Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function

In 2006, Resilience Thinking addressed an essential question: As the natural systems that sustain us are subjected to shock after shock, how much can they take and still deliver the services we need from them? Now, in Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function, authors Brian Walker and David Salt take the notion of resilience one step further, applying resilience thinking to real-world situations and exploring how systems can be managed to promote and sustain resilience.

Resilience is not about stopping change, the authors are quick to emphasize. Instead, it is about balancing the growth and disorder of interconnected variables in a landscape shaped by forces operating over multiple scales. Resilience Practice teaches the reader how to go about deciding what are the important things to focus on in the system they are concerned about.

The book begins with an overview and introduction to the concept of resilience  and then takes the reader through the process of describing systems, assessing their resilience, and intervening as appropriate. Although the authors describe their own process, they take care to encourage the reader to modify their own resilience practice as is appropriate for their own situation. Following each chapter is a case study of a different type of social-ecological system and how resilience makes a difference to that system in practice. The final chapters explore resilience in other arenas, including on a global scale.

Resilience Practice will help people with an interest in the “coping capacity” of systems—from farms and catchments to regions and nations—to better understand how resilience thinking can be put into practice. It offers an easy-to-read but scientifically robust guide through the real-world application of the concept of resilience and is a must read for anyone concerned with the management of systems at any scale.

Brian Walker is a Research Fellow in Australia’s CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Visiting Researcher in the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and Chair of the Resilience Alliance. David Salt is a science and environment writer at the Australian National University, and has more than two decades experience writing and producing popular science magazines and books. Both authors live in Canberra, Australia.