Resilience Thinking as an Interdisciplinary Guiding Principle for Energy System Transitions

Abstract

Abstract:Resource usage and environmental consequences of most current energy systems exceed planetary boundaries. The transition to sustainable energy systems is accompanied by a multitude of research methods, as energy systems are complex structures of technical, economical, social and ecological interactions. The description of different discipline's perspectives in this paper show that a more mutual understanding between disciplines of their respective focus is necessary as they partly create internally competitive views arising from differing emphasis of connected matters. The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for interdisciplinary proceeding in a complex energy system transition process. Resilience thinking is chosen as a core concept for a more holistic view on sustainable energy system development. It is shown that it is already widely used in different disciplines connected to energy system research and is especially suitable due to its wide application across disciplines. The seven principles of resilience thinking (maintain redundancy and diversity, manage connectivity, manage slow variables and feedback, foster complex adaptive systems thinking, encourage learning, broaden participation, and promote polycentric governance systems) are chosen as the basis for a procedure that can be utilized to increase the interdisciplinary perspectives of energy system transitions. For energy transition processes based on scenario development, backcasting and pathway definition, resilience thinking principles are used to assess the resilience of the target energy system, the pathway resilience and the design of the scenario process with respect to the probability of a resilient outcome. The described procedure consisting of questions and parameters can be applied as a first attempt for a resilience assessment of energy transition processes. The perspective of resilience in sustainable energy systems strengthens the importance of diversity, redundancy and flexibility, which reduces the current dominant focus on efficiency of the overall system.

Review article: Towards a context-driven research: a state-of-the-art review of resilience research on climate change

“…In the 1970s, social scientists could thus have recourse to both closed-systems theories and complexity theory to think about resilience to climate change (Dahlberg, 2015;Davoudi, 2018). Some of them also merged the two models so that socio-ecological systems became conceptualized as adaptive complex systems (Wiese, 2016;Bergström, 2018). Holling's SES is an example of the integration of complexity theory in ecological science.…”

“…Hence, those who conceive an energy transition as an adaptive necessity are primarily concerned with what several scholars call "energy resilience" (Béné et al, 2018, p. 120;Jesse et al, 2019, p. 21), that is, with the continuing supply of energy to support the prevailing socioeconomic system and prevention of power outage during the transition. In other words, reliable energy supplies at stable costs must be kept going to support the present socioeconomic system (Wiese, 2016). Since system collapse is to be avoided at any cost, adaptive resilience to climate change means incremental changes and the increasing use of renewables without stopping the use of fossil fuels (Berbés-Blázquez et al, 2017;Schilling et al, 2018;Stegemann and Ossewaarde, 2018).…”

Review article: Towards a context-driven research: a state-of-the-art review of resilience research on climate change

“…Hence, resilience to climate change is a matter of evolution: in naturalist social science resilience is presented as 'evolutionary resilience' (Pizzo, 2015: 137; Davoudi, 2018: 4). When this type of science comes to embrace Holling's SES approach in the 1970s, it incorporates the notion of resilience within the context of its complexity theoretic orientation (Wiese, 2016;Bergström, 2018). The ability to cope with uncertainty and complexity is found in the capacities and relations between multiple agents that are able to interact and self-organize, learn and https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2020-90 Preprint.…”

“…From the (typically naturalist) perspective of strengthening 'energy resilience'(Béné et al, 2018: 120; Jesse, Heinrichs & Kuchshinrichs, 2019: 21) -energy systems must adapt to changing environments in which high levels of greenhouse gas emissions comes from burning fossil fuels for electricity, heat and transportation. Energy resilience means that energy systems can limit the risk of power outage and continue providing reliable energy supplies at stable costs, even in a turbulent ecological and political environment(Wiese, 2016). The notion of energy resilience, as a form of adaptive resilience to climate change, implies that the energy transition, including the use of renewables, can only go via incremental changes, to avoid system collapse (Berbés-Blázquez et al, https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2020-90 Preprint.…”

The Resilience of Sustainability Transitions

“…Some scholars identified the added-value of linking a transitions and resilience view on sustainability transitions and provided first ideas for a combined perspective [14,[21][22][23][24]. This includes a stronger emphasis on social-ecological transformations in the resilience discourse [25][26][27] as well as the need to consider a common system's perspective by integrating ecological aspects in transition studies [9] and vice versa by applying a stronger focus on the role of technology and innovation in resilience research [28].…”