Resilience in Environmental Risk and Impact Assessment: Concepts and Measurement

Abstract

Different resilience concepts have different assumptions about system dynamics, which has implications for resilience-based environmental risk and impact assessment. Engineering resilience (recovery) dominates in the risk assessment literature but this definition does not account for the possibility of ecosystems to exist in multiple regimes. In this paper we discuss resilience concepts and quantification methods. Specifically, we discuss when a system fails to show engineering resilience after disturbances, indicating a shift to a potentially undesired regime. We show quantification methods that can assess the stability of this new regime to inform managers about possibilities to transform the system to a more desired regime. We point out the usefulness of an adaptive inference, modelling and management approach that is based on reiterative testing of hypothesis. This process facilitates learning about, and reduces uncertainty arising from risk and impact.

Fig. 1

Schematic distinguishing between a recovery (engineering resilience) and b ecological resilience. Panels on the left show ecosystem trajectories before, during, and after disturbances. Panels on the right express these dynamics with ball-in-cup heuristics commonly used in ecology. In the case of recovery/engineering resilience, the ball rolls back to its equilibrium position after a disturbance. In the case of ecological resilience, the ball rolls over the cup’s brink and falls into a new cup. This cup represents an alternative stable system regime from which recovery to the previous regime is impossible. This is symbolized with the ball not rolling back to the previous cup

Fig. 2

Cross scale resilience model modified from Angeler et al. (2016). For description see text

Fig. 3

Schematic showing adaptive approaches for resilience-based environmental risk and impact assessment [Figure modified from Baho et al. (2017)]