transforming australia to remain resilient. food waterenergy climate change antibiotic resistance,...
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TRANSFORMING AUSTRALIA TO REMAIN RESILIENT
food
waterenergy
clim
ate
chan
ge
antibiotic
resistance, new
diseases
economic shocksre
fugees,
war, terro
rism
Links and feedbacks in the food-water-energy nexus
?
It is a complex, self-organizing system
- cannot predict particular outcomes therefore
it is necessary to build resilience, to be able to cope with whatever happens
Resilience
The ability to cope with shocks and to keep functioning in much the same kind of way“The capacity to absorb disturbance and re-organize so as to retain essentially the same function, structure and feedbacks – to have the same identity”
Complex systems have threshold effects, sometimes irreversible
ball-in-a-basin metaphor for stability and resilience
resilience
instantaneousresilience
State of the system
Stable equilibrium
Unstable equilibrium
The shape and size of the basin can change
– thresholds move, and so resilience changes
resilience
The closer a system is to a threshold, the smaller the shock needed to shift it across
-- and thresholds can move, and interact
Effect of climate change and ocean pH on threshold positions After Bellwood et al, Nature 2004
X
Coral reef thresholds and alternate states
Fishing pressure
Extr
a
nutr
ien
ts Healthy coral reef
Macro-algae
Social system thresholds / tipping points
- crowd behaviour (riots, fads, “crowd waves”) - economic systems (debt : income ratio, labour supply)
farm catchment country Shocks
bio
ph
ysic
al
socio
-econ
om
ic
values (environment vs. agriculture) /‘rules’
financial viability
agric. industry viability
soil salinity
infrastructure (irrigation)
biodiversity
tree cover and water table equilibrium
climate shocks
price / economic shocks
changes in markets
diseases
soil acidity river pollution
Multiple thresholds in an agricultural system
making a system resilient in one way can cause it to lose resilience in other ways and at other scales.
There are trade-offs in applying resilience
and therefore:-
There is a danger in focusing on a particular, known threshold :
It is necessary to understand and enhance
general resilience
- the capacity to cope with all kinds of shocks
What kinds of attributes confer general resilience ?
• high diversity (esp. response diversity) • ecological variability (vs. trying to control and
reduce it)• being modular (not over-connected) • responding quickly to change (having tight
feedbacks)• being open (emigration and immigration)• reserves, biophysical (seed banks) and social
(memory)• fostering learning, innovation, novelty (vs.
subsidies to continue doing the same thing that’s not working)
• social capital (trust, leadership, social networks)• adaptive and distributed governance
4 important points about resilience
1) You cannot understand or manage the resilience of a system at one scale
all complex systems function at multiple scales
the interactions across scales are critical to resilience
2) Resilience is NOT about NOT changing
trying to prevent disturbance and keepa system constant reduces its resilienceprobing the boundaries of resilience is necessary for maintaining and building resilience
- failure to recognize secondary effects
3) Most losses in resilience are unintended consequences of narrowly focused optimization
e.g. efficiency drives
(so-called ‘redundancy’ is often in fact ‘response diversity’)
4) Resilience, per se, is neither ‘good’ or ‘bad’
Undesirable states of systems can be very resilient (saline landscapes, inner city slums, debt-ridden economies)
A system state that once was considered to be in a ‘desired’ state can become ‘undesirable’ through changes in external conditions (context)
If a shift into a “bad” state has happened or is inevitable, and is irrecoverable, the only option is transformation
Adaptation or Transformation?
Does further adaptation simply amount to digging the hole deeper? (the first rule of holes!)
Which raises the issue of:
Resilience and transformation are not opposites
Maintaining resilience at one scale can require transformational changes at other scales
- the Murray Darling Basin as an agro-ecosystem
- most larger cities (urban complexes)
“where is there a need to build resilience, and where is there a need for transformational change?”
What’s necessary for transformation?
- Getting beyond the state of denial
- Creating options for change
- Building the capacity to change
“transformability” - capacity to transform into a different kind of system; a new way of living, and making a living
Transformability
i) preparedness to change
ii) options and opportunities for change new ‘trajectories’; timing
iii) capacity to change- levels of capitals (including ‘social capital’), - higher-scale support
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A resilience approach to the future- don’t aim for some particular “optimal” state; use “guided self-organization” - learn about thresholds, to avoid unwanted states- allow environmental/ecological variability- think about feedbacks and secondary effects (beware of partial solutions!)- promote and sustain diversity, of all kinds (don’t confuse ‘redundancy’ and ‘response diversity’)- encourage learning, innovation and experiments- be ready for transformational change
Celebrate change• resilience is largely about
learning how to change in order not to be changed
Embrace uncertainty• building systems that will be
safe when they fail, rather than trying to build fail-safe systems
• learning to ride the system piggyback
Summary