A resilience approach to the future Brian Walker

1. A resilience approach to the future Brian Walker

2. looming threats - climate change • peak oil, energy prices - food shortages and prices - water shortages and wars (Tibet / China) - new and old diseases, pandemics - social unrest /terrorism - increasing connectedness (globalisation, financial risk correlation) - increasing numbers of people with increasing aspirations

3. “Rising Above The Gathering Storm” (USA Academies 2008) - the need for investment in science and innovation

4. less and less room to manoeuvre more and more need for ability to absorb shocks – for resilience

5. Resilience “the ability of a system to absorb disturbance and re-organise so as to retain the same structure, function, feedbacks and identity”

6. resilience places an emphasis on the limits to change it puts a focus on thresholds (tipping points) between alternate states, or ‘regimes’, of a system

8. the water table rises as trees are cleared a threshold occurs at a depth of 2m

9. 9 thresholds in the Goulburn-Broken catchment Shocks and slow drivers Region/ nation Farm/ landscape Landscape/catchment Tree cover and water table equilibrium (E/T) diseases Water table depth Native veg cover and biodiversity population (demand) biophysical Area salinized Riverine ecosystem condition markets Water infrastructure state technology Farm financial viability economic Size of dairy & fruit processing sectors long run energy cost climate change social Values (e.g. environment vs. agriculture) – water allocations governance

10. Applying a resilience approach - resilience is maintained by probing its boundaries - ‘specified’ (targeted) resilience, vs. ‘general’ resilience - the cost of maintaining resilience vs. the cost of not maintaining it resilience vs. efficiency

11. what determines resilience? • diversity • modularity • tightness of feedbacks • openness – immigration, inflows, outflows • reserves and other reservoirs (memory,seedbanks, nutrient pools) • overlapping governance/institutions

12. The Longford gas explosion in Shepparton: 25 million litres of milk poured away - no alternate power source for pasteurisation machinery (no “response diversity”)

13. “resilience” – “adaptability” – capacity to manage resilience; avoid thresholds (leadership, trust, ‘social capital’, governance)

14. if a shift into a “bad” state has happened,or is inevitable, the only option istransformation “transformability” - capacity to transform into a different kind of system; a new way of living, and making a living (the first rule of holes!)

15. determinants of transformability - preparedness to change - capacity to change • options for change

16. Where do we need to enhance resilience of existing systems? Where do we need to transform?

17. A resilience approach to the future • don’t aim for some “optimal” state • learn about thresholds and aim to avoid them • let the system self-organise within the range of acceptable states (‘command-and-control’ doesn’t work for very long) • maintain general resilience and embrace change - promote and sustain diversity, of all kinds • restrict control of environmental and ecological variability • be ready for and capable of transformational change • encourage learning, innovation and experiments • beware of partial solutions!