Resilience Thinking understands thresholds and adaptive cycles
The essence of Resilience Thinking is contained in two crucial concepts that underpin it: Thresholds and Adaptive cycles.
Thresholds: the point at which a system crosses over into another regime.
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.”[1]
- Resilience is the distance between the system and its nearest threshold
- Proximity to a threshold decreases the shock required to cross it
Adaptive cycles: the pattern by which an ecosystem organizes itself and responds to a changing world.
The other central theme to a resilience approach is how social-ecological systems change over time— systems dynamics. Social-ecological systems are always changing. 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.[2]
- Systems of nature tend to follow an adaptive cycle
- Complex adaptive systems are unpredictable and non-linear
See also:
- Resilience Thinking embraces the reality that things change
- Resilience Thinking creates antifragile systems
- Resilience is the capacity to absorb shocks and retain function
- Resilience is the distance between the system and its nearest threshold
- Proximity to a threshold decreases the shock required to cross it
- Systems of nature tend to follow an adaptive cycle
- Complex adaptive systems are unpredictable and non-linear
Resilience Thinking – Walker and Salt (2012), ch. 1, § “A Roadmap to this Book.” ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎