The Need for Resilience

The early integration of resilience concepts into the regulatory structures for systems management is needed to address the emerging issues associated with complexity and uncertainty – like climate change. Building resilience of large socio-economic technological systems can improve on current risk management methods. These are the key findings of a new commentary entitled “Changing the resilience paradigm” that was published in Nature Climate Change and is co-authored by Felix Creutzig, head of the working group Land Use, Infrastructures and Transport at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC).

The proposed ideas specifically apply, for example, to the problems that occur with climate change which cannot be precisely predicted, analyzed, and prepared for with traditional risk analysis techniques alone. "As our environmental and socio-economic systems become more connected and entangled, risk measures become increasingly insufficient”, says Creutzig. “Instead we need to focus more on designing resilient systems."

Furthermore, the paper argues that strategies to communicate with policy makers are needed to support the shift to resilience management by legislative, regulatory and other means. Creutzig says: “While risk aversion has become a fixed term in most national and regional administrations and is thereby addressed by the authorities, this is not necessarily a helpful concept when the strength and distribution of disasters are unknown. We advocate that resilience should be the concept to enter the administrative level.”

The link to the article: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n6/full/nclimate2227.html