At the heart of resilience thinking is a very simple notion; things change, and to ignore or resist this change is to increase our vulnerability and forego emerging opportunities. In so doing, we limit our options.

Sometimes the changes are slow (like population growth); sometimes they are fast (like exchange rates, or the price of food and fuel). Humans are usually good at noticing and responding to rapid change. Unfortunately, we are not so good at responding to things that change slowly. In part this is because we don’t notice them and in part it’s because often there seems little we can do about them. The size of the human population is a key slow variable, for example. So too is climate change. But few people believe there is anything they can do directly to influence either.

In and of itself, change is neither bad nor good. It can have desirable or undesirable outcomes – and it frequently produces surprises.

These are all broad statements, but applied to interacting systems of humans and nature (social-ecological systems) they take on special meanings with important consequences. Resilience thinking presents an approach to managing natural resources that embraces human and natural systems as complex systems continually adapting through cycles of change.
There are many ways to present a framework for resilience thinking. We have chosen to approach it by taking three steps. The first lays down a foundation for understanding. The second outlines the core of the approach and the third begins to explore how resilience thinking might be applied to addressing challenges in the real world.

The first step involves moving into a systems perspective of how the world works. We are all part of a linked system of humans and nature, and these are complex adaptive systems. Resilience is the key to the sustainability of these systems.

A traditional command-and-control approach to managing resources usually fails to acknowledge the limits to predictability inherent in a complex adaptive system. The traditional approach also tends to place humans outside of the system whereas we are very much a part of them.

The second step is to develop an understanding of the two central themes that underpin resilience thinking. The first is that social-ecological systems can exist in more than one kind of stable state. If a system changes too much it crosses a threshold and begins behaving in a different way, with different feedbacks between its component parts and a different structure. It is said to have undergone a ‘regime shift’.

The other central theme to a resilience approach is how social-ecological systems change over time – systems dynamics. Social-ecological systems are always changing, and a useful way to think about this is to conceive of the system moving through four phases: rapid growth, conservation, release and reorganization; usually, but not always, in that sequence. This is known as the adaptive cycle and these cycles operate over many different scales of time and space. The manner in which they are linked across scales is crucially important for the dynamics of the whole set.

The third step is to apply this understanding to the real world. While a framework for resilience thinking provides valuable insights into why and how systems behave as they do, to have policy and management relevance it needs to be able to solve problems in resource management. Managing for resilience has the capacity to create space in a shrinking world by opening up options rather than closing them down. Resilient social-ecological systems have the capacity to change as the world changes while still maintaining their functionality. Resilient systems are more open to multiple uses while being more forgiving of management mistakes.

Even if the finer details of some aspects of this approach remain a bit obscure, if you can take on board the broader themes presented in resilience thinking on living within complex adaptive systems you’ll discover you’ve acquired a powerful set of insights about how the world works. Concepts of sustainability, efficiency and optimization all begin to take on a new light.

Our hope is that Australians will start asking questions about the systems in which they live: what are the key variables driving them? Is the system approaching a threshold? What management actions do you need to consider to keep away from such a threshold? What are the dynamics of this system? What are the connections between the different scales at which the system operates?

These are all big questions that may not be easy to answer. However, the very act of framing them in relation to the system in which you play a role is an important step towards resilience thinking.

Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of our communities, ecosystems and landscapes that provide us with the goods and services that sustain our wellbeing. Our resource base, planet Earth, is shrinking while our population continues to expand. The response from most quarters has been for ‘more of the same’ that got us into this situation in the first place: more control, more intensification and greater efficiency.

Current approaches to ‘sustainable’ natural resource management are failing us. They are too often modeled on average conditions and expectations of incremental growth, they ignore major disturbances, and seek to optimise some components of a system in isolation of others. This approach fails to acknowledge how the world actually works.

Resilience thinking is about understanding and engaging with a changing world. By understanding how and why the system as a whole is changing we are better placed to work with change – instead of being a victim of it.

‘Resilience Thinking’ by Brian Walker and David Salt. Island Press, $49.95. Orders: http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/5344.htm