National risk management and resilience

Erwann Michel-Kerjan proposed to develop nation-wide risk management strategies to make nations truly resilient to extreme events such as superstorm Sandy (Nature).  He reckons governments should be able to answer five questions: What risks do we face and where? What assets and populations are exposed and to what degree? How vulnerable are they? What financial burden do these risks place on individuals, businesses and the government budget? How best can we invest to reduce risks and strengthen economic and social resilience?

Literature on disaster risk reduction (DSS)

Prevention web
Institute for Social and Environmental Transition
The International Disaster Database

HT: Joy E. Hecht via RESECON list

Predicting Ecosystem Collapse: the 1st field study

Just published in Science

Natural capital and economic resilience

Peter Zeihan attempted to establish the link between natural capital of USA, Russia, China and EU and their ability of recovery from recession.

Rapid Recovery of Damaged Ecosystems

A PLoS article showed that most ecosystems recovered a lot faster than expected.

According to the study, those systems that disturbed by invasive species take relatively shorter time to recover. But it seems only those studies using animal community traits as indicator for recovery were included in the study.

The nine features of a resilient world

I didn't expect to see "ecosystem services" on the bottom of the list. It seems to be overlapping with "ecological variability" to me (Arts Counselling).

7 minute whiteboard presentations of resilience

HT: Resilience Science.

Resilience, Adaptability, and Transformability in the Goulburn-Broken Catchment

Published in Ecology and Society.

Resilient thinking & the paradox of optimization

by Brian Walker.

"In theory, an efficient economy optimally produces the things people want and value. However, the paradox of optimization is that optimization is often applied too narrowly. Systems like the one that efficiently hunts down sea otters are efficient in that they optimize resources for a narrow set of interests – in this case, otter pelts.

Such narrow goals lead to a loss of resilience in a business, an ecosystem or the world economy. More simply, a system that sustains timber yields but not the other benefits of a healthy forest does not really generate maximum value for society. This is the paradox of optimization."

HT: Resilient science

Maximum tinkering

"...contrary to social-science wisdom, almost no discovery, no technologies of note, came from design and planning—there were just black swans. The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves."

From prologue of the Black Swan by Taleb

Update: Risk mis-management in stock market that requires the maximum tinkering treatment.

Reframing resilience

A STEPS center report on reframing resilience, along with bunch of presentations by a panel speakers (Esha Shah, Andrew Scott, Henny Osbahr, Bronwyn Hayward, Joachim Voss, Carl Folke, Melissa Leach, and Andy Stirling)

HT: Resilience Science

the Center vs the Border

"The center sees the future as continuous with the present. It has numberless ways of discounting information to the contrary. It expects disturbances and setbacks i the normal course, but it also expects to weather them. in the long it is optimistic. the border foretells imminent disaster. It does not believe in the long run, and in the short run it is pessimistic. Paradoxically perhaps, it is optimistic about the perfectibility of human nature. since the border is committed against institutions, it must fall back o faith in human goodness as the basis for good society. When its prophets inveigh against human wickedness, they are calling upon the people to return to their essentially human power of moral regeneration. The center does not worry about possible irreversible damage to nature emanating from its own technology but rather about the possible irreversible destruction of its social systems (page 122~123, Risk and Culture by Mary Douglas & Aaron Wildavsky)."

"The more that a public interest group is organized as a hierarchy, the more it believes there is time for reform...The more hierarchical the organization, the less it bears a message about catastrophe and the less it is cosmic in its portent...(Page 126)"

Does that partially explain why it is so difficult to move collectively for climate change??

P.S. Here is a book review from NYT in 1982 about the book. The reviewed thought Douglas and Wildavsky negatively described the environmentalists as sect. I don't think that was the case. At least the authors were not as unfriendly as the reviewer described.

One-Third of Reef-Building Corals Face Elevated Extinction Risk from Climate Change and Local Impacts

A scientific article. The picture gets more worrying considering corals is one of the most resilient system of all.

P.S. Quiggin got into the resilience business.

Assumption for "get the price right"

"The stereotypical economist might say "get the prices right" without recognizing that price systems require a stable context where social and ecosystem processes behave "nicely" in a mathematical sense (i.e. are continuous and convex). "
--From preface of the book "Panarchy" edited by Gunderson and Holling

The Earth as a Social-Ecological System?

This is the title of a presentation given by Will Steffen during a conference in Stockholm on Resilience, Adaptation, and Turbulent Times. They did a great job in putting together an impressive agenda and one could watch presentations online.

I only met professor Steffen once when he introduced himself as "Bob (my PhD advisor)'s friend." Now I understand why: not many ecologists did their research at global scale, and they are two of them.

Professor Steffen delivered two major points throughout his presentation:

1. There are three stages of anthropocene: Stage I--pre-industrial revolution, Stage II--rapid growth after WWII, and now we are at the critical Stage III: sustainability/collapse

2. Because we only have one earth, perhaps adaptive management is not a good idea at the global scale. We are much better off adapting precautionary principle.

He also mentioned a couple of interesting points from a recent paper he coauthored with his colleagues titled " Mind the sustainability gap" that hasn't reached my radar yet, including "sustainability hierarchy vs triple bottom line", and "short-term pragmatism." I'll have to check the paper out and report back.