similar systems, thus enabling system comparison, monitoring, and adaptive management.

4. Human foresight about potential future disruptions can guide the selection of a portfolio of interventions that maintain and/or strengthen the resilience of managed systems.

5. Even in the absence of foresight, it is possible to increase the inherent resilience of a system by improving characteristics such as diversity, dispersion, flexibility, redundancy, and buffering.

6. Additional information about the probabilities and/or consequences of specific perturbation scenarios can support the application of risk assessment and management methods.

7. Resilience is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for achieving sustainability; in particular, there may be trade-offs between short-term resilience and long-term sustainability.

embracing variability rather than struggling to maintain constancy. Instead of resisting deviations from a ‘normal’ state, resilient organizations recognize early signals of change and respond swiftly to maintain their performance and continuity. At the same time, their planning horizon must be long enough to consider the trade-offs between shortterm gains and long-term outcomes.

A systems approach reveals how enterprises and communities are linked to the environment, and how they can flourish in harmony with natural systems. We are beginning to understand the resilience of these systems, and to study their cyclical patterns of growth, collapse, and renewal, but traditional modeling and forecasting tools are only valid in small regions of time and space where conditions remain relatively constant. Research is needed to develop more robust, dynamic models of resilient systems, enabling us to better prepare for extreme disruptions.

Finally, it is important to understand the limitations of resilience thinking: • Resilience is essentially an amoral concept; it is entirely possible for highly resilient systems (e.g.,

dictatorships) to violate core human values. The primary motivation for survival and growth must be supplemented by a commitment to justice and human rights.

• Resilience is typically utilitarian in the pursuit of persistence and performance. It preserves the system function and identity but does not necessarily consider whether the system has a transcendent purpose such as creating value for society.

Joseph Fiksel is corresponding author from the Center for Resilience, The Ohio State University (fiksel.2@osu.edu, 614-226-5678); Iris Goodman is with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Office of the Administrator; Alan Hecht is with the U.S. EPA, Office of Research and Development.

Acknowledgements The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of Gary Foley of the U.S. EPA and Keely Croxton, Tim Pettit, and Mikaella Polyviou of The Ohio State University. In addition, we thank the U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development, the National Science Foundation, the Dow Chemical Company, and the National Council for Science and the Environment for their support of an expert workshop on Sustainability and Resilience, held in January 2013 in Washington, DC. This article and many of the other articles in this issue of Solutions were authored by participants in that workshop.

References 1. Kuczinski, T & Irwin, K. Severe Weather in North America (Munich Re, Munich, 2012).

2. Taleb, NN. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, New York, 2007).

3. Fiksel, J. Sustainability and Resilience: Toward a Systems Approach. IEEE Management Review Vol. 35, No. 3, Third Quarter (2007).

The world will face daunting challenges in the decades ahead: population will grow to nine billion people, with the majority living in cities, and the pressures on natural resources will continue to mount. To sustain a growing, vibrant economy will require transformative innovations in urban planning, industrial technology, and environmental policy. Business and government must partner to develop solutions, and must communicate effectively to help citizens understand these complex challenges. In the ‘new normal’ of turbulent change, we must design for resilience in order to ensure a safe, secure, and prosperous future for ourselves and for future generations.

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4. National Research Council. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative (The National Academies Press, Washington DC, 2012).

5. National Research Council. Sustainability for the Nation: Resource Connections and Governance Linkages (The National Academies Press, Washington DC, 2013).

6. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Ecosystems and Human Well-Being (Synthesis) (Island Press, Washington DC, 2003).

7. Global Footprint Network. China Ecological Footprint Report 2012: Consumption, Production and Sustainable Development. http://www. footprintnetwork.org 8. Ceres. http://www.ceres.org/about-us/our-history/ ceres-principles 9. The United Nations Global Compact. http://www. unglobalcompact.org/aboutthegc/thetenprinciples/ index.html 10. The Natural Step. http://thenaturalstep.org/thesystem-conditions

Mirko Ries, World Economic Forum / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Managing Director of the IMF Christine Lagarde and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab deliver a special address titled “Resilient Dynamism” at the Annual Meeting 2013 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

11. UNEP Global Environmental Outlook 4. http:// www.unep.org/geo/geo4.asp 12. Lovins, A. Reinventing Fire, (Chelsea Green, White River Junction VT, 2011).

13. Dobbs, R, Oppenheim, J & Thompson, F. Mobilizing for a resource revolution. McKinsey Quarterly (January 2012).

14. Hecht, AD et al. Creating the Future We Want.

Business School Press, Cambridge, 2004).

21. Fiksel, J. A Systems View of Sustainability: The Triple Value Model. Environmental Development (June

ten Brink, M. The Triple Value Model: A Systems

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Approach to Sustainable Solutions. Clean Technology

22. Porter, M & Kramer, M. Creating Shared Value: How to Fix Capitalism and Unleash a New Wave of Growth. Harvard Business Review (January 2011).

23. Walker, B, Holling, CS, Carpenter, SR & Kinzig, A.

Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy Vol. 8, Issue

Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in

2 (Summer 2012).

Social-ecological Systems. Ecology and Society 9 (2004.).

15. National Research Council, Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment (National Academies Press, Washington DC, 2009).

16. Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO) of the Treadway Commission. Enterprise Risk

George Washington University (2012) 29. Fiksel, J, Bruins, R, Gatchett, A, Gilliland, A &

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5/ 24. Cleveland, C. Energy Return on Investment (EROI) The Encyclopedia of Earth (2011) http://www.eoearth. org/view/article/152557/

and Environmental Policy (June 2014).

30. Hamel, G & Valikangas, L. The Quest for Resilience.

Harvard Business Review (September 2003).

31. Starr, R, Newfrock,J & Delurey, M. Enterprise Resilience: Managing Risk in the Networked Economy. strategy+business Issue 30 (2002).

32. Rice, JB & Caniato, F. Building a Secure and Resilient Supply Network. Supply Chain Management Review (Sep-Oct. 2003).

33. Pettit, TJ, Croxton, KL & Fiksel, J. Ensuring

25. Fox-Penner, P. Smart Power: Climate Change, the Smart

Supply Chain Resilience: Development and

Management: Integrated Framework (2004) www.coso.

Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities (Island Press,

Implementation of an Assessment Tool. Journal of

org/Publications/ERM/

Washington DC, 2010).

Business Logistics Vol. 34, Issue 1 (March 2013).

17. We Forum Global Risks. http://www.weforum.org/ issues/global-risks 18. National Research Council. Sustainability at the US EPA (National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2011).

26. National Research Council. Pathways to Urban

Made its Supply Chain More Resilient. Presentation

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Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability.

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Ecology and Society 15(4): 20 (2010).

www.eoearth.org/view/article/51cbf17c7896bb431f

20. Iansiti, M & Levien, R. The Keystone Advantage: What the New Dynamics of Business Ecosystems Mean for Strategy, Innovation, and Sustainability (Harvard

34. McIntyre, J & Hemmelgarn, S. How One Business

Sustainability: Research and Development on Urban

Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP), Philadelphia PA (Oct. 4, 2011).

35. Fiksel, J. Designing Resilient, Sustainable Systems.

Environmental Science and Technology (Dec. 2003).

6a5af0/ 28. Fuerth, LS, & Faber, EMH. Anticipatory Governance: Practical Upgrades. National Defense University and

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Evans, P.C. and P. Fox-Penner. (2014). Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructure for Urban Energy Systems. Solutions 5(5): 48-54. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/resilient-and-sustainable-infrastructure-for-urban-energy-systems/

Feature

Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructure for Urban Energy Systems

by Peter C. Evans and Peter Fox-Penner

Gabriel White / CC BY-SA 2.0

Rapid urbanization and the growth of ‘megacities,’ such as Mexico City, will greatly increase the threats of infrastructure damage and failure.

In Brief Extreme weather from climate change and growing urbanization are making cities more vulnerable to loss of electric power and damage to energy infrastructure. Policy makers and users of critical infrastructure services are searching for solutions that increase the resiliency of energy systems but are closely tied to other goals, such as sustainability and affordability. Creating Resilient-Sustainable Infrastructure solutions, or “RSI solutions,” will require technical solutions, including: intelligence, redundancy, and coupling and decoupling within networks. For example, predictive tools can be used to better anticipate storms, advanced metering can pinpoint outages in real time, and in some cases, social media is emerging as a potential new source for widespread data and communication. Physical changes to the construct of systems will also be a crucial part of solutions. System redundancy is a traditional form of increasing security by allowing electricity many paths to flow over if one is obstructed. Coupling joins systems together, instead of building redundancies, so that the resulting larger structure expands optionality by making more generation units available or by expanding the variety of fuel types that can be accessed to generate power. While this diversity can create security, being able to “island” a subset of this system, or “decouple”, during a major storm also increases resiliency as those sections can now shield themselves from cascading failures. Finally, governments and planning entities must be involved in these efforts and create awareness of RSI solutions to truly move resiliency to the forefront. Coordination is needed across all levels of government and should engage the private sector. These entities should ensure that disaster planning is collaborative, goes beyond physical solutions and incorporates new types of intelligence, stimulates investment in RSI solutions, and drives research into new RSI solutions as well. Governments and planning entities can achieve both resiliency and sustainability using a portfolio of the approaches described and should continue to seek innovative solutions to meet the demands of an increasingly urbanized world facing growing global challenges of climate change.

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E

ach year, billions of dollars in energy infrastructure are damaged or destroyed as a result of natural disasters, causing significant social and economic disruptions. Climate change and urbanization, especially the growth of megacities, are amplifying these threats, and the frequency and costs of disasters are rising. However, simply restoring infrastructure systems of the past may be ill-advised.

Investing in resilient energy systems would enable local economies to better adapt to sudden shocks such as earthquakes and extreme weather events. An increasingly pressing question facing policy makers and users of critical infrastructure services: How should the need for more resilient energy systems be factored into energy policy and aligned with other goals, such as sustainability and affordability?

Our Urban Planet: Concentrating Risk Once limited to the developed world, urbanization has become a dominant worldwide force. Many of the world’s largest urban areas are becoming ‘megacities’—fast-growing megalopoli with populations of five million or more.1 These large urban centers will create and consume a large share of the world’s economic output, and they will comprise most of human-created physical assets.

At the same time, the world is electrifying at a rapid rate. In the past four decades the installed base of power generation world-wide has grown almost 800 percent, which is 5.8 times more than world population growth and 4.4 times more than the global economic growth since 1970.2 While this growth has been an important enabling force behind the growth of cities around the world, the size of electricity networks has exposed more of this foundational infrastructure to cyclones, earthquakes, droughts and floods.

The unprecedented size of cities and the energy networks that have grown to support them magnifies the risks of infrastructure failures; not only are more people directly at risk, but the repercussions may affect interconnected systems.3 Flooding

Key Concepts • The convergence of three trends— Climate change, which is causing more extreme weather, urbanization, which is creating a larger human built-environment across which damage can occur, and the growing importance of electricity in supporting modern economic systems—pose unprecedented risks for urban energy systems.

• Investment and policy should advance technologies that are capable of improving resilience and sustainability, creating ResilientSustainable Infrastructure (RSI).

• One promising solution is the enhancement of resilience through better intelligence. Tools include information technology that harnesses big data, use of advanced analytics, and systems with more sophisticated monitoring and automation.

• Physical and operational changes to systems are needed in the form of system redundancy, coupling, and decoupling capabilities.

• Governments and planning entities are a necessary element of the solution and should pursue improved disaster planning, policies that incentivize investment in resiliency, and increased research and innovation.

and storm surges pose a particularly severe threat because over half the world’s population lives within 60 km of a coastline,4 and another billion live within the path of what used to be referred to as the 100-year flood. By 2015, 21 of the 33 cities over ten million will be on coastlines, all but six in the developing world.5 Since the 1960s,

climate change and urbanization have more than tripled the number of reported disasters, to about 320 to 350 large disasters per year.6 When disasters strike, urban energy systems are especially vulnerable because these systems are not only concentrated geographically but also deeply interconnected. Large-scale failures in one part of the system during a disaster can cascade into failures in all systems. For example, power outages caused by Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy contaminated local water supplies, stopped phone service, and disrupted the availability of gasoline and diesel, hampering the ability to move goods and services.7 Of course, disruptions that happen rapidly are not the only source of concern. Gradual climate changes also pose risks to energy networks.

Decreasing water availability can reduce the availability of hydroelectricity and even cause power plants that depend upon water-based cooling systems to shut down.

Not all countries face the same kinds of risk. This variation is revealed when the global installed generating capacity of economies around the world is mapped against the measures of natural hazard risks.8 As shown in Figure 1, approximately 8 percent of world generation capacity, can be found in Asia and Latin America. This group of countries supports 15.3 percent of the world’s population and just under 10 percent of economic output. In particular, Japan scores relatively low in vulnerability due to strong domestic institutions, but this is offset by the country’s very high exposure to hazards, particularly earthquakes and cyclones. The highest-risk emerging markets include the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Chile and Guatemala.

A higher proportion of the world’s power system falls into the second quartile of medium-high risk. This group represents 28 percent of the

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Figure 1. Power Systems at Risk

global installed base of electric power generation. Many highly populated and rapidly growing economies fall into this category, including China, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan.

Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructure The impact of natural disasters on energy infrastructure has drawn attention to the need to build more resilient energy systems. A growing number of countries are incorporating resilience into their national strategies.

For example, the UK and Australia have developed comprehensive national strategies and institutional arrangements to introduce resilience into their critical infrastructure planning process, recognizing the relationship between critical infrastructure resilience, disaster resilience, and community resilience.9 In the United States, the Critical Infrastructure Task Force of the Homeland Security Advisory Council argued that the government’s critical

infrastructure policies were focused too much on protecting assets from terrorist attacks and not focused enough on improving the resilience of assets against a variety of threats.10 These strategic roadmaps converge on a common view that is more holistic than traditional risk assessments.

They view resilience as the ability to endure stresses or shocks, and to recover more quickly after a disruption. This reflects a recognized need to expand from preventive measures such as asset hardening to adaptive measures that minimize the negative consequences of disruptive events.

Thus, an important question arises: how does the need to create more resilient energy systems intersect with the need to establish cleaner, more efficient energy systems?

Ideally, investment and policy should advance technologies that are capable of improving resilience and sustainability, creating Resilient-Sustainable Infrastructure (RSI).

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Hurricane Sandy demonstrated that green energy systems can fail when they are not sufficiently robust. Many homeowners in the region were shocked when their solar systems became inoperable as long as the electricity grid was down.11 This situation occurs because regulatory code requires grid-connected solar systems to automatically shut down when the power fails, partly to protect linemen working on power restoration unless they have more expensive protection switches.

Available RSI Solutions Technology can play a role in providing the next generation of RSI energy solutions. Three categories are particularly important today: intelligence, redundancy, and coupling and decoupling within networks. The latter involves how energy assets can gain or lose resilience by being part of larger networks.

provides a significant amount of data that can be analyzed and visualized by the operators, as well as by maintenance and field crews. Advanced grid analytic and visualization technologies can also incorporate social media.

H

“RSI”

Greener Environmental footprint reduction

Status Quo

L L

Robust

Resilient

H

Source: Authors, 2013

Figure 2. Resilient-Sustainable Infrastructure (RSI) Matrix

Intelligence Enhancing resilience through better intelligence is one promising approach. This involves using information technology to harness big data, advanced analytics, and more sophisticated monitoring and automation.

Examples include the following: • Anticipation and preparation for major storms has improved, with the help of predictive tools that range from simple storm classification tables to more sophisticated computer models that take into account other system variables like topology, system design and layout, customer density and vegetation. Thanks to the application of supercomputers, radar, and satellites, today’s fourday weather forecast is much more accurate than a two-day estimate was 20 years ago.12 More accurate forecasts provide longer lead times for pre-positioning equipment, warning exposed populations, and other proactive measures.

• Crisis management and recovery has benefited from smart meters and advanced Outage Management

Systems (OMS) that automatically detect a fault, isolate the faulted section from the grid, and restore service to unfaulted sections. This can reduce the time and frequency of outages as well as the costs of locating the fault and of manually operating switches. These systems can also improve safety for the public and utility worker since faults, such as downed wires, are cleared quickly and utility workers can efficiently manage their work since they can remotely visualize and control much of the distribution grid.

• Social media can be leveraged to more quickly determine the location and extent of a problem and to communicate with customers. If customers link their Twitter tags to their utility account information or enable their mobile devices’ geo-tagging function, they can reveal their location automatically when they tweet. Automatic systems can analyze clusters of tweets tied to addresses to reveal valuable information about location and extent of an outage.13 This

Redundancy Redundancy is a time-tested approach to achieving resilience; for example, having multiple production facilities provides flexibility in the event that one facility is shut down. A common way to establish electric power redundancy is to install backup generation.

Many facilities, ranging from refineries to hospitals, and data centers, have standby generation systems. In many countries regulations often require certain critical facilities to have backup power systems.

However, redundancy can conflict with sustainability goals, as in the above example of backup diesel generators. Thus, to the extent possible, redundant systems should have minimal environmental impact; for example, gas-fired backup generation is cleaner than diesel systems. Even more desirable are systems based on renewable energy. In early 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued new emission rules for diesel generators in order to cut costs and reduce air pollution.14 Under these rules, emergency diesel generators can only operate for up to 100 hours per year, thus inviting the design of redundancy protection with cleaner, distributed power generation technologies.

Network Coupling and Decoupling Network coupling is a key feature of most energy infrastructure systems.

In the case of electric power, deepening the central grid network can enhance resilience by expanding the number and type of generation units available for dispatch. This is

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Arlington County / CC BY-SA 2.0

Due to interconnected systems, solar systems in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy were automatically shut down while the electric grid was down. In such cases, green energy systems are still susceptible to disruptions.

particularly valuable in the case of electricity, which cannot be stored in large quantities and requires matching of supply with demand. However, when a network fails, users may need the ability to ‘decouple’ and operate without the support of the central system. This is particularly true for critical facilities such as hospitals, water treatment facilities and communication systems.

One example of the benefits of network coupling is the Central American Electrical Interconnection System. Completed in 2012, it couples the power grids of seven countries, and consists of over 4,500 towers and 25 substations. The project involved

establishing the necessary legal, institutional and technical resources to facilitate private sector investment in power generation and to establish a transmission infrastructure to allow power exchanges among participants.

In addition to helping lower electricity costs and reduce the region’s heavy dependence on imported fuel oil and diesel, the interconnection and the ability to more effectively pool power generation resources also provide greater resilience to weather events and other natural hazards.

Central America is vulnerable to a wide range of natural disasters including droughts, earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes.15

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Another example of the benefits of network decoupling is Combined Heat and Power (CHP) systems, which utilize reciprocating engines or turbines to enable decoupling from the central grid. Extra equipment, and therefore extra expense, is needed to enable a CHP system to operate in both grid-parallel and stand-alone mode. Just as an automobile needs a battery to help start the engine, a CHP system needs a battery pack to help re-start during a grid outage. There are a small, but growing number of examples of where CHP systems have demonstrated the ability to deliver critical services during natural disasters.16

NASA/GSFC/TRMM / CC BY 2.0

Tools as simple as radar to predict storms provide intelligence that allows for greater preparation for extreme weather.

Advancing More Resilient Urban Energy Systems Governments and planners across the world are acutely aware of the challenges they face in providing urban security and sustainability.

Most developed and many developing nations have undertaken extensive disaster planning and have elaborate response systems in place. A burgeoning global effort to share best practices has emerged around the four key elements of disaster management: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.17 However, more needs to be done. Mitigation planning often overlooks new strategies for improving energy system resilience by relying on a combination of introducing greater intelligence, innovative redundancy, and the ability to couple and decouple from the central grid

system. For example, the official U.S. Federal Energy Management Agency (FEMA) manual on mitigation of urban hazards does not mention energy system resilience.18 Similarly, a recent World Bank report noted that “the energy sector is under-represented in both peer-reviewed literature on adapation and in related investments and actions.”19 Rather than taking a broad view of energy system disaster resilience, most disaster plans focus on hardening the existing large-scale networks: strengthening transmission towers, building seawalls around power plants, reducing the need for power plant cooling water, storing larger amounts of fuel at plants, and other measures that mainly treat the largescale system.20 But, urban energy resilience is now more than simply

hardening the large-scale utility network. Modern utility resilience will be provided by a combination of local generation and storage, increased redundancy, conventional system hardening and stockpiling, and smart grid functionality.

Several steps can be taken to accelerate progress in this area. For example, national disaster planning authorities should reach out more intensively to utilities and other companies in the distributed energy, storage, and smart grid production chains. A huge amount of investment and analysis is occurring in public and private settings that may inform disaster risk reduction exercises while addressing more traditional reliability and service value issues.

Researchers should begin developing new tools and methods of analysis that optimize the resilience and adaptive capacity of urban utility systems.

There are many investment tradeoffs in the creation of urban utility systems: pipes can be larger or stronger; redundancy elements can be inserted; more sensors and controls can be installed; distant sources can be hardened; and/ or, local sources can be multiplied.

These options can be optimized only within a framework of portfolio analysis, with clearly designated objectives and a deep understanding of the benefit streams flowing from each option.

Finally, more is needed to encourage innovative technologies.

More also needs to be done to incentivize technology innovation to support resilience, especially innovations aimed at reducing the cost of resilience. To date, national energy R&D programs have provided little or no dedicated funding to develop new technologies aimed at providing site-specific or even more general system-level resilience. Even fewer efforts are underway to incentivize innovation for technologies that blend resilience with lower carbon and other important environmental objectives. One exception is the State of

www.thesolutionsjournal.org | September-October 2014 | Solutions | 53

Connecticut which has allocated funding for a series of advanced microgrid projects aimed at ensuring that critical buildings continue to have power during electrical outages.21

Conclusion Establishing energy systems that are both sustainable and resilient will require new approaches. It will require anticipating and preparing for disruptions, resisting or mitigating the severity and impact of disruptions, responding in the immediate aftermath, and recovering to a fully functional and less vulnerable condition. It will also require more than simply hardening the energy systems. Both resilience and sustainability can be achieved through a portfolio of technologies including intelligent systems such as advanced grid automation, redundancy through distributed generation and storage, as well as the ability to couple with and decouple from centralized grid systems. While some technologies exist to support these objectives, more awareness-raising and innovation is needed to ensure that resilient and sustainable energy infrastructures can keep up with the growing global challenges of climate change and the shift to an increasingly urbanized world.

Authors: Dr. Peter C. Evans is Vice President of the Center for Global Enterprise. Dr. Peter Fox-Penner is Principal and Director of The Brattle Group and author of Smart Power: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities. The authors would like to extend a special thanks to Heidi Bishop for her contributions to this article.

Credit: Ll1324 / CC BY 2.0

The Central American Electrical Interconnection System couples the power grids of seven countries, pooling resources generated by numerous sources including this hydroelectric dam over the Lempa River in El Salvador. The interconnected system provides greater resilience to weather events and other natural disasters.

5. Institute for Civil Engineering (ICE). Flooding:

and Power in the Gulf Coast Region: Benefits and

referred to as ICE 2010.

Challenges. Houston Advanced Research Center

6. Guha-Sapir, D, Vos, F, Below, R, with Ponserre, S. Annual Disaster Statistical Review 2010: The Numbers and Trends. WHO 2010 (May 2011).

7. Leavitt, WM & Kiefer, JJ. Infrastructure Interdependency and the Creation of a Normal Disaster: The Case of Hurricane Katrina and the

1. Some demographers and the United Nations employ a cutoff of ten million inhabitants, butthe underlying trends are identical.

as WHO 2010.

which lists the elements of a proper mitigation

Nations University Institute for Environment and

plan, but omits utility systems from the list. In

Human Security (UNU-EHS) (Bonn, 2012).

its lists of resources, FEMA’s How-To Guide for

9. Australian Government. Critical Infrastructure Resilience Strategy (2010).

10. Moteff, JD. Critical Infrastructure Resilience: The Evolution of Policy and Programs and Issues for Congress. Congressional Research Service (August 23, 2012).

Bloomberg BusinessWeek (October 31, 2012).

12. Lubchenco, J & Hayes, J. New Technology Allows

developing mitigation plans lists the websites of a dozen other federal agencies, but fails to include the U.S. Department of Energy, which has extensive materials on decentralized energy sources and the smart grid.

19 Ebinger, J & Vergara, W. Climate Impacts on Energy Systems. The World Bank (2011).

20. Sieber, J. Weather Extreme Impacts on Power Plants st

and Possibilities for Adaptation. Presented at the 1

Better Extreme Weather Forecasts. Scientific

Annual Conference for the International Society for

American (April 17, 2012).

Integrated Disaster Risk Management (September

13. McDonald, J. Integrated Systems, Social Media Electric Power & Light Vol. 90 (Nov. 1, 2012).

and Health. (January 2010). Hereinafter referred to

larger. CRED 2010.

18. The Federal Emergency Management Agency.

2003). See, for example, Table 3.3 of the manual,

8. United Nations. World Risk Report 2012. United

3. Hochrainer, S and Mechler, R. Natural Disaster Risk Vol. 28 (2011).

and economic dislocation risks are only growing

Developing the Mitigation Plan. FEMA (April

Improve Grid Reliability, Customer Satisfaction.

4. The World Health Organization. Climate Change

statistical mortality risk from disasters, but property

Policy Vol. 10 (April 2006).

2. Authors’ calculations. in Asian Megacities: A Case for Risk Pooling?. Cities

(May 2006).

17. Remarkably, these efforts have so far reduced the

City of New Orleans. Public Works Management &

11. Tozzi, J. Solar Panels No Savior in a Blackout.

References

16. Bullock, D & Weingarden, S. Combined Heat

Engineering Resilience (May 12, 2010). Hereinafter

14 EPA Issues New Emission Rules for Diesel

2, 2010) and Hardening and Resiliency U.S. Energy Industry Response to Recent Hurricane Seasons.

Department of Energy (2010).

21. Office of Governer Donnel P Malloy. Press Release:

Generators. Dow Jones Newswires (January 15,

Gov. Malloy Announces Nation’s First Statewide

2013).

Microgrid Pilot. http://www.governor.ct.gov/malloy/

15. EM-DAT: The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database www.emdat.be

54 | Solutions | September-October 2014 | www.thesolutionsjournal.org

cwp/view.asp?A=4010&Q=528770. (July 24, 2013)

Heckbert, S., R. Costanza, and L Parrot. (2014). Achieving Sustainable Societies: Lessons from Modelling the Ancient Maya. Solutions 5(5): 55-64. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/achieving-sustainable-societies-lessons-from-modelling-the-ancient-maya/

Feature

Achieving Sustainable Societies: Lessons from Modelling the Ancient Maya

by Scott Heckbert, Robert Costanza, and Lael Parrott

In Brief

Ben Beiske / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Temple IV at Tikal in Guatemala is the tallest building in the pre-Columbian Americas, and is a testament to the growth of Maya society during the Classic Maya period.

T

he archaeological record reveals diverse societies that flourished in their time and place and succeeded in achieving impressive works of architecture, novel technological advancement, complex economies, and other measures of human achievement.

The archaeological record also shows complex societies having declined, some gradually, others precipitously, with common explanations including changing environmental conditions, greedy rulers, wars and conquest, resource depletion, pathogens, and

overpopulation. However, single-cause explanations, or even a string of singlecause explanations do not do justice to past peoples, who like us, must have known their vulnerabilities and must have sought to adapt.

In this article, we explore whether the concept of resilience, as represented within a simulation model, can help explain the collapse of a civilization.

We use the ancient Maya as an example to explore how that society might have avoided collapse, and provide insight into the resilience of our current global civilization.

The ancient Maya provide an example of a complex socialecological system which developed impressively before facing catastrophic reorganization. In order for our contemporary globally-connected society to avoid a similar fate, we aim to learn how the ancient Maya system functioned, and whether it might have been possible to maintain resilience and avoid collapse. The MayaSim computer model was constructed to test hypotheses on whether system-level interventions might have resulted in a different outcome for the simulated society.

We find that neither collapse nor sustainability are inevitable, and the fate of social-ecological systems relates to feedbacks between the human and biophysical world, which interact as fast and slow variables and across spatial and temporal scales. In the case of the ancient Maya, what is considered the ‘peak’ of their social development might have also been the ‘nadir’ of overall social-ecological resilience. Nevertheless, modelling results suggest that resilience can be achieved and long-term sustainability possible, but changes in sub-systems need to be maintained within safe operating boundaries.

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The Ancient Maya: A Case Study of Societal Resilience and Vulnerability The political and economic history of the ancient Maya (specifically the lowland Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula) suggests a pattern of regional and sub-regional growth, decline, and reorganization during the Preclassic (1000 BCE –250 CE), Classic (250–900 CE), and Postclassic periods (900–1500 CE). Classic Maya culture reached its height around 700 CE before a rapid and fundamental transformation altered its political, social, economic, and demographic organization, commonly referred to as the “Classic Maya Collapse”.1,2,3 This significant reorganization defines the transition from the Classic to Postclassic period at a time when Maya society was growing at its fastest rate, building many of its most impressive monuments, and increasing in its socioeconomic connectivity.

For example, Temple IV at Tikal in present-day Guatemala is the tallest building in the pre-Columbian Americas, and was constructed in 747 CE.4 The majority of Tikal’s population was lost soon after, during the period from 830 to 950 CE.5 The largest building in present-day Belize is still the main Maya architectural complex at Caracol, abandoned around 900 CE. At the end of the Classic period the population of the Maya lowlands had reached an order of magnitude larger than the region supports today, with some estimates as high as 10 million people.6 Following their Late Classic peak, there was a political, social, and economic crisis, and many cities, some supporting up to 100,000 people, were abandoned.7,8,9 This narrative should be balanced with a perspective of the entire Maya historical timeline given the Maya are today a populous, diverse and resilient people, speaking 29 Mayan languages.

Simulating the Ancient Maya The Integrated History and future of People on Earth (IHOPE) initiative (http://ihopenet.org/)10,11,12,13 developed a simulation model of the ancient Maya civilization This model can be used to test hypotheses of societal development, resilience and social-ecological vulnerabilities. The MayaSim model is presented as one possible set of assumptions about how the ancient Maya social-ecological system might have functioned. The model is a simplified representation of the Maya system

Key Concepts • The MayaSim model represents the development and reorganization of an integrated social-ecological system.

Perturbing the system, we can test what parameter combinations result in either sustainability or collapse.

• The complex nature of socialecological systems means there is no single-cause explanation of sustainability or collapse. Interacting human and biophysical sub-systems regulate the magnitude of reorganizations.

• The capacity of the system to avoid undesirable outcomes is related to rates of change in these interacting sub-systems, the interaction of fast and slow-changing variables, and the effect of cross-scale dynamics.

MayaSim represents individual settlements as ‘agents’ located in a landscape represented as a grid of cells. Settlement agents manage agriculture and forest harvesting over a set of local cells, and establish trade with neighbors, allowing trade networks to emerge. Agents, cells, and networks are programmed to represent elements of the historical Maya civilization, including demographics, trade, agriculture, soil degradation, provision of ecosystem services, climate variability, hydrology, primary productivity, and forest succession.

Simulating these in combination allows patterns to emerge at the

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landscape level, effectively growing the social-ecological system from the bottom up. The MayaSim model is able to reproduce spatial patterns and timelines that mimic relatively well some elements of what we know about ancient Maya history, such as the general location of important capital cities, and the maximum overall population.

The baseline case best represents the historical ‘life cycle’ as we understand it for the ancient Maya, with model parameters generating results that mimic the transition between the Maya Preclassic, Classic and Postclassic periods. This baseline scenario is presented in Figure 1, showing spatial outcomes for four indicators of: a) population density; b) forest condition, c) settlement ‘trade strength’; and d) soil degradation. Each indicator contains a narrative describing the development and reorganization of the simulated social-ecological system.

By simulated year 250 BCE, settlements have expanded into all regions, first occupying areas with greater ecosystem services, and progressively growing with agricultural development. Population densities are higher in areas where settlements have clustered and formed local trade connections. By simulated year 500 CE, the value of trade increases, extending local trade connections to ‘global’ connectivity. The centre of the trade network is approximately located in the region where the ancient Maya capitals of Tikal and Caracol existed. The condition of the forest is markedly changed, with only small patches of climax forest remaining in agriculturally unsuitable areas, forming ecological refugia within the near-completely settled landscape. By simulated 1500 CE, the trade network has disintegrated, the centre of the most densely populated areas is nearly entirely abandoned, leaving only a small number of locally connected settlements in what was once the fringe.

Population Density, Forest Condition, Settlement Trade Strength, and Soil Degradation for the Simulated Landscape at 800-Year Intervals 800 CE

1600 CE

(d) Soil Degradation

(c) Trade Strength

(b) Forest Condition

(a) Population Density

0 CE

Figure 1. Darker colouring shows increased a) population density (blue), b) forest condition [three states of cleared/cropped cells] (yellow), secondary regrowth (light green) and climax forest (dark green), c) trade strength (red), and d) soil degradation (red). www.thesolutionsjournal.org | September-October 2014 | Solutions | 57

Ryan Greenberg / CC BY-NC 2.0

The centers of trade in the MayaSim program are the capitals of Tikal and Caracól, pictured in present day Belize.

Abandoned cropland and decreased fuelwood harvesting allows broadscale secondary regrowth, and climax forest eventually expands out from refugia to an extent similar to prepopulation expansion levels.

The model reports quantitative indicators that can be used to analyze the dynamics of development and reorganization. Figure 2 presents a series of indicators that provide a ‘health diagnostic’ of the socialecological system through time.

Figure 2a) shows the total population of all simulated settlements and contributions to real income by ecosystem services, agriculture, and trade.

In the early part of the simulation, ecosystem services provide the majority of value, but agriculture begins to contribute relatively more value by about year 50 CE. Both are superseded by trade around year 550 CE, but trade value peaks and declines precipitously by 950 CE, and population adjusts accordingly.

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The rapid change in the value of trade can be explained by examining Figure 2b), which depicts the total number of trade links, and the number of nodes within the largest cluster. Confidence intervals are largest for this indicator, and are depicted to show the range of variability in model results. The network grows from local clusters to a near-globally connected system. Periodic perturbations (droughts) give the clusters a more organized structure. Marginal

links are periodically removed during droughts, tending to establish and reinforce some routes, which inevitably forms the ‘skeleton’ of the global trade network.

Figure 2c) depicts soil degradation and forest condition by three states of cleared or cropped land, secondary regrowth, and climax forest. Roughly the first third of the simulation shows accelerated decline of climax forest and inhibited regrowth as a result of cropping and timber harvesting as populations grow. The following period shows dramatic increase in cleared/cropped land and the rate of soil degradation increases to its highest level. The last third of the simulation shows a rapid decline in cleared/cropped land as agriculture is abandoned, with corresponding large-scale secondary regrowth, and eventual succession into climax forest which recovers to near pre-population expansion levels.

Figure 2d) depicts increasing area devoted to agriculture, but with a much smaller increase in overall yield signalling that more marginal lands are put under production and that the returns from agricultural development are smaller. Natural capital is modelled as a summation of four ecosystem services based on arable soils, precipitation, access to available freshwater, and timber resources. Natural capital is shown to reach its lowest level around simulated year 750 CE.

Figure 2. MayaSim baseline simulation results for: a) population [# people, primary axis], contributions to real income by ecosystem services, agriculture, and trade [# proxy value units, secondary axis]; b) number of network nodes and number of nodes within the largest network cluster; c) forest condition [proportion of total area , primary axis] by categories of cleared/cropped, secondary regrowth and climax forest, and soil degradation [proxy units, secondary axis]; and d) area cropped [ha] and total crop yield [proxy units], and total natural capital [proxy units, secondary axis]. Horizontal axis in years from 800 BCE to 1680 CE www.thesolutionsjournal.org | September-October 2014 | Solutions | 59

Erik Törner, IM Individuell Människohjälp / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The Maya today remain a populous and diverse people, with over 29 spoken languages. In Guatemala, the Chichicastenango Maya Market remains a place for trade. MayaSim scenarios test if trade reduction in Ancient Maya could have prevented the societal collapse.

Can Loss of Resilience Predict Collapse?

Resilience has been defined in different ways19,20 and here we use a working definition as the capacity of the system to handle whatever the future brings without being altered in undesirable ways.21 Resilience is thus a necessary condition for system sustainability. A resilient system must have ‘room to manoeuvre’, i.e., it must be able to adapt in response to changing conditions. A social-ecological system’s room to manoeuvre is positively correlated with social and natural capital, and when either is scarce (social networks are broken down or ecosystem services are degraded), a system loses resilience and becomes more vulnerable to perturbations.

As an analogy to vulnerability and collapse, consider the idea of societal resilience as ‘slack in the system’. If society is near the ‘edge of the cliff’ so to speak, a small push will force it over the edge, whereas if that cliff is further off, the system can adjust and recover. The distance to the cliff is a moving target that moves forward and back depending on the current state of system vulnerabilities. With a computer model, we can determine the location of the resilience ‘cliff edge’. Different candidate statistics can be proposed to estimate how vulnerable the system is, and we can evaluate which of the statistics perform best as estimators of sustainability or collapse. The ‘cliff edge’ is multidimensional, so resilience metrics will, by definition, be complex functions.

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Modelling a social-ecological system, as shown here using the Classic Maya as an example, represents a computational laboratory that can be used to test hypotheses around how the system will perform under different sets of assumptions. We can test different candidate resilience indicators with the aim of defining conditions under which a society is able to develop, achieve sustainability, and avoid collapse. Just as an indicator of patient health would entail several metrics such as heart rate, BMI, blood pressure, and caloric intake, an indicator for resilience will combine several different metrics, such as those presented in Figure 2. We can attempt to observe patterns in (and importantly between) the metrics in order to generate an indicator of resilience.

Erik Hungerbuhler / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

One MayaSim scenario found that combining population control with soil conservation through agricultural and farming practices could allow for the ‘peak’ to occur while also reducing the severity of the collapse.

The resilience indicator might ideally tell us how vulnerable a social-ecological system might be to disturbance. The indicator would be most useful if it could consider the direction and magnitude of changes in sub-systems, correlations with other indicators, the points where thresholds exist and under which of these conditions the integrated system shuts down. Once we know the predictor and thresholds of collapse, we can then identify ways to increase the chances of avoiding that outcome. The MayaSim model identifies that resilience indicators must consider cross-scale interactions, such as how the global trade system is related to local food security, and how rates of change in fast and slow variables contribute to vulnerabilities, such as rapid change in forest cover and gradual change in soil productivity.

Could The Maya Have Avoided Collapse?

Was the collapse of the Maya socialecological system inevitable, or did it become inevitable after a certain point in their history? Given sufficient foresight, could the Maya have avoided collapse and achieved a sustainable outcome?

To answer these questions we can perform sensitivity analyses on the model and search for combinations of interventions that may have helped the Maya avoid collapse. Input parameters can be altered to show which combinations lead to different development pathways, achieve sustainability, or result in collapse. Some configurations do not lead to development of what we might recognise as a ‘peak’ in human civilization. Some configurations maintain large populations without collapse. This suggests that neither growth nor collapse is

inevitable, and that win-win solutions at least exist, even if we do not yet fully know what the ranges might be for critical variables in this simulated social-ecological system.

The MayaSim model was tested to see what variables affect overall sustainability. Nine experiments were performed along with the baseline collapse scenario. The experiments involved various combinations of the following interventions: a) limiting loss of soil productivity due to agricultural production; b) limiting forest harvesting above rates of natural disturbance regardless of local population density; c) limiting the trade network or value of trade; and d) high and low reduction of birth rates.

Results from these scenarios are depicted in Figure 3, showing: a) population; b) total real income as derived from combined trade, agriculture, and ecosystem services; and c) the difference in per capita real income from the baseline scenario. These metrics were determined to best tell the story of both a sustainable and desirable outcome for a societal life cycle.

Scenario 1 is the baseline collapse. There are three ‘extreme’ scenarios—2, 3, and 4—which test boundary conditions. Scenario 2, with no trade value, does not result in any significant development. This scenario might be analogous to a broad scale form of swidden agriculture. Scenarios 3 and 4 are somewhat unrealistic in that they assume human impacts on forests and soils are reduced to zero. Nevertheless, the zero soil productivity loss scenario produces the most overall real income and stabilizes without collapse. It also generates, by far, the most people, and overall results in a large number of poor settlements ubiquitously covering the landscape. Scenario 3, with no forest harvesting, actually causes the collapse to be magnified because there is no prior limiting signal from degraded forests, and the system significantly overshoots.

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Scenarios 5, 6, and 7 control the human population in some way.

Scenario 5 limits the value of trade to not exceed the value of agriculture for any given city. This causes a lower level of development because major trade nodes are not able to develop and the critical links in the skeleton of the trade network do not fully form.

Scenarios 6 and 7 institute population control in larger cities. Low population control slightly mitigates the collapse and high levels of population control shows an only slightly declining trend in population, but again, development does not reach ‘peak’ levels due to critical nodes in the network not achieving their largest size and wealth.

Scenarios 8, 9, and 10 combine these different interventions in some way and depict the most sustainable outcomes. Combining population control and soil conservation at different rates can allow for the ‘peak’ to occur, and also to somewhat mitigate the severity of the collapse. With high population control and soil conservation, a ‘near sustainable’ outcome is possible, and still allows for a peak. However, of all scenarios examined, once the system begins decline it is irreversible. The exception is Scenario 10, in which all 3 forms of intervention examined are implemented, including high population control, and both soil degradation and forest harvesting are reduced by half from their baseline rates. In this case, the socio-ecological system develops, peaks, and declines, but the reorganization is not severe and the system begins to again fluoresce as it recovers into another (albeit muted) Classical age.

Conclusions

Figure 3. MayaSim model results from scenarios testing system interventions, reporting a) Population; b) Total real income per capita from combined trade, agriculture and ecosystem services; and c) difference in per capita real income from the baseline collapse scenario. Simulation results test assumptions on limiting soil degradation, forest harvesting, trade, and population. Horizontal axis in years from 800 BCE to 1680 CE. 62 | Solutions | September-October 2014 | www.thesolutionsjournal.org

The archaeological record is encoded with societies’ interactions with their environments. Our computer model of the ancient Maya is a simplification of a real-world social-ecological system, which allows us to propose alternative assumptions, and to test hypotheses about system resilience.

We present the model as a tool to broaden our understanding of how social-ecological systems function across temporal and spatial scales. We find that developing and maintaining a sustainable and desirable society requires that interactions between different system components be maintained within some bounds. The bounds are not hard and fast absolute numbers, but are described in relationships between variables. Managing for sustainability, therefore, requires a holistic system-level perspective with an understanding of how change in one sub-system can be manifested in other sub-systems, and across scales.

Some historical pathways lead to growth and reorganization, with the possibility of either sustainability or collapse. Through the exploration of scenarios, we can identify key interventions that might lead to a resilient and sustainable society. The baseline scenario shows a pattern of development and collapse, and although natural capital can recover to some extent as forests regrow, the loss of soil productivity limits future re-settlement opportunities, and the trade network structure is gone, no longer providing high trade value. As a result, trade connectivity and population numbers do not recover.

Scenarios 2 through 7 test one-shot interventions, such as trade reduction or population control. Overall, these scenarios provide the worst outcomes in terms of either population numbers or real income, teaching us that no one intervention can do it all. In addition, the modelled society in these one-shot intervention scenarios rarely develops an advanced trading network with large population centres, and arguably never flourishes. Using population control in combination with soil conservation (Scenario 8) mitigates the steepness and severity of the collapse, however, most indicators continue to decline in the following centuries.

Implementing three interventions in parallel can level off the slope of the

early development curve, and avoid overshoot to some degree.

The scenario in which three interventions are implemented (Scenario 10: population control, reduced forest harvesting and reduced soil productivity loss) is the only outcome where the collapse is mitigated, and the trade network, real income levels, and population all begin to recover. Notably, a significantly higher real income is achieved in this scenario, suggesting that multiple interventions can yield win-win solutions, and the more points of intervention available, the more degrees of freedom exist for managing towards a sustainable and desirable society.

reorganization like the Classic Maya?

Can we implement strategies like population control, ecosystem protection and restoration, and trade regulation that could have altered the course of history for the Maya? Modelling complex social-ecological systems can help to answer these questions, provide guidance for resilient policies, and assist in avoiding unintended consequences.

Viewing civilization as a complex system highlights that feedbacks and interactions across scales are the nuts and bolts of a resilient system.

A reductionist view of resilience and vulnerability cannot be used to identify a single cause (or a linear progression of single causes) of the unravelling of the social-ecological system.

Combining population control and soil conservation at different rates can allow for the ‘peak’ to occur, and also to somewhat mitigate the severity of the collapse.

What does this mean for our modern society? We might interpret our achievements in global development as analogous to the Classic Maya, building their most impressive cities and monuments immediately before a precipitous reorganization. Although considered to be the ‘height’ of that impressive civilization, our model suggests that despite the grandeur, the social-ecological system as a whole may have been fundamentally undermined. Like the ancient Maya, the world today is highly interconnected, and is pushing production into ever more marginal areas, potentially moving us closer to the edge of reorganization. In order to know how close we are to this system-level edge, we need to consider the relationships between components of our system, such as how global trade, agricultural production, and demographics interact. Have we lost resilience and are we standing at the precipice of

A novel finding of the MayaSim model is that collapse does not require an ‘instigating shock.’ In the baseline scenario the dynamics of collapse are embedded in the system, and it does not require an invader, meteorite, volcano, or any other human-wrought or natural calamity to push it off the edge.

Reorganization is simply a property of complex systems, and the magnitude of the reorganization depends on system resilience.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Christian Isendahl, Joel Gunn, Simon Brewer, Vernon Scarborough, Arlen Chase, Diane Chase, Nicholas Dunning, Carsten Lemmen, Timothy Beach, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, David Lentz, Paul Sinclair, Carole Crumley, and Sander van der Leeuw.

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Norman Z / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Modern society survived what some believed to be the end of the world as predicted by the end of the Mayan calendar. It is conceivable, however, that our society has lost resilience and is onthe brink of a major reorganization as experienced by the Ancient Maya.

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14. Heckbert, S, et al. Growing the Ancient Maya Social-

(2004).

21. Glaser, M, Ratter, BMW. Krause, G & Welp, M.

ecological System from the Bottom Up. Isendahl,

New Approaches to the Analysis of Human-

8. Guderjan, T, Beach, T, Luzzadder-Beach, S & Bozarth,

C, & Stump, D (eds.). Applied Archaeology, Historical

nature Relations. Human-Nature Interactions in the

S. Understanding the Causes of Abandonment in

Ecology and the Useable Past. Oxford University Press

Anthropocene (Glaser, M, Ratter, BMW, Krause, G &

the Maya Lowlands. Archaeological Review from

(in press).

Welp, M (Eds.) (Routledge, New York, NY. 2012), 3–12.

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Bennett, E.M., S.R. Carpenter, L.J. Gordon, N. Ramankutty, P. Balvanera, B. Campbell, W. Cramer, J. Foley, C. Folke, L. Karlberg, J. Liu, H. Lotze-Campen, N.D. Mueller, G.D. Peterson, S. Polasky, J. Rockström, R.J. Scholes, and M. Spierenburg. (2014). Toward a More Resilient Agriculture. Solutions 5(5): 65-75. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/toward-a-more-resilient-agriculture/

Feature

Toward a More Resilient Agriculture

by EM Bennett, SR Carpenter, LJ Gordon, N Ramankutty, P Balvanera, B Campbell, W Cramer, J Foley, C Folke, L Karlberg, J Liu, H Lotze-Campen, ND Mueller, GD Peterson, S Polasky, J Rockström, RJ Scholes, and M Spierenburg

John Flannery / CC BY-ND 2.0

Native pollinators of crops are declining globally in response to practices intended to increase the efficiency of farming, such as land-use change and pesticide use.

In Brief Agriculture is a key driver of change in the Anthropocene. It is both a critical factor for human well-being and development and a major driver of environmental decline. As the human population expands to more than 9 billion by 2050, we will be compelled to find ways to adequately feed this population while simultaneously decreasing the environmental impact of agriculture, even as global change is creating new circumstances to which agriculture must respond. Many proposals to accomplish this dual goal of increasing agricultural production while reducing its environmental impact are based on increasing the efficiency of agricultural production relative to resource use and relative to unintended outcomes such as water pollution, biodiversity loss, and greenhouse gas emissions. While increasing production efficiency is almost certainly necessary, it is unlikely to be sufficient and may in some instances reduce long-term agricultural resilience, for example, by degrading soil and increasing the fragility of agriculture to pest and disease outbreaks and climate shocks. To encourage an agriculture that is both resilient and sustainable, radically new approaches to agricultural development are needed. These approaches must build on a diversity of solutions operating at nested scales, and they must maintain and enhance the adaptive and transformative capacity needed to respond to disturbances and avoid critical thresholds. Finding such approaches will require that we encourage experimentation, innovation, and learning, even if they sometimes reduce short-term production efficiency in some parts of the world. www.thesolutionsjournal.org | September-October 2014 | Solutions | 65

A

griculture is both critical for human well-being1 and a major driver of environmental decline.2 Agricultural development is rightly perceived as being a significant component of efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals,3 which aim to combat hunger and malnutrition and improve social conditions in the world’s poorest nations. As the human population expands to more than 9 billion people by 2050 and as diets shift toward more animal protein,4-6 we will be compelled to find a way to adequately meet rising demand for food7 while also meeting increased demand for other agricultural products such as biofuel feed stocks.1,6 A path toward resilient and sustainable agriculture must meet food and development needs from local to global scales without destabilizing the Earth system. To achieve this, we will need to resist the trend to focus on single solutions, globally applied, and instead move towards a diversity of solutions operating across scales. Policies and research to develop a resilient agriculture can improve food security and maintain a livable planet.

Modern agriculture has substantial impacts on the biophysical components of the Earth system (Table 1). These impacts of agriculture on the biophysical environment can undermine the very processes that underpin the functioning of agricultural systems, thus reducing the long-term sustainability of agriculture itself.2,8 Because of this, there has been a recent and significant push toward sustainable intensification of agriculture3,7,9–11 that aims to optimize crop production per unit area while accounting for social, political, and environmental impacts.

Essentially, these strategies focus on increased production efficiency at lower environmental and resource costs.2,4-6,10,12 Examples include using improved irrigation techniques that give more crop-per-drop,7,13

increasing yield per unit input,14,15 climate-smart agriculture that produces less greenhouse gas per unit product, or other forms of sustainable intensification.16 Many of these efforts aim to achieve and maintain the highest possible productivity

Key Concepts • Agriculture is both fundamental for human well-being and a major cause of environmental decline.

• Many have suggested that we can achieve a more sustainable agriculture by increasing agricultural production per unit of environmental impact; however, while increasing efficiency is certainly necessary in many places, it is unlikely to be sufficient and, in some cases, may even reduce long-term agricultural resilience.

• Developing resilient agriculture implies an understanding of which agricultural practices need to be persistent, when adaptation is needed, and maybe most important, how to build transformative capacity when fundamental changes are required.

• To encourage an agriculture that is both efficient and resilient, radically new approaches to agricultural development and bold experimentation are needed. These approaches must build on a diversity of solutions operating at scales from the farm to the planet.

• Practices that are inefficient and do not provide opportunities for innovation are maladaptive and should be discontinued. Policies should instead stress learning and innovation toward an agriculture that serves human needs while decreasing the adverse effects of agriculture on biodiversity, water resources and quality, harmful contaminants, and climate.

at a given location for the lowest economic and environmental cost.17 These efforts are sustainabilityrelated in that they attempt to produce the same or more food without causing a decline in other forms of capital now or in the future.18

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However, many of these approaches do not specifically address key aspects of environmental systems having to do with vulnerability, resilience, and the potential for surprise. Considering vulnerability and resilience is important when planning for the future of agriculture because complex social-ecological changes that alter the agricultural context can result in surprising challenges.19 Many such changes with the potential to undermine agricultural development are already underway.

Climate change, an increasingly connected social and trade system, declines in pollinators, and increases in pests and diseases all create instabilities that can disrupt the ecosystem services provided by the agricultural landscape, including food production.20 Increasing efficiency can actually undermine system resilience if it reduces the diversity of the system21 or if it whittles away the safety buffers that are implicit in operating some distance below the theoretical maximum.

While we have been good at increasing agricultural productivity, especially in areas with access to fertilizers and other technologies, some actions taken to promote higher agricultural yields have undermined the provision of other ecosystem services.22,23 Evidence indicates that steps taken to increase the narrow-sense efficiency of agricultural production without addressing resilience and long-term provision of a variety of ecosystem services can lead to highly damaging fluctuations in food production, food cost, and environmental outcomes.24 For example, native pollinators of crops are declining globally due to land-use change, pesticide use, and other causes, and managed honeybees cannot compensate for this loss.25 Similarly, destruction of mangroves for aquaculture is increasing vulnerability to tsunamis.26 Therefore, approaches to agriculture must also consider the resilience of the system;27 short-term or local efficiency is not sustainable if it results in long-term or off-site failures.

Agricultural Impact

References

Land use

20% of forests and 50% savannas, grasslands and shrublands have been converted. Still high pressures.

50, 51

Biodiversity loss

Land cover change for agriculture has been one of the key drivers of biodiversity loss, and could increase current extinction rates 100-fold over the 21st century

51

Radiative forcing

Agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other human activity

52

Freshwater

54% of the geographically and temporally accessible runoff generated by Earth’s hydrologic cycle each year consumed by agriculture. Agriculture is by far the largest consumer of fresh water among human activities

53, 20

Agriculture has greatly amplified the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles with consequences including tropospheric air pollution, human health problems, toxic algal blooms, and anoxic “dead zones” in freshwater and marine ecosystems

13, 54, 55

Nutrients

Table 1. Agriculture’s impact on different global resources and processes

Further, in complex systems such as the global human–environment system, intense pressure on the environment can cause the system to cross critical thresholds from adequate freshwater to drought, from productive to desertified landscapes, and so forth. Agriculture can push the Earth system, or regions within it, over these types of thresholds. For example, some agricultural practices modify hydrologic cycles in ways that can lead to sudden and surprising changes.20 A well-documented example is the landuse change and irrigation practices that lead to soil salinization and the resulting declines in agricultural production.28 Once a threshold is crossed, it is often both costly and difficult (if even possible) to go back. In our highly connected world, crossing one threshold often triggers another, and many regional or global crises involve cascades of events.29,30 Because of this, and the resulting potential for the

unexpected, we need an agricultural system that is both sustainable and resilient. Yet improving food security while also maintaining a safe biophysical environment for humanity is a complex challenge, and current trends indicate that these goals will not be met.31

Defining a Globally Resilient Agriculture A resilient agriculture is one that meets both food and development needs over both the short- and very long-terms, from local to global scales, without destabilizing the Earth system. It aims to maintain or grow the full natural capital of landscapes as well as a broader set of mechanisms, such as the social networks, governance, and leadership required to meet the immediate needs of 9 billion or more people without undermining the long-term stability of social and natural systems that together provide

services to people. It specifically seeks not only persistence, but also adaptive changes or even transformations needed to meet evolving environmental conditions and human needs. To do this, we must challenge the current relatively fixed configuration of our production and consumption systems and the assumption that we will be able to continue any given practice ad infinitum. Instead, a resilient agriculture explicitly allows for adaptive changes or transformations to meet evolving environmental conditions and human needs. Indeed, resilience denotes the capacity of a system to continue to develop by absorbing change and without unintentionally shifting into a qualitatively different state controlled by a different set of processes. It also involves staying within critical boundaries. Where it is inevitable or desirable to cross a boundary, this transformation to the new system is managed in such a way

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Resilient solutions will vary between agricultural regions, resulting in a “mosaic of resilient regions” interacting through trade.

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that preserves the key processes essential to allow the new system to operate within acceptable boundaries.32 The concept of resilient agriculture demands that we reframe the discussion on sustainable agricultural development from its current focus, which is primarily on optimization of production relative to its immediate economic, social, and environmental costs. Rather we must ask how to build an agricultural production system capable of meeting current and forthcoming challenges, many of which are still unknown to us. To fully comprehend the magnitude of this shift, we must change our basic definitions of success and failure in agriculture. Successful agriculture is most often perceived as high yields with low economic cost. Increasingly, this also includes high yields at low environmental cost. A resilient agriculture must also consider the ability of the system to preserve key functions in the face of systemic change. We suggest that that these key functions include the following condition: To stay within planetary boundaries for the persistence of the human-environment system, while generating the capacity to reduce hunger and malnutrition to acceptably low levels in all regions and continuing to offer livelihoods and development opportunities now and in the future.

United Nations Photo / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In order for this to work, agriculture must be reasonably profitable33 and diversified.34 Success in any one measure alone does not mean agriculture is resilient: a financially successful agriculture that undermines biodiversity is not resilient, and an agriculture that produces plentiful food but is not economically viable or undermines local livelihood options is not resilient. An agriculture that causes long-term or widespread environmental crises is

not resilient, no matter how economically successful or how much food is produced, making its profitability and productivity irrelevant.

We can think about resilience by understanding which management practices tend to maintain the natural capital and generate a balanced and sufficient suite of ecosystem services over long periods of time and which do not. Agricultural regions are heterogeneous around the globe and thus, resilient solutions will vary between locations. It is also true that not all goods and services need to be produced in all locations at all times.

It may be that some local biodiversity is lost due to intensified agriculture in one location if this allows better maintenance of biodiversity at a larger scale.35 We thus believe that a resilient global agricultural system will be a mosaic of resilient regions, each one unique in some way, interacting through trade, assistance in times of need, and transfer of learning.

Resilience is often associated with diversity, including both biological diversity and social diversity. We would expect a resilient agriculture to be diverse, with many different types of agriculture happening in different places around the world, or even within the same region. This is quite different from an optimized agriculture, in which (at the logical extreme) each region does just one thing, in the way currently believed to be best.

Toward a More Resilient Agriculture A more resilient agriculture will need to be persistent, adaptive, and transformative, each at the appropriate moment in time and at the appropriate place. Steps to promote persistence of critical functions might include absorbing shocks such as price fluctuations, invasive species, or disease outbreaks. In situations of more long-term change, such as climate change-driven increases in dry spell frequency and occurrence,

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the capacity to adapt without large declines in critical functions will be necessary. Finally, a resilient agriculture must be able to transform to new modes of operation without excessive damage to human or natural systems when the basic conditions for its operation become untenable. The ability to determine when persistence, adaptation, or transformation is needed, where, and to what degree is critical. There are many steps that are being taken to build persistence and to adapt to changes. Some of these steps have long-term benefits. Others have short-term benefits but can be harmful in the long-term if they are continued. For example, governments sometimes solve short-term problems with subsidies or other interventions that eventually hinder more beneficial changes as agriculturalists become dependent on the subsidies and thereby persist with maladapted agricultural practices.36

Persistence There are many small to moderate disruptions that influence agriculture in any particular location or region.

These include economic factors like fluctuations in the price of inputs or outputs that affect the viability of farming or the affordability of food; climatic factors, like droughts, floods, and heat waves; and ecological factors such as the loss of pollinators or the eruption of new diseases. Farmers must persist in the face of these inherent and expected shocks if agriculture is to be sustainable.

Among the mechanisms forged to encourage persistence, some are sustainable and some are not. Policies for persistence are often designed to insulate farmers from the effects of specific shocks, for instance, through insurance or relief. However, longterm sustainability of agriculture requires some amount of adaptation to these shocks if they are inherent features of the system, and especially if their probability and severity are

changing over time. For this reason, policies that recognize and allow feedbacks to remain in place, such as internalizing externalities and providing true cost accounting of costs and benefits of agricultural management, could improve agriculture’s long-term persistence at the cost of short-term fluctuations. Persistence mechanisms that preserve the regulation of ecosystem services and natural capital and that maintain adequate levels of reserves and inter-regional transfers, will promote long-term sustainability.

On the other hand, efforts that aim only to increase productivity and efficiency in a narrowly defined set of dimensions leave inadequate buffering capacity in the system to cope with inherent variability.

manipulating subsidies and tariffs, but all such programs create dependencies that may impede change and adaptation in the long run.36 On the other hand, some local adaptations can create sustainable practices. For example, extensive experimentation with soil amendments and tillage practices in Wisconsin led to new approaches for building soil organic matter, conserving soil water, and decreasing runoff of nutrients.38 Some efficiencyoriented approaches are sustainably adaptive: for instance, it is hard to argue that reducing the current 30 percent wastage in the farm-to-fork chain would be anything but a good thing, and there is no reason to believe that such improvements would be inherently unsustainable.

Instead, a resilient agriculture explicitly allows for adaptive changes or transformations to meet evolving environmental conditions and human needs.

Adaptability

Transformation

Adaptability is the capacity of a system to adjust its responses to changing external drivers and internal processes and thereby allow continued development along the current trajectory.37 Being adaptive and sustainable over the long term means that agriculture must be able to make changes relatively quickly in relation to the rate of change in the circumstances and do so without reducing the overall capacity of the system to support human well-being.18 Among current mechanisms to encourage adaptation, we again find a mix of sustainable and unsustainable practices, where sustainable practices are those that maintain natural and social capital, regulate ecosystem services, and promote social self-organization. For example, governments adapt to changing market pressures by

Transformability is the capacity to create entirely new types of development and cross thresholds onto a new development trajectory.37 It is not achieved by incremental increases in efficiency or sustainability of agricultural practices. It means a fundamental change in the agricultural landscape, with new structures, functions, and feedbacks. For example, farmers in southern Niger who primarily used to cultivate millet are now actively managing the natural regeneration of trees on their crop fields, which has resulted in an improvement in both provisioning and regulating ecosystem services and improved coping capacity among farmers.39 This change required substantial social transformation in the farmers’ relations to trees, their field practices, and the institutions by which communities managed

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Darin / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

An example of a sustainable local adaptation can be found among farms in Wisconsin, where experimentation with soil and tillage practices have been successful in conserving soil water and decreasing runoff nutrients.

resources, including decentralized tenure rights to trees.40. In the last 20 years, more than 200 million trees, an average expansion of 250,000 ha/y, have been established in the region.41 This socio-ecological transformation has likely been further enabled by a general increase in precipitation over the same time span.42 Breakdowns in agriculture should open opportunities for learning and for new practices to emerge. In some situations, marginal adaptation (tinkering to squeeze a bit more productivity or efficiency from the system) cannot lead to a resilient agriculture. Bigger and more systemic changes are needed. Transformation is often difficult and comes at a cost.

For example, the dietary shifts that are likely needed for sustainable agriculture on a planet of 9 billion or more are likely to require significant

increases in the relative price of animal-based foods. The coming decades are likely to be characterized by increasing food security crises and possibly conflict over food, land, and water. Governments and nongovernmental organizations often step in to ameliorate crises and reduce human suffering. They do this through policies such as subsidies meant to provide economic assistance, which are often needed in times of crises.

While interventions like subsidies may be necessary to prevent suffering in the short term, they should not be allowed to block longer-term adaptive changes that decrease the risk of future breakdowns.

In general, current agricultural policies tend to steer away from true transformation because it is disruptive of existing patterns and interests and can incur short-term

losses in agricultural productivity or development opportunities. In practice, the push toward a more efficient agriculture can postpone inevitable transformation because of the increased potential for transient inefficiencies during the reorganization process. Instead, we tend to opt for policies that focus on persistence and sometimes modest adaptation.

However, ignoring the importance of maintaining natural capital and providing a variety of ecosystem services, while suppressing experimentation, is just as likely to undermine agriculture as failing to consider the importance of development opportunities. More than anything else, in recent decades, we have avoided transformation in agriculture. The time has now come and renewed transformation is inevitable. How can we ensure that it is successful and not catastrophic?

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A Positive Transformation Efforts to improve short-term efficiency and optimization are not ensuring sustainability and may simply be setting us up for a bigger fall down the road. A marginally greener revolution is unlikely to lead to a resilient agriculture. Instead, we must search for systemic changes in agricultural practices and institutional arrangements that allow agriculture to be productive but not static. Ensuring resilient agriculture for the long term will require a bold new focus on innovation and on institutions to facilitate sharing the learning and knowledge that results from that innovation.

Focusing on innovation, maintaining diversity, and improving outmoded policies will help ensure a more transformative agriculture. A transition to

a resilient agriculture requires a focus on innovation.44 Innovation can be achieved through the reorganization of existing building blocks into new families of practices that meet multiple goals in a particular biophysical, geographic, and socio-economic setting.

Johnson45 highlights enabling conditions for innovative ideas. Innovation in agriculture will surely draw parts from existing practices, while the truly new ideas will come from bricolage (putting together several pieces into a

We thus believe that a resilient global agricultural system will be a mosaic of resilient regions, each one unique in some way, interacting through trade, assistance in times of need, and transfer of learning.

Yet important questions remain: How can this transformation occur without unacceptable loss of the well-being of both consumers and producers of agricultural products, particularly the most vulnerable people? How can this be done without propping up maladaptive agricultural practices? And what sorts of institutions are likely to be able to lead toward a more resilient agriculture?

There are no easy answers.

Achieving a sustainable agriculture will require patience to allow policies to work, protection for vulnerable people in difficult times, experimentation with effective monitoring of the results, and recognition of the opportunities for learning that result from allowing unsuccessful practices to fail.

In fact, the period immediately after a crisis or failure is the best time to promote innovation and experimentation and create new capacity.43

new formulation), exaptation (building on existing complex ideas), or platforms (building complex things from complex networks). Innovation can be promoted by providing time and resources to experiment and learn from outcomes and by providing opportunities for ideas to connect randomly. This innovation will require experimentation, flexibility, local learning, and these must be fostered by institutions at local, regional, and global scales.

The diversity of socio-ecological systems and food reserves both contribute to the resilience of agriculture.

Diversity, including variety of crops, cropping systems, farm sizes, agricultural landscape types, institutional arrangements, policies, and food systems, all provide functional diversity.

This diversity provides the raw material needed for innovation and avoids getting locked into traps that are set by having one solution available.

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Practices that are inefficient and do not provide opportunities for innovation are maladaptive and should be discontinued. Many agricultural policies are aimed at persistence (e.g. subsidies) and adaptation (e.g. domestic protection laws during price hikes). As they are often focused on short-term benefits, they can be harmful in the long run. Such policies exist because failure is hard—on individuals and on society. However, to maintain agriculture in the long run, maladaptive practices and policies should be dismantled without extreme shocks to individuals and society. At the same time, we need to make failure safe for individuals and societies. In other words, when failure is the best option, we will require at a minimum a vision of a better way, a bridge or pathway from the current system to the better one, and a temporary damage-control mechanism to protect vulnerable people during the transition.

Building institutions to facilitate the development of new ideas will improve communication of successes and failures and make adoption of techniques likely to be successful.

Institutions and incentives are needed to translate goals across scales, so that innovative local solutions to farming problems also help meet regional or global goals, such as water security, pollution mitigation, or climate mitigation. This will require new types of governance that fosters communication across scales in order to enable learning and attenuate shocks. These institutions and incentives must be multiscale and allow the solutions to be responsive to changing conditions and unexpected shocks. They can be encouraged to provide resources for experimentation while providing opportunities for bottom-up innovations to be developed locally. They must also protect the most vulnerable, poorest farmers and consumers, who are most likely to bear the cost of failed agriculture and failed policies.

Emily Cain, Canadian Foodgrains Bank / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Farmers in southern Niger are transforming their agricultural landscape by managing the natural regeneration of trees on their crop fields.

Substantial resources need to be made available to promote for innovation, experimentation, and learning. Bold experimentation can be aided by policies that provide insurance to farmers for trying new farming methods. Fostering communication across scales will be particularly important to enable learning from these experiments, potentially enabled by networking and bridging organizations to transmit innovation.46 However, modularity and weak connections between systems can also be important to allow a variety of local experimentation that sometimes

succeed and provide opportunities for learning when they fail.

Agricultural development organizations can help ensure that these experiments are monitored for success or failure and that measures of success and failure are based on the characteristics of resilient agriculture. Systems to monitor progress47,48 are important in this context. These organizations could, for example, look for bright spots of success and transmit information about what makes these places and practices particularly successful to other farmers or farming organizations for which that information might be useful.

How Resilience Thinking Can Improve Agricultural Development Shifting focus from maximum yield to efficiency and sustainable intensification were big steps for agricultural development. These systems aim for an agriculture that eliminates hunger, provides development opportunities, and maintains, to some degree, the supply of natural capital and a diversity of ecosystem services, factors which are truly basic conditions for the persistence and prosperity of human society. Resilience thinking addresses all these goals while specifically focusing on what builds capacity to persist, adapt, and transform

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in a world characterized by uncertainty and complexity, where agriculture needs to respond to a rapidly and profoundly changing world. The path towards resilient agriculture will include radically new approaches. To find these best new approaches, we must allow—and even encourage—experimentation, innovation, and learning, even if they produce results that reduce efficiency or are less than optimal. A critical step will be identifying a safe operating space for agriculture in which this learning can happen without causing serious damage to the environment or to human well-being.49 This will mean identifying the ecological and social boundaries within which we want to operate and the places where we are willing to achieve something less than optimal in order to allow room for experimentation.

A resilient agriculture that eliminates hunger, provides development opportunities, and maintains the supply of natural capital and a diversity of ecosystem services is a basic condition for the persistence and prosperity of human society. Achieving this goal will require developing an agriculture that is persistent, adaptive, and transformative. We have many successes in stabilizing agriculture in the short term and in building efficiency; however, this very success has interfered with our ability to allow agricultural systems to adapt to the rising rate of environmental change and to be transformed when needs and opportunities arise. There will be costs to allowing transformation and maintaining a resilient agriculture, but these will be compensated by the capacity to maintain human well-being in the long run.

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38. Zimmer, GF & Zimmer-Durand, L. Advancing Biological Farming. (Acres USA, Texas, 2011).

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Eisenberg, D.A., J. Park, M.E. Bates, C. Fox-Lent, T.P. Seager, and I. Linkov. (2014). Resilience Metrics: Lessons from Military Doctrines. Solutions 5(5): 76-85. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/resilience-metrics-lessons-from-military-doctrines/

Feature

Resilience Metrics: Lessons from Military Doctrines

by Daniel A. Eisenberg, Jeryang Park, Matthew E. Bates, Cate Fox-Lent, Thomas P. Seager, and Igor Linkov

In Brief

Senior Airman Brett Clashman, US Air Force / CC BY-NC 2.0

US Air Force cyber protection team works to protect against potential cyberspace threats

A

s terrorist attacks and natural disasters become more frequent and costly, the U.S. Office of the President is initiating a national push to create a more resilient society1-3 that can recover from these events and persevere.

Resilience, as defined by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), is the ability to plan and prepare for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events.4 Here, resilience is a function of the physical losses at the time of the event, and social processes before and after that

govern the management of known vulnerabilities, sustained damages, and adaptations needed to face future threats. When understood and implemented, this can offer system benefits across broad domains including engineering, ecology, cybersecurity, social sciences, and health. However, resilience remains difficult to apply in government agencies, as metrics used to assess and improve system resilience largely do not exist, and where they do, do not function across diverse systems. Metrics fail because they are developed based on concepts

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Escalating damages associated with international catastrophes, such as Hurricane Sandy and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Meltdown, have spurred the Office of the President to release Executive Orders that direct government agencies to enhance national preparedness and resilience.

However, there has been a struggle to comply with these directives as there is limited guidance on how to measure and design resilient systems. As a further challenge, the Defense Science Board states that resilience metrics must be focused, yet generalized, in order to be applied across cyber, defense, and energy systems in the Department of Defense and other agencies. We assert that metrics of resilience in the literature often fail due to existing conceptual issues that reduce their use, including the conflation of risk and resilience, and the necessity of reconciling engineering and ecological resilience definitions and objectives. We explain these conceptual issues and discuss military doctrine required to support the development of metrics that meet government agency needs.

Furthermore, we provide a list of example metrics that overcome these barriers, and can be used across systems.

of risk instead of resilience, and do not consolidate different resilience definitions that relate to engineered, ecological, and social systems. As a result, recent attempts to address resilience by the Defense Science Board (DSB)5 demonstrate that the current science does not meet Department of Defense (DOD) needs.

This article discusses two identified conceptual barriers to resilience: its conflation with risk, and the lack of a standard definition. It provides concepts that bridge resilience and military doctrine to support the development of more effective metrics for a wide variety of disciplines.

Breaking Down Barriers To improve societal resilience, government agencies first need metrics to assess the state of resilience. Metrics are measurable quantities that are used to compare and justify resource and operations decisions. Data collection for these metrics is often carried out by engineers, scientists, and specialists who have area expertise and understand the limitations of built and natural environments. Data is then aggregated into metrics used by decision-makers to help direct decisions within a single agency, and across multiple agencies. This includes high-level government personnel who manage the funding and completion of resilience-focused projects, such as the implementation of cybersecurity measures that ensure the operation and recovery of critical resource systems under cyber threat (e.g., electric power, water, and financial). To support effective applications of resilience, it is necessary to identify which qualities of known metrics obstruct their use by government agencies.

We assert that two of these issues are misconceptions: the conflation of resilience with concepts of risk,6 and the fact that resilience has multiple application-dependent definitions that confuse the objective that metrics are trying to support.

Risk assessment7 is foundational for decisions associated with adverse events in many government agencies.8 Its widespread acceptance impedes implementation of a successful

Key Concepts • Resilience metrics must be general enough to support broad applications, yet precise enough to measure system-specific qualities. Such metrics are necessary to make resource and operations decisions in government agencies that manage diverse systems (e.g., cyber, defense, ecological, and energy), while fostering cooperation between agencies.

• Risk assessment is the traditional method used to make decisions about adverse events. Resilience and risk are often conflated, but risk-based quantitative and qualitative methods provide limited guidance for emerging and unforeseen threats.

• Multiple definitions of resilience exist (i.e., for engineering or ecological resilience), and metrics are often developed to support singular definitions. However, different definitions of resilience have complementary objectives, and metrics should incorporate multiple viewpoints to ensure efficacy for government agencies.

• Network Centric Operations (NCO) doctrine organizes systems into four domains that can be managed for any event affecting the system. Combining this doctrine with an understanding of resilience processes sets a new conceptual foundation, separate from risk assessment, for developing and organizing resilience metrics.

• We provide three tables of example metrics, organized via the U.S. National Academy of Sciences definition of resilience, that are representative of engineering, environmental, and cybersecurity systems.

resilience strategy, as risk and resilience are separate concepts, though complementary.9,10 Resilience describes the ability of a system to absorb and recovery functionality, whereas

risk quantifies known hazards and expected damages. Risk-based metrics for addressing resilience are not efficient as they require quantification of an exposure-effect relationship, which is not possible for emerging and unforeseen threats. They also tend to assess risks to individual components, ignoring system functionality as the result of interacting components (e.g., telecommunications, targeting systems, and personnel for defense operations). Rather than the static view of systems and networks in risk assessment, resilience adopts a dynamic view. This means resilience metrics must also consider the ability of a system to plan, prepare, and adapt as adverse events occur, rather than focus entirely on threat prevention and mitigation. Resilience depends upon specific qualities that risk assessment cannot quantify, such as system flexibility and interconnectedness. For these reasons, risk assessment cannot be used to establish metrics for measuring the resilience of systems.

Using risk assessment to measure system resilience only offers solutions to incremental, known risks, and does little to manage unforeseen events or perform under the stress of catastrophe. In complex engineering systems, resilience metrics fail to extend beyond risk assessment. Some proposed approaches to resilience merely expand the boundaries of traditional risk calculations (see examples11,12). These methods employ probabilistic risk assessment to link system component losses to system functionality losses. For example, risks to a building’s elevators could be linked to the response time of management and of maintenance personnel to estimate the loss of transportation capacity in the building system. This approach fails to extend beyond the typical exposure-effect-damage paradigm of risk assessment. Requiring fore-knowledge of the event type, probability of event occurrence, and potential system damage limits design

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efforts to the known. Successful resilience analysis extends decisions from probabilities to possibilities, and risk assessment does not support this.

While risk assessment and resilience can be complementary in concept, actual risk-based and resilience-based decisions often conflict. Thus, the widespread use of risk-threshold criteria for regulation by government agencies, such as by the Federal Aviation Administration13 may hinder the implementation of resilience-based decisions. An example of a risk versus resilience decision would be to strengthen airport security measures to prevent a terrorist attack (risk) instead of increasing the number of airports, flight paths, or specialized personnel required to respond (resilience). The redundancy imposed in the resilient option does not reduce the risks, yet ensures that national travel receives less damage and can recover faster in the event of a terrorist attack.

Establishing metrics for government agencies is also obstructed by the multiple definitions of resilience that apply to systems under the jurisdiction of a single department or agency. Federal bureaucracy dictates that definitions of resilience must be transparent across agencies to foster cooperation, yet in practice, resilience has multiple definitions and objectives, the two most prominent being engineering and ecological.14 Engineering resilience is focused on the ability of a system to absorb and recover from damages from adverse events, while ecological resilience is focused on understanding how close a system is to collapse and reorganization. The engineering definition brings resilience principles such as robustness, redundancy, and modularity, while the ecological definition supports principles of flexibility, adaptability, and resourcefulness. An example of engineering resilience would be a bridge with specialized personnel that provide fast recovery of

transportation functions after unforeseen equipment failure. Engineering resilience definitions are already in use by some government agencies,15 but to meet national policy objectives, ecological resilience must also be considered as it offers other benefits.

For example, forests exhibit ecological resilience as they naturally burn down and re-grow in a cyclical pattern, a process that decreases chances for catastrophic forest fires. In each case, resilience is related to maintaining some prescribed function, whether continued transportation options or ecosystem services. A resilient system does not require continual provision of the function, but instead requires that in failure there is some form of recovery or adaptation so that the function can be maintained.

The methods employed in complex systems science to measure resilience have relevance in engineering, ecological, social, and economic systems, as they can demonstrate both a need to maintain critical functionality, as well as emergent and unpredictable (complex) behavior. A strong resilience program should make clear use of each of these definitions.

Metrics of resilience tend to be compartmentalized into engineering or ecological terms, and thus fail to integrate knowledge across both, losing the ability to incorporate resilience improvement strategies from one system into the other. In addition, using a single definition for metrics limits the potential benefits that resilience offers. As each definition brings with it a set of conceptual guidelines that are complementary and desirable, a more pragmatic approach is to combine the two. Results from this hybrid resilience approach should be able to create more representative sets of metrics and analysis techniques that can guide the creation of systems resilient to a wider range of threats. Although no single solution can address all threats simultaneously16 systems should be as resilient as possible.

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Furthermore, the bureaucratic nature of government agencies emphasizes the importance of a hybrid concept.

Using both definitions in tandem facilitates communication across diverse systems found in engineering, environmental, disaster management, and health agencies, as well as across multiple levels of government. By establishing a consistent set of resilience metrics that stands on its own and encompasses a broad spectrum of definitions, a framework can be created that is adaptable in a wide array of disciplines.

Resilience in Defense The difficulty these barriers create is illustrated in recent work by the DSB to establish metrics of cyber resilience.

Since 1956, the DSB has played an important in role in shaping national policy decisions for science and technology within US defense agencies. The DSB consists of military and scientific leaders across multiple DOD and federal science funding agencies.

They advise the highest-level individuals in the US military on innovative technologies to help the DOD manage the vast array of infrastructure and manpower under its authority. This includes a complex array of cyber, defense, and energy infrastructure for global military operations. A recent DSB report addresses the resilience of military systems to advanced cyber threats17 and explains that the size, importance, and capabilities associated with US military systems makes their resilience to unknown threats a national imperative. Due to the high level of risk associated with the loss of critical cyber systems, even minor changes in computer code (e.g., via malware) can result in catastrophic losses comparable to the nuclear threat of the cold war. Cyberattacks have been easily implementable since the 1990s through simple and inexpensive computer code, yet the growing use and reliance on cyber systems in military operations has

Airman 1st Class Andrew Moua, U.S. Air Force

General Larry Welch of the Defense Science Board meets with airmen at the Barksdale Air Force Base.

increased costs for cybersecurity. The DSB calculates that there is no feasible way to prevent all threats to defense systems, and suggests that planned resilience should thus play a key component in cyber threat management.

Although the DSB indicates the need for resilience, the Presidential Policy Directive (PPD-21) and Executive Order (EO-13636) that direct the implementation of resilience programs in government agencies do not provide clear guidance on how to achieve resilience.18,19 The instructions provided in EO-13636 direct the creation of a cybersecurity framework by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Such a framework must be populated with metrics that measure the cyber resilience of each piece of infrastructure. The DSB states that few such metrics exist and those

that do are not suited to meet national defense needs. It further identifies two specific criteria for metrics which were not evident in the literature: they must be general enough to be used in a wide range of systems (e.g., weapons, operations, energy, and telecommunications), yet specific enough to relate to individual system objectives and components. The DSB’s 2013 report provides the development of a new metrics dashboard and a framework for implementation.20 This work demonstrates a gap between national policy objectives and the current state of real-world application which prevents a sustainable national resilience program. The limited guidance found in PPD-21 and EO-13636 forces multiple agencies to create their own metrics frameworks.

However, this piecemeal approach

limits the capability for national resilience, as each agency individually determines definitions and conducts metrics research. Instead, generalized metrics that can be applied across the wide range of engineered, environmental, and social systems managed by government agencies are needed.

Metrics that Support Resilience Where the DSB sheds light on the needs of agencies, military doctrine can also be used to inform the development of better metrics. A defining characteristic of the modern age is high level of connectivity between systems, and the DOD manages some of the most globally extensive and diverse personnel, cyber, and infrastructure systems. This ubiquitous connectivity21 introduces new vulnerabilities to

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military systems that are sometimes impossible to predict.22,23,24 In response, the DOD Command and Control Research Program has adopted a Network-Centric Operations (NCO) doctrine that is informative for advancing resilience thinking.1325 NCO accelerates the ability to manage warfare by focusing on the control of large networks operating in physical, information, cognitive, and social domains, which can collectively describe any system. They are defined as: • Physical: the engineering capabilities of infrastructure or devices, efficiencies, and network structures. This includes all data collection equipment and measurable real-life system components; • Information: the usage of what we measure and know about the physical domain, including data use, transfer, analysis, and storage; • Cognitive: human processes, i.e., translating, sharing, and acting upon knowledge to make, communicate, and implement decisions throughout the system; and • Social: interactions and entities that influence how decisions are made, including government regulations, religions, cultures, and languages.

Military research into command and control has found that a highly connected system can enhance overall military operations through application of NCO principles.26,27 The primary principle termed ‘power to the edge’28 is a shift from traditional top-down administrative structures to one that implements information collection, sharing, and utilization networks. Implementation of this principle infuses military systems with characteristics that parallel and reinforce those associated with resilience, such as responsiveness, flexibility, versatility, and innovation.29

Linkov et al.30 were the first to link NCO doctrine and the NAS resilience definition in a framework to guide metrics development for resource and operations decisions. Their approach groups relevant system components into a ‘resilience matrix’ that requires the consideration of the NCO domains—physical, information, cognitive, and social—to fulfill each of the NAS defined resilience functions31 to: plan/prepare, absorb, respond, and adapt. Previous work by the authors demonstrates the validity of this approach to integrate metrics from multiple scientific disciplines to develop generalized metrics for cybersecurity32 and energy systems.33 Still, cross-comparison of diverse systems such as engineering, environmental, and cyber requires greater detail of the resilience processes that govern interactions between NCO domains. Resilience processes represent the emergent skills or qualities of a system associated with its resilience.

For example, as a professional sports team works together to win a game, emergent skills associated with the entire team (e.g., communication) govern how well it will succeed. In a similar way, the resilience processes of a system are the skills that benefit the system in becoming resilient. In the literature for complex engineering systems, four resilience processes provide an important example for future metrics development:34 1. Sensing: the effort to measure new information about a system’s operating environment with special attention on anomalous data. Anomalous data can provide the greatest support for resilience design, as it can alert system evaluators of overlooked possibilities.

This process connects components in the physical domain to the information domain.

2. Anticipation: imagining multiple future states without reducing improbability to impossibility.

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This process connects components in the information domain to the cognitive domain.

3. Adaptation: reacting to changing conditions or states, in novel ways, to restore critical functionality under altered system conditions or operating environments. This process connects the cognitive domain to the physical domain.

4. Learning: observing external conditions and system responses to improve understanding of relationships and possible futures, identifying needs for system improvement where applicable.

This process connects the physical, information, and cognitive domains together and can incorporate the social domain depending on the system studied.

NCO domains and resilience processes offer necessary conceptual guidelines to support the creation of metrics for government agency systems. A system example associated with multiple agencies is a dam network. The DOD, Environmental Protection Agency, and numerous community stakeholders are all involved in the building and maintenance of dam networks within the US. The physical domain includes the dam infrastructure, pumping stations, equipment, meters, and sensors used to monitor changes in infrastructure and the environment. The physical domain is represented as data and knowledge in the information domain, where it is presented and used for learning. The people working in the dam network, government agencies and communities involved, use the information domain to anticipate outcomes, formulate decisions, and take action. The management structure and social capital inherent in the social domain has direct implications as to which anticipated decisions matter and how people will respond to actions. Relationships between domains depend upon how

Chuck Hagel / CC BY 2.0

Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta is shown a slate of solar cells at an exposition of energy efficiency efforts within the US Marine Corps at the Pentagon’s Energy Security Event in October 2012.

environmental and infrastructure changes are sensed, events are anticipated, actions are adapted, and learning occurs throughout all domains.

Metrics Across Multiple Systems Overcoming misconceptions that hampered previous metrics enables one to construct metrics that meet DSB and government agency criteria.

As an example, we have developed metrics that can be used to measure the resilience of engineering, environmental, and cybersecurity systems (Tables 1–3). We began by conducting a literature review of cybersecurity and engineering infrastructure metrics.35,36,37,38,39,40,41 From the collected metrics, we established a list of those that did not appear to be risk- or

resilience-definition biased and then determined which of this subset were conceptually sound in terms of NCO domains and resilience processes.

We organized the resulting metrics into the resilience matrix described

by Linkov et al.42 for each system.

Therefore, the metrics found in Tables 1–3 are new metrics for any system, informed by resilience literature and showing distinct similarities to several metrics found in the following sources: Park et al.43 MITRE,44 Cutter et al.45 and Fischer et al.46 Parallel metrics from Tables 1 and 2 for engineering and ecological resilience, were selected as appropriate to populate Table 3 for cyber resilience. Measuring each system’s resilience separately supports systemic changes to improve resilience operations. The matrix approach

does not identify interrelated risks, but comparing across systems can identify the possibility of cascading effects and help in making resource decisions. When the basis for a metric is the same across systems, the loss of that resource will cause damage through all systems. For example, the majority of metrics presented have a direct connection to budgetary decisions, implying that a loss of budget can cause adverse effects to all systems simultaneously.

Also, comparing the metrics values helps determine how resources should be appropriated. For instance, relative resource strength in the preparation stage of engineering, environmental, and cyber systems helps an agency tasked with managing the resilience of all to distribute resources amongst them.

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Prepare

Absorb

Recover

Adapt

Physical

Percent of bridge disturbances that do not result in collapse or loss of function

Length of time to deploy redundant resources needed to maintain function

Time between event and restoration of bridge’s full function

Bridge or alternate transportation system performance compared to before event

Information

Strength of external system to detect emergence of potential threat to bridge structure

Ability of the system to detect when and what damage has occurred to the bridge

Time to gather and disseminate information needed in order to implement appropriate repairs

Ability of informationcollection system to detect trends of changing threat or vulnerability levels

Cognitive

Range of threat scenarios considered in the bridge component design

Length of time for emergency management team/person to operationalize failure contingency plans

Existence and specificity of bridge failure contingency plans

Flexibility of decision-making bodies to update governing regulations to address changes in reality

Social

Money allocated to regular inspection personnel and maintenance operations

Traffic-handling capacity compared to before disturbance

Money needed to build bridge back to full function

Willingness of bridge users to accept alternative methods of conveyance previously provided by the bridge

Table 1. Engineering resilience matrix, bridge collapse

Furthermore, Tables 1–3 provide an example as to how NCO domains and resilience processes can inform the development of better metrics in government agencies. The metrics presented in Tables 1–3 are not comprehensive, but system similarities indicate that these principles support the development of broadly useful metrics. In addition, the tables are organized based on the NAS definition of resilience to help orient them for national policy.

Therefore, the tables show a cohesive framework that connects national goals, scientific opinion, military doctrine, and the needs of government agencies.

Conclusion The concepts and examples provided help reorient resilience metrics to meet national policy objectives. The DOD has identified issues with metrics found in the literature, but militaryscience-based research can help inform ways to overcome inherent issues. Understanding the difference between risk and resilience and the necessity of employing qualities of both engineering and ecological resilience definitions helps lay the foundation for improved metrics.

NCO domains and resilience processes offer constraints on metrics that are

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conceptually sound and do not limit broad applications. We were able to reanalyze available metrics by combining concepts of resilience into new metrics that can be used by government agencies.

About the authors: Daniel A. Eisenberg is Contractor to the Environmental Laboratory, US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, MS, USA and also with the Ira Fulton Schools of Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA; Jeryang Park is with the School of Urban and Civil Engineering, Hongik University, Seoul, Republic of Korea;

Prepare

Absorb

Recover

Adapt

Physical

Percent of disturbances that do not result in significant population shifts for species

Percent population change before temporary equilibrium is obtained

Length of time for species to return to initial populations or stable populations

Species’ population compared to before event

Information

Range of threats able to be detected by the species

Length of time between threat appearance and threat detection

Length of time species continues to detect presence of threat

Evidence of species adaptations in threat detection capability

Cognitive

Ability of individuals to alert other member of species to threat

Ratio of individuals lost directly from threat to individuals lost due to indirect causes

Time for species to reorient lifestyles and habitat to obtain new prey

Evidence of species habitat migration and diet flexibility

Social

Diversity of species habitat and diet

Proportion of species in the target species food web also affected

Abiotic resources needed for food web to return to equilibrium

Fraction of food web that fully recovered

Table 2. Ecological resilience matrix, rapid environment change

Matthew E. Bates and Cate Fox-Lent are with the Environmental Laboratory, US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, MS, USA; Thomas P. Seager is with the Ira Fulton Schools of Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA; and Igor Linkov is with the Environmental Laboratory, US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, MS, USA (Address correspondence for Igor Linkov by mail to: Igor Linkov, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 696 Virginia Rd., Concord, MA 01742, USA; email: igor.linkov@usace.army.mil.

the individual authors and not those of the US Army, or other sponsor organizations. This material is based upon work supported by the NSF under Grant No. 1140190 and an NSFfunded IGERT-SUN fellowship Grant No. 1144616. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

Preparedness. http://www.dhs.gov/presidentialpolicy-directive-8-national-preparedness (2011).

2. Executive Order. Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity. http://www.whitehouse.gov/thepress-office/2013/02/12/executive-order-improvingcritical-infrastructure-cybersecurity (2013).

3. Presidential Policy Directive 21. Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience. http:// www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/ presidential-policy-directive-critical-infrastructuresecurity-and-resil (2013).

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Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the editor and reviewers of The Solutions Journal and Zachary Collier for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

Permission was granted by the USACE Chief of Engineers to publish this material. The views and opinions expressed in this paper are those of

4. Committee on Increasing National Resilience to

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Prepare

Absorb

Recover

Adapt

Physical

Percent of malware attacks blocked by firewall

Percent of system affected before threat is contained

Time between event and return to computer’s optimal performance

Amount of memory reserved for future system changes

Information

Percent of system components monitored for attack

Time for computer to locate software needing repair and to prepare resources

Time for software to distribute resources in order to recover properly

Ability of system to anticipate future system states

Cognitive

Plans for storage and containment of classified or sensitive information

Ability to evaluate system performance during attack and determine if mission can continue

Decision-making protocols to select recovery options

Existence of methods for determining motive for attack

Social

Degree of training for cyber-security awareness among system users

Lines of communication between identified experts and resilience personnel

Level of liability or loss of confidence in the organization

Methods for information sharing among system users and system managers about emerging threats and protection measures

Table 3. Cyber resilience matrix, cyber attack Earthquake Spectra 23, 41–67 (2007).

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27. Alberts, DS & Hayes, RE. Power to the Edge: Command and Control in the Information Age. CCRP Publications (Library of Congress, Washington D.C.,2003).

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Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced

DOD Command and Control Research Program:

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Washington, DC. (2011)

Alexandria, Virginia, USA, (June 16–19, 2014).

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US Army Corps of Engineers (www.usace.army.mil)

Dams managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers interact with systems regulated by diverse local community and federal agencies, e.g., nearby electric power municipalities, the Environmental Protection Agency, and DOD

29. Collier, ZA & Linkov, I. Decision Making for Resilience within the Context of Network Centric Operations. 19th International Command and Control

Infrastructure Engineering: Maintenance, Management,

Kays, R. Typological Review of Environmental

Life-Cycle Design and Performance 6, 127–144 (2010).

Performance Metrics (with illustrative examples

36. MITRE Corporation, Cyber Resiliency Metrics,

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Version 1.0, Rev. 1. https://register.mitre.org/

Alexandria, Virginia, USA, (June 16–19, 2014).

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30. Linkov, I et al. Measurable Resilience for Actionable Policy. Environmental Science & Technology 47(18):10108–10110 (2013a).

31. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative. http:// www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13457 (2012).

32. Linkov, I et al. Resilience Metrics for Cyber Systems.

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pdf (2012).

37. Cutter, SL, Burton, CG & Emrich, CT. Disaster Resilience Indicators for Benchmarking Baselines

47(18):10108–10110 (2013a).

43. Park, J, Seager, TP, Rao, PSC, Convertino, M & Linkov,

Conditions. Journal of Homeland Security and

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Emergency Management 7, (2010).

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38. Fisher, RE et al. Constructing a Resilience

Risk Analysis 33, 356–367 (2013).

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anlpubs/2010/09/67823.pdf (2010).

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33. Roege PE, Collier ZA, Mancillas, J, McDonagh, JA &Linkov, I. Metrics for Energy Resilience. Energy Policy. (2014).

34. Park, J, Seager, TP, Rao, PSC, Convertino, M & Linkov, I. Integrating Risk and Resilience Approaches to Catastrophe Management in

39. Cox, A, Prager, F & Rose, A. Trasportation Security and the Role of Resilience: A Foundation for

44. MITRE Corporation, Cyber Resiliency Metrics,

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Operational Metrics. Transport Policy 18, 307–317

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Resilience. Version 1.0. http://www.enisa.europa.eu/

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35. Cimellaro, GP, Reinhorn, AM & Bruneau, M. Seismic Resilience of a Hospital System. Structure and

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Goodman, I. (2014). Practicing, Not Preaching: A Helpful Guide for Resilience Practitioners. Solutions 5(5): 86-87. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/practicing-not-preaching-a-helpful-guide-for-resilience-practitioners/

Reviews Book Review

Practicing, Not Preaching: A Helpful Guide for Resilience Practitioners

by Iris Goodman REVIEWING Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function Brian Walker and David Salt, Island Press, 2012

R

esilience Practice ably picks up where Resilience Thinking (2010) left off. The book lays out examples of how people around the globe have put resilience principles into practice to manage their environs and their livelihoods. In this sequel, authors Brian Walker and David Salt again demonstrate their skills in presenting the essential elements of resilience in ways that draw in the reader. This work begins with a concise review of 10 essential concepts one must bear in mind to think capably about resilience, meaning that folks who have not read Resilience Thinking can still benefit immensely from Resilience Practice.

Case studies are then interleaved with concise descriptions of resilience fundamentals, with the happy result that readers are guided toward a useful and practical synthesis of information almost unknowingly. Lesser treatments of this topic often end in confusion.

The case studies provide insights into various resilience issues in many locales, including those related to (1) managing grazing rangelands in Australia; (2) maintaining traditional irrigation methods, as illustrated in Taos, New Mexico, Bali, and Sri Lanka; (3) managing catchments in New South Wales; (4) the critical role of governance and local community participation in maintaining resilient coastal fisheries, as described for the Gulf of California and Chile, and (5) lessons learned from

case studies of management at six iconic wetlands, lakes, and deltas: the Okavanga Delta in Botswana, the Tonlé Sap in Cambodia, the Camargue wetland in France, the Macquarie Marshes in New South Wales, the Everglades in the U.S., and the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan.

To complement the case studies are interleaved discussions on three skills fundamental to practicing resilience: how to describe a given system, how to assess that system’s resilience, and how to develop ways to manage systems through testing a suite of potential interventions as heralded in the book’s title. Notably, these interventions span both science and governance, as either one alone is insufficient for the task.

Some of the most interesting ideas are presented in a set of problematiques, illustrating the application of resilience practices in six different arenas: (1) psychosocial resilience, identity, and coherence; (2) disaster relief and crisis management; (3) engineering; (4) resilience and health; (5) resilience and the law; and (6) resilience and economics.

Given the essential role of law to governance and the predominant role that economics plays in modern society, I found the latter two particularly interesting. In Resilience and the Law, the authors point out the inherent tension between the dynamics of socioeconomic systems, as well as the need for legal systems to be tight, explicit, and stable. By contrast, in Resilience and

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Island Press

Economics, the authors note that these two disciplines share many characteristics. For example, both disciplines are supported by underlying theories and methods for analyzing system stability, system robustness, the effect of slow variables on system resilience, equilibrium states, and the potential for systems to shift to alternative stable states. This all sounds promising so far.

Yet, the lesson derived from this work is that resilience practice necessarily requires investigation as well as management of interactions and threshold effects in the whole coupled humannatural system. The implication is that, similar to the economic system, subsystems also have to consider the likelihood and consequences of significant, potentially irreversible shifts in the natural, social, and technological systems with which the economic system interacts. The authors indicate that both ecologists and economists are equipped with the theory and tools to consider whole systems, but neither group has sufficiently put these theories and tools into practice as yet.

Reviews Book Review The book tells us why we must do so—and I direct the unconvinced to the book’s postscript: “a view from the Northwest Passage.” In four pages, this postscript sums up a dire set of interacting feedback loops that, in the words of Brian Walker, “give rise to a number of thresholds—some crossed, some looming—and a confusing picture of societal response…

What is happening in the Arctic,

coupled with the risks—and costs— of increasing global catastrophes, point to the intersections of rising stresses and disturbance, and declining resilience. It calls for a different way of dealing with uncertainty—it puts a high priority on getting resilience thinking into practice.”

This book fills a need for a college textbook on resilience, and its use would bring essential new dimensions

to courses in resource conservation, ecology, business, and economics. This reference is equally suitable for use by officials and professionals in government, consulting firms, and NGOs that work on resource conservation, community development, human health and well-being, and economic development. Among these organizations are USAID, the World Bank, and the World Resources Institute.

vulnerable to unexpected events or forces. Antifragility goes beyond robustness, in that it benefits from disorder.

Unfortunately, the book conflates resilience and robustness, treating them as synonymous. In practice, the meaning of “resilience” is actually very close to the notion of antifragility.

Rather than resisting change, resilient systems are able to survive, adapt, and flourish in a volatile environment. (See Solutions article by Fiksel, Goodman and Hecht).

Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in resilience.

Taleb’s unique writing style is entertaining, iconoclastic, often profound, and at times infuriating. With sarcastic wit, he takes aim at the “fragilista”— those who cling to the illusion of order and predictability, including government bureaucrats, bankers, physicians, and even fitness trainers. He calls risk a “sissy” concept, and is openly scornful of academics who pursue reductionism and elimination of uncertainty.

Instead, he advocates “decision making under opacity.”

The book is actually divided into a series of “books”, beginning with a prologue that succinctly lays out the overall premise. The subsequent

sections expand on how antifragility theory can be applied to virtually every aspect of life from technology to politics, often invoking colorful characters such as Socrates and the streetwise “Fat Tony.” You won’t agree with everything, but you are sure to find this ambitious work both unique and thought-provoking.

Media Reviews Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

by Joseph Fiksel We live in a culture that values order and predictability. As a result, most of our artifacts and institutions are fragile—easily damaged by random forces.

What if an object were antifragile, and actually thrived on chaos?

This is the fascinating premise of the latest book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, best-selling author of The Black Swan, a phenomenally successful book that pointed out the futility of trying to predict major disruptive events (e.g., recessions, revolutions, disasters) with cascading consequences that could change the course of our lives. In this sequel, he argues that we should accept uncertainty as not only inevitable, but even beneficial. After all, biological organisms can adapt and regenerate in response to random shocks or fluctuations. Stress is an essential aspect of life, and it makes you stronger.

Taleb, a former businessman turned philosopher, proposes a fundamental triad, a sort of spectrum along which everything can be positioned: Fragile— Robust—Antifragile. The systems that we design to be robust are actually

Random House

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van der Leeuw, S. (2014). French Resilience: Designing for Change on the Comtat Plain. Solutions 5(5): 88-92. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/french-resilience-designing-for-change-on-the-comtat-plain/

Solutions in History

French Resilience: Designing for Change on the Comtat Plain

by Sander van der Leeuw

T

he Comtat Vénaissin plain is a small area in Southern France with such a specific economy and strong internal organization that it can be considered as a separate socioenvironmental unit, even though it is currently part of the Vaucluse département. It was part of the papal domain until 1814, when it was officially recognized as part of France. Two socio-environmental crises tested the resilience of the area: one in the 1860s and the other some 120 years later.

These two crises brought out very different results, demonstrating how foresight, planning, and preparation are essential to resilience.

The 19th Century (c. 1860–1890)

The Yellowrider / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Changes in infrastructure, namely the construction of canals, helped to ease the crisis of the 19th century.

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Three unexpected and sudden perturbations created an economic crisis for the Comtat in the mid-19th century: (1) the discovery of a chemical substitute for madder, a plant used to manufacture dye and one of the Comtat’s main agricultural products, (2) a Phylloxera epidemic that heavily damaged the region’s vineyards, and (3) the construction of a railway connecting Paris, Lyon, and Marseille that changed the geopolitical position of the Comtat and opened other markets to its products.

Simultaneously, the area underwent other gradual perturbations, including rising imports of wheat following the opening of the national borders and imports of diseased silkworms from Asia that destroyed local silkworm breeding. Both wheat and silk were important sources of income for the Comtat at that time.

Towards the end of the 19th century, and after much debate, the region’s farmers finally adopted substitutes for

Solutions in History the cultivation of madder, wine, and silk. Their decision to adopt arboriculture and market gardening owed much to the fact that proven knowhow was locally available because these activities had been practiced on a small scale in the area since the Middle Ages.

The new horticulture system was labor-intensive and thus required a large workforce for daily activities such as irrigation and pruning as well as seasonal workers during the harvest. The farmers’ families were generally too few to provide sufficient manpower. Fortuitously, the now defunct silkworm breeding and madder cultivation operations helped to attract immigrant workers from nearby regions.

Although there was no irrigation system for agriculture in the Comtat, a dense network of canals supplied the population with water. The development of cash-crop agriculture improved this network substantially and extended it to a very large part of the region. However, if the core of that canal system had been absent, the conversion to horticulture would have been much more difficult as its construction would have required raising capital.

Other historical legacies contributed to the Comtat’s recovery from the crisis. Equal division of parents’ properties among their sons had led to fragmentation of land holdings since the 15th century. The resulting small, owner-operated farms proved to be nicely adapted to the new crops and methods, which the owner could rapidly introduce without major organizational changes or investments.

Large properties were divided into small plots and sold, thereby generating financial benefits for the owners.

The specialization in market gardening thus perpetuated and spread a pattern of small farmer-owned properties.

Nevertheless, none of these structural characteristics alone or in combination would have been sufficient to ensure the system’s resilience.

The crisis could have easily damaged the local economy were it not for the perception that change was urgent, and the fact that the spatial structure of the region lent itself to rapid transformation. Some of the dynamics triggering the crisis were rapid, whereas others were quite slow. However, the population perceived the disturbance as an acute crisis and acted quickly. Thus, the perceived urgency of the situation and the immediate response were crucial in ensuring a successful transition.

The other important condition for resilience was a spatial structure more or less adapted to the new situation.

When the crisis occurred, the region had recently improved its transportation infrastructure, facilitating the movement of goods, people, and information throughout the region’s towns and villages. It also connected the Comtat to outside regions, enabling the introduction of new ideas and access to wider markets. Altogether, the dense urban network and welldeveloped transportation system in the region played an essential role in the farmers’ successful adaptation to the changing economic circumstances of the late 19th century.

In summary, during the second half of the 19th century, the existing urban and transport structures contributed to the Comtat’s ability to overcome an economic crisis because the readjustments needed did not significantly require any modification of the system’s geography. The more fundamental changes that occurred concerned the type of crop and the emergence of more specialized markets. Furthermore, the farmers’ immediate recognition of the crisis enhanced their chances of successful adaptation to the resulting changes.

The 20th Century (c. 1970–1990) In the 20th century, the crisis emerged at a slower pace. The creation and expansion of the European Union led to increasing competition in vegetable and fruit production among Union member states. Thus in contrast to the 19th century, the initial changes were external to the Comtat region. The global trend towards integration of economic activities, which made local or regional systems more vulnerable to disruptions, compounded the problem.

Unlike the positive influence of the existing structures on Comtat’s resilience in the 19th century, those same structures highly constrained the 20th century adaptation process.

In the mid-19th century, the regional transportation structure was well adapted to the changing needs of the ‘new agriculture.’ At the end of the 20th century, however, the spatial structure of the Comtat was poorly adapted to the emerging changes; its rigidity and close integration meant that minor oscillations in any part of the system could quickly spread and cause destabilization.

One of the impediments to adaptation was the small size of the farms, which had been an advantage a century earlier. Moreover, excessive divisions of the parcels belonging to individual farms precluded re-allotment. The existing gravity irrigation network also hindered adaptation because it perpetuated the small size of the landholdings and was much less efficient than drip irrigation. A lack of capital, which reduced farmers’ ability to acquire new equipment, further compounded the difficulties. Altogether, the existing agrarian system proved rather rigid for the new crisis.

Moreover, in the 1970s, the commercial organization of the region, which focused on local markets, was unable to deal with changes that were

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Solutions in History

Jean-Louis Zimmerman / CC BY 2.0

The development of an international European market in the 1970s challenged the rigid, locally focused agricultural system remaining in the Comtat.

occurring globally. Sales had become heavily reliant on supermarkets and hypermarkets. As a result, the international agricultural system became geared toward centralized trading requiring an efficient regional commercial organization. But in the Comtat, producers and traders frequenting the local markets remained dominant, thereby hampering the region’s capacity to deal with national and Europe-wide transformations.

The spread of modern plastic greenhouses (first introduced in the 1960s), especially around Châteaurenard, best illustrates this situation. The greenhouses spread unevenly and primarily to the new, more distant production areas where traditional market gardening had not left any preexisting structures. As a consequence, the core areas of the Comtat became

less dynamic than the communes situated along its fringes. The market towns, whose central location had connected the different components of the system for a long time, progressively lost their role as driving forces that in turn led to a decrease in the system’s resilience.

It must be emphasized that the difficulties in the core areas did not only result from traditional customs but also from the weight of the established infrastructure that hindered the contemporary adaptation process.

This accentuated the tension between the system’s spatial structures on the one hand, and the region’s overall functioning on the other. Currently, as a result of the differences in how the various players responded to change, different parts of the Comtat are subject to different positive feedback

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loops that drive the system away from a balanced state. Whereas the periphery is adapting to the changes brought about by the increased external competition, the core is not. This generates differences in wealth, social conditions, and attitude (progressive vs. conservative) that reduce the resilience of the region as a whole.

The spatial and agrarian infrastructure became a handicap as early as the 1960s. Within the core, however, the Comtat farmers were confident in structures that had been successful for a long time and remained unaware of the gap between the structure and the actual functioning of the system. For a considerable time, the system’s players perceived the internal structural crisis triggered by the external perturbations as a series of conjunctural crises and were therefore too late in dealing with it.

Solutions in History Conclusion The relationship between the spatial structures and the dynamics in the Comtat system has reversed over time.

Whereas in the mid-19th century the core areas—the agricultural markets and the small farming units run by families—had a positive influence on resilience, in the 20th century they were an impediment to the system’s adaptability. During the 19th century, the perturbations did not impair the relationships between the different components of the system. As a matter of fact, the system not only actively used the existing structures to absorb the perturbation, it also managed to improve its functioning because of them. On the other hand, the 20th century’s growing commercial competition provoked a tension within the spatial structure of the Comtat. The traditions characterizing the core areas and their existing structures inhibited the system’s adaptation. This threat to the system’s survival was to a large extent due to a disparity between the spatial organization and the modernization of agriculture. The evolution of the spatial structures was slower than that of the broader economy, leading to an unsustainable situation.

This historical perspective suggests that a fundamental condition for the incorporation of a perturbation into a system’s functioning is the compatibility between existing structure and current dynamics.

It is also apparently important that the response to an external perturbation should be early and decisive. In the absence of such a response, the community would keep reacting to changes rather than anticipating them.

How could these fundamental lessons be used to improve regional resilience in similar cases? Let us look at the need to respond early and decisively to external perturbations (or internal ones, for that matter). The resilient community proposes that

‘’adaptive management,’’ meaning continuous feedback between action and observation of outcomes, can best achieve this improvement.

In environmental studies, the classic example of adaptive management is eutrophication, a process whereby runoff of nutrients causes algal blooms in ponds and lakes, thereby reducing the water’s oxygen content. By monitoring water quality using sensors, managers can detect and counteract elevated concentrations. Similar techniques are widely used in industry and finance. For adaptive management to be effective, two conditions need to be met: first, the understanding of the system must be sufficiently complete and detailed to activate the correct response to any observed changes; and second, there must be capabilities in place that measure the right early warning signals.

However, adaptive management is based on an equilibrium model of the state of the system. It cannot deal effectively with small perturbations that are likely to trigger phase changes, so-called ‘’tipping points,’’ in which the system undergoes a dramatic transformation. Yet if we think about the two Comtat crises, we realize that they both led to such phase changes.

I would therefore argue that adaptive management must be combined with ‘’design for change.’’ This concept involves a very different way of thinking than is usually practiced in Western culture. For most of our history, or at least since the beginning of agriculture, we have focused on maintaining stability. That is why we used controlled fires to regenerate a grassy environment, erected dams around areas that were regularly flooded, or took advantage of regular natural flooding to maintain the fertility of our fields, as in the Nile River valley.

In the process, we fundamentally changed the risk spectrum of the socioenvironmental system that we created

and maintained. This is inherent in any human–environment interaction; at best, humans perceive a limited number of the many dimensions of environmental processes on different scales. Yet when we act upon the environment, we affect all the dimensions of these processes. Over time, we deal with frequent risks by intervening in the environment (or in our behavior) in order to remove them. But in doing so, we act upon a large number of unknown factors in ways that we cannot anticipate. That act engenders potentially unknown risks, some of which may be frequent, and others may be less frequent (say centennial or millennial). The accumulation of the less frequent risks would then lead to much greater perturbations over time.

Both Comtat crises, in my opinion, illustrate this process. The population failed to address the root challenges that threatened the region’s way of life, and this generated increasingly important tensions between the region and its environment that ultimately had to be resolved by dramatic changes in the region itself.

In the case of the 19th century crisis, what enabled the region to adapt relatively quickly and efficiently were the small farms and the high availability of low-cost labor as well as the fact that changes in the spatial infrastructure, in particular the construction of irrigation canals, helped the transition.

In the 20th century, such an alternative infrastructure was not available. On the contrary, the existing small-farm structure and the spatial configuration of the towns actively resisted change.

Present societies are subject to similar shifts in the risk spectrum. Although we believe that we are accumulating knowledge about the systems we manage, our activities actually engender transformations in those systems that are much more profound than the increase in our knowledge. In a nutshell,

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Solutions in History

Maria Rosa Ferre / CC BY-SA 2.0

Designing for change, rather than permanence, will enable more long-term, strategic approaches to resiliency.

the more we think we know about our environment, the less we actually know about its current state because of the changes we have triggered.

Following this train of thought, we can conclude that crises such as those in the Comtat—and other crises of the contemporary world—are in effect part of the same phenomenon: the process that causes our society to be slowly but surely overwhelmed by the unintended consequences of its own past actions. It manifests itself in a shift over time from long-term strategic thinking to short-term tactical thinking to deal with these unintended consequences as they emerge.

Although I do not think that we can avoid this process, I do believe that we can mitigate it, notably by designing for change rather than permanence— by accepting the fact that change is the

rule and that stability is the exception.

Ideally, any socio-environmental or societal structure or institution should inherently have the seeds of new ways of doing things. These “memories’’ may be preserved by diversity of infrastructure so that their elements can serve as the basis for a recrystallization of the system or by diversity of institutions and human thought processes.

Consciously building resilience into our way of thinking would imply adopting a different kind of science that is not only aimed at descriptive explanation but also at creative interpretation. Any explanation, and the scientific proof that it demands, necessarily focuses on analyzing historical relationships. Rather than seeking origins and reducing the dimensionality of phenomena to the point that we can infer cause-and-effect, we need to

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start looking for emergence and value our work based on its projection of possibilities.

Transforming a fundamental aspect of our education can begin this shift.

From an early age, we need to educate our children to think about alternatives instead of accepted truths. In much of our current early education system, when we have the choice between socializing children (by aligning their opinions) and developing their creativity (by enhancing their sense of differences and alternatives), we choose the former and instill in them a particular vision of the world based on ‘’truths.’’ A change of mindset toward resilience and sustainability would instead emphasize creative thinking about alternatives and unanticipated consequences with all of the social challenges that it would inevitably pose.

Cage, J. (2014). After the Tornado Came to Town. Solutions 5(5): 93-96. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/after-the-tornado-came-to-town/

On The Ground

After the Tornado Came to Town

by Jane Cage

Mercy Health / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Destruction in the wake of the Joplin tornado.

A

s soon as I opened the door to the crate, the cat shot up the stairs. I had been in the basement for about 20 minutes, listening to the wind blow and the rain come down.

When the sirens sounded for the first time, I turned on the TV to check the weather. The radar showed a tornado west of Joplin, Missouri that seemed headed towards my neighborhood.

When the sirens sounded a second time, I put on my raincoat, put my cellphone in my pocket, gathered up the pets and headed down the stairs.

Now it was quieter, and it seemed safe to come up.

I opened the front door to a neighborhood that looked much the same as it did earlier in the afternoon. The electricity was on, but there was no cable TV or phone service. A neighbor called my cellphone with the news that there may have been some damage downtown. We drove down and looked at our respective offices, which were fine.

We headed west, encountered only one downed tree and headed back home. I thought to myself, “I guess it wasn’t so bad after all.”

It wasn’t until the next day that I saw for myself how bad it was, after an evening of listening to sirens and fire

trucks. It turned out that the Joplin tornado would be the worst tornado on record since 1947 in the United States. Driving twelve blocks south from my office, my hometown was unrecognizable. Even today, any words used to describe the devastation seem inadequate. There have been thousands of pictures of what Joplin looked like in those hours and days. I can tell you that none of them hold a candle to being there in person.

The EF5 tornado that moved through Joplin left a path of destruction about 13 miles long and up to three-quarters of a mile wide. An

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On The Ground

Paul Brady / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The Joplin High School was badly damaged by the storm, as well as two elementary schools, fire stations, and the local hospital.

estimated 7,500 structures were damaged, with 4,000 of those destroyed.

St. John’s Hospital took a direct hit, as well as our high school, two elementary schools, two fire stations, and almost every park across the city.

Worst of all, 161 of our friends and neighbors lost their lives as a result of the storm.

In the first weeks after the tornado, I did what all citizens did—we helped friends, neighbors, and strangers literally pick up the leftover pieces of their lives. We moved residential debris to the curb for pickup and by the end of summer, between volunteers, residents, businesses, and contractors, we had hauled more debris than from the World Trade Center Disaster.

At the end of June, I got an invitation to a meeting organized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Region VII Long-term Community Recovery to explore the idea that citizens should have a place in the long-term recovery of Joplin. We needed a mechanism to stop looking around and start looking ahead. The Citizens Advisory Recovery Team (CART) suggested by FEMA and mobilized by the city became just that. We divided ourselves into four sectors: schools and community facilities, economic development, housing/neighborhoods and environment/infrastructure. We made the decision that sustainability should run through them all.

When I took on the role of chairman, I will admit, I did not have a

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clue about where or how to lead. The FEMA folks started inviting me to lunch every other day to discuss possible directions and scenarios. They reminded me that every disaster is local, and that may be partially true, but there are elements that all disasters have in common. For us, disaster was a new experience. The government groups that came to help had far more expertise than we did. It did not take me too long to catch on to that, and to begin to ask for help and guidance directly. Taking full advantage of the experience and expertise of federal and state agencies went a long way towards moving us forward. Part of their answer was to give me a book to read—the FEMA Long Term Recovery Self-Help Guide. One Saturday, I sat

On The Ground

Chris Gray-Garcia, US Army / CC BY 2.0

The CART, FEMA, and other federal agencies, including the US Army Corps of Engineers, combined efforts to provide immediate relief and long term planning for the Joplin recovery.

out on the porch and read it from start to finish, twice. It was then that the light bulb went off about how to navigate the long-term recovery process. I understood that recovery is a process and not an event.

From the beginning, our goal was to get as much input from citizens as we could. FEMA coordinated our first public input meeting just twelve days after we met for the first time as a group. We were all worried about whether anyone would come because there were plenty of reasons not to—debris removal was in full-swing.

But, that afternoon and evening, 350 people passed through the doors of the school gymnasium. There was a nurse who had taken care of me at St. John’s eight weeks before who told me how she found her dog inside the kitchen cabinet. There was a young man I recognized from church as the caretaker of three developmentally disabled adults who had all died as a result of the tornado. People were engaged at every level, answering questions, and talking with neighbors. It was good to see.

The meeting allowed people to stop looking around and start looking ahead. With one third of Joplin now a clean slate, the path was literally cleared to think about a re-imagined city. We had requests for pocket parks and more sidewalks. People wanted an updated and more consistent appearance for our commercial districts.

They asked about amenities we did not have before, such as dog parks and splash pads. They wanted the rebuilt schools to be examples of 21st century learning environments with the caveat that every school should have a safe room. People cared about building in more green and sustainable ways.

Every suggestion that was made that night was published in a booklet that we handed out to residents across the city to gain more feedback.

Throughout that entire summer, I was pulled between process and progress. There were times when it was tempting to short-change citizen vision in order to align it with what we thought was reality. At the end of the day, we decided to dream big.

Our plan became a blueprint for what citizens wanted but not a roadmap on how to accomplish that vision. It turned out to be the right decision. As I look back, we have found ways to accomplish goals that I thought would be impossible.

By fall, the FEMA team started to wind down their presence in Joplin.

Considering they were the operational support team for CART, it started to get a little lonely getting the plan written.

In November, we presented the plan to the City Council. It felt like a big moment and the council chambers were packed that night. But, a plan without direction and follow-up is just a wish-book. That same night, the Mayor called for an Implementation Task Force (ITF) to assign responsibilities and priorities to the plan. The ITF was made up of representatives of the school board, the city council, the chamber of commerce, and CART itself. This meant another round of work for all of us, and more time.

In January of 2012, we convened a joint meeting of the City Council, the School Board, the Chamber Board, and the CART Executive Board. It was the first time in the history of our city that all of those groups had ever met together. That endorsement allowed everyone in the community to move forward on the same page.

Of course, we needed to enlist outside help to accomplish the plan. We held a recovery forum with the help of FEMA and the Chamber. We invited foundations, federal agencies and state agencies to attend. We presented the plan and asked each group represented to walk through the plan to see where their agencies might fit. Even as long as a year later, we were still getting responses that turned into substantial assistance.

The CART plan has turned into the de-facto long-term recovery plan for Joplin. Every CART sector translated

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On The Ground

sarahjole / CC BY-NC 2.0

Recovery efforts in Joplin have been defined by local ownership and involvement in the process.

their goals into projects that could be catalysts for recovery. Some of those projects were about quality of life issues aimed at retaining and attracting new citizens such as calling for extending our walking trails and requiring bike lanes when streets were refurbished or built. Economic development ideas included anchor projects within the devastated area to spur redevelopment and to develop new zoning codes to accommodate leftover retail and mixed-use developments.

The work that a group of volunteers did over the course of six months has been referenced more times than I can count. It has gained notoriety as

a ‘bottom up’ planning process that helped guide and shape our recovery.

Unlike other plans guided by consultants or government entities, this is a plan for the people by the people.

If you are interested in seeing any of the documents, they may be found at www.joplinareacart.com.

We have been asked for our advice on citizen participation many times.

Here are some of the items that I always pass along to anyone taking on that role: • Remember that you work for the citizens—your purpose is to listen, report and then to be their advocate.

96 | Solutions | September-October 2014 | www.thesolutionsjournal.org

• Remaining objective and independent is absolutely essential.

• Use the role to build bridges between other groups. In recovery, everyone is running a race, and generally in their own lane. Help them to look side-to-side and communicate to strengthen the effort.

• Be ready to be in for the long haul.

Do not just drop off the plan at the government‘s doorstep. Your continued presence is a reminder of whom everybody should be working for—the citizens that trusted you with their hopes and dreams.

EARTHACTION

Gund Institute

for Ecological

Economics

University of Vermont

The Alliance for Appalachia

National Council for Science and the Environment Improving the scientific basis for environmental decisionmaking

Associated  Socie0es  International Society for Ecological Economics

Chris Silas Neal / www.csneal.com / Green Patriot Posters

Support local farmers and buy locally produced fruits and vegetables, or exercise your green thumb by planting a backyard garden. Your produce will cost less, taste better, and decrease your environmental footprint.