Specified resilience defends against known disturbances

Specified resilience is a system’s defense against a known disturbance, usually worded as “resilience of <system> to <disturbance> (as <change factor>).”

When considering how you might manage a system’s resilience there is usually an emphasis on appreciating specific threats to a system. The approach is to define the system in terms of thresholds, and this means attempting to understand the key slow variables that are configuring it—the ones that might exhibit threshold effects.^[1]

With the key variables identified, resilience can be specified—for example, “the resilience of the Everglades vegetation to fires and droughts (as phosphate levels increase)… If you can perform this type of analysis on the system then you have already come a long way from a business as usual approach. However, by itself it is not enough. Resilience thinking needs to go beyond managing for specific variables and specific disturbances.”^[2]

#systems #resilience

See also:

• Resilient systems require both specified and general resilience
• General resilience depends on diversity, modularity, and feedbacks