Abstract
Ecological resilience enables the transformation of social-ecological systems (SES). The transformation of SES currently needs both adaptation to and mitigation of climate change. The transformations that ecological resilience enables emerge through evolutionary adaptation. With SES, evolutionary adaptation includes the processes whereby regulatory, governance, and economic structures, as well as technologies are selected. Ecological resilience within SES means there is sufficient diversity and flexibility of these structures and technologies to ensure institutional and technological choices are proactively made to avoid the occurrence of disasters—to enhance disaster risk reduction (DRR). Through this process of proactively seeking DRR, appropriate transformations of SES incrementally emerge.
This chapter outlines a framework for DRR developed over three decades of research in the South Pacific on sustainable development and climate change adaptation. The framework conceptualizes the various processes that nurture ecological resilience in SES, from communities that are guided by cultural traditions, to institutions and regulatory authorities, to political processes of governance. The processes are modeled as nested recursive soft system methodologies (Bazrkar et al., Urbanization and climate change, handbook of climate change adaptation, Springer, 2015).
The chapter starts by outlining and developing SES theory to show how ecological resilience enables necessary transformations to incrementally emerge. Then the chapter develops how the catastrophes being brought by climate change can avoid becoming disasters, through the development of ecological resilience; how ecological resilience enables DRR in face of climate change. It is also shown how the possible transformations that ecological resilience entails, will enable mitigation of climate change as well as adaptation to climate change. Moreover, it is also shown how the possible transformations potentially also enhance well-being, and hence sustainable development. It is shown that the causes of climate change are also the causes of social ill-being: the socioeconomic and ecological crises are linked, as are the solutions. The chapter ends by exploring paradigms of ecological engineering and ecological economics, which can be used within the overarching framework for DRR, to guide the development of possible transformations of SES, for ecological resilience.
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Notes
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Communitas refers to experience of empathy and compassion for others.
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Morrison, K., Nand, M.M. (2023). Ecological Resilience for Transformative Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. In: Eslamian, S., Eslamian, F. (eds) Disaster Risk Reduction for Resilience. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22112-5_5
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