Resilience

Question 1

What is resilience?

Answer 1

The ability of a system to recover after a change or disturbance.

The capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbances without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by a different set of processes.

Question 2

3 Characteristics of resilience:

Answer 2

1. The amount of change the system can undergo and still retain the same controls on function and structure.
2. The degree to which the system is able to self-organization.
3. Ability to build and increase capacity for learning and adaptation.

Question 3

What happens when resilience is lost?

Answer 3

• System is vulnerable to smaller disturbances it could previously cope with.
• At risk of shifting into a different state.

Question 4

Factors that make resilience be lost:

Answer 4

1. Loss of biodiversity.
2. Toxic pollution.
3. Inflexible, closed institutions.
4. Perverse subsidies that encourage unsustainable use of resources.
5. A focus on production and increased efficiencies that leads to a loss of redundancy.

Question 5

How resilience is enhanced:

Answer 5

1. When biodiversity improves.
2. If resource management is shared by a diverse group of stakeholders.
3. Adaptive management whereby actions are designed to increase resilience.
4. More interactions between different species.
5. More diversity makes preys replaceable.
6. Genetic diversity makes species more resistant to disease.
7. Species that can shift their geographical range are more resilient.
8. The larger the ecosystem, the more resilient it will be because species are more in contact.
9. Decreased human impact.