Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic: Perspectives from the Barents Area

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Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic: Perspectives from the Barents Area

8.2 Resilience of social-ecological systems

The response proposed here is to focus on the underlying capacity to respond to change, to successfully ride out disruption and disturbance, and to deliberately and effectively steer a path toward chosen goals in a less-than-predictable future. This capacity can be characterized as resilience – defined in the Arctic Resilience Report (Arctic Council, 2016) as the capacity of people to learn, share and make use of their knowledge of social and ecological interactions and feedbacks, to deliberately and effectively engage in shaping adaptive or transformative social-ecological change. Now widely used in many settings, resilience is being applied in a variety of different ways (discussed further in Section 8.2). This definition of resilience emphasizes human agency, capacity for learning and use of knowledge, and the tight coupling and interaction between social and ecological systems. In addition to emphasizing the human capacity for deliberate action, two characteristics common in work on resilience are especially relevant for the purposes of this chapter. Resilience science employs a social-ecological systems approach that conceives humans as an integral part of nature, and as such, a resilience approach shares important commonalities with the holistic perspective reflected in accumulated wisdom of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic (Section 8.2). The chapter also draws on insights from a large body of empirical research that has identified key ingredients of resilience (Section 8.3). Building on these ingredients,Section 8.4 outlines an approach to developing indicators of resilience that represent characteristics which, if strengthened, can contribute to building resilience and thereby strengthen the capacity to engage in adaptation actions. This chapter therefore proposes tools to facilitate preparations for responding to and adapting to change that will surely include surprises. The aim is to provide concrete tools for assessing resilience not only at the scale of local communities, but also at higher scales. To provide a basis for these tools, this chapter reviews definitions of resilience and the social- ecological systems framework and clarifies the relationships between resilience, adaptation, and transformative change. It then examines resilience ingredients that when assessed and developed as a collection of indicators, can provide feedback useful both to policymakers and community leaders. Such indicators will provide useful insights about concrete actions that can be taken or curtailed to strengthen resilience. The framework of indicators is then applied to a selection of case studies from the Barents area (Section 8.5). To illustrate the tight coupling between ecological and social systems that is central to resilience, this chapter focuses on cases in which communities are pursuing livelihoods closely linked with nature. Traditionally, human activities in the Arctic have been tightly coupled with ecosystems.Among the indigenous cultures of the Arctic, nature is conceptualized as the dynamic and evolving interactions between the biological and the physical world – and humans are an integral part of that world (Henry et al., 2013). This appreciation of the close coupling between humans and nature arguably stems from the need to navigate sometimes harsh and inhospitable conditions and the fact that traditional livelihoods are often dependent on resources which vary with natural cycles and external changes.

The use of‘resilience’has expanded dramatically over the past few years. The term figures strongly in the two major international agreements adopted in 2015: the SustainableDevelopment Goals (United Nations, 2015) and the Paris Agreement on climate change (UNFCCC, 2015), and in other important international initiatives such as the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR, 2015). As a function of its diverse applications, resilience is used with varied meanings (Brand and Jax,2007; Baggio et al.,2015).Not unlike the termsustainable development, which has usefully encouraged discussion and innovative work across different disciplines and practices, widespread use of the concept – and the many ways in which it has been applied – has also generated confusion. 8.2.1 Diverse meanings of resilience Resilience has diverse roots that can be traced to several areas of policy and research, including engineering (resilient buildings, resilient cities), psychology (resilient individuals, resilient communities), risk reduction, and systems ecology (ecosystems resilience). It emerged from its origins in systems ecology (Holling, 1973) to become an important conceptual framework for understanding systemic processes that involve both stability and fundamental change of ecosystems – particularly those upon which societies depend (Chapin et al., 2009). Interestingly, Holling’s original definition of ecosystems resilience was goal neutral. It assumed constant evolutionary, and sometimes abrupt change.The characterization of resilience as“ the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances while retaining essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks ” (Walker et al., 2004) remains a common working definition of resilience. ‘Disturbance’ may be generated by natural phenomena such as a thunderstorm or fire, or it may be either an intended or unintended result of human activities. In this form, resilience is a property of the social-ecological system and is independent from judgments that might be made about its desirability. Resilience is used increasingly in discussions in which the capacity to ride out or recover from disruption or shocks, whether expected or unexpected, is given high priority. In these circumstances, resilience is sometimes used in the context of seeking to maintain current ecological conditions to which communities have already accustomed themselves (Kofinas et al., 2013). This more goal-oriented definition of resilience is clearly part of the reason for its appeal (Walsh, 2013). Yet, while a part of the widespread popularity of the concept is based on positive associations of ‘bouncing back’ after disruption, returning to the conditions that existed prior to the disruption may not be a desirable outcome (Matyas and Pelling, 2015) and in practice, may not even be possible. This has led to characterizations of ‘bouncing forward’ (Manyena et al., 2011; Kresge Foundation, 2015). As defined in this chapter, resilience is considered a positive attribute – not regarding any particular system state, but regarding a community’s capacity to navigate into the future on terms of its own choosing, considering knowledge of the dynamics of ecosystem function and change.