Resilience trinity: safeguarding ecosystem functioning and services across three different time horizons and decision contexts

Abstract

Ensuring ecosystem resilience is an intuitive approach to safeguard the functioning of ecosystems and hence the future provisioning of ecosystem services (ES). However, resilience is a multi‐faceted concept that is difficult to operationalize. Focusing on resilience mechanisms, such as diversity, network architectures or adaptive capacity, has recently been suggested as means to operationalize resilience. Still, the focus on mechanisms is not specific enough. We suggest a conceptual framework, resilience trinity, to facilitate management based on resilience mechanisms in three distinctive decision contexts and time‐horizons: 1) reactive, when there is an imminent threat to ES resilience and a high pressure to act, 2) adjustive, when the threat is known in general but there is still time to adapt management and 3) provident, when time horizons are very long and the nature of the threats is uncertain, leading to a low willingness to act. Resilience has different interpretations and implications at these different time horizons, which also prevail in different disciplines. Social ecology, ecology and engineering are often implicitly focussing on provident, adjustive or reactive resilience, respectively, but these different notions of resilience and their corresponding social, ecological and economic tradeoffs need to be reconciled. Otherwise, we keep risking unintended consequences of reactive actions, or shying away from provident action because of uncertainties that cannot be reduced. The suggested trinity of time horizons and their decision contexts could help ensuring that longer‐term management actions are not missed while urgent threats to ES are given priority.

A Multi-Level Framework for Adaptation to Drought Within Temperate Agriculture

“…In their resilience trinity, Weise et al (2020) identify two decision contexts of relevance to drought management in agriculture-reactive decisions where the loss of the desired functions (e.g., food production) due to a current threat (e.g., drought) is imminent or already happening; and adjustive decision contexts where the desired functions are threatened by future threats (Ault, 2020), but not yet to a critical level. In such a decision context, concerns about losses from future uncertain drought events exist, but initiatives and incentives to adjust current management practices to increase longer-term drought resilience might be neglected (Boltz et al, 2019), slow or even fail because of the lower perceived urgency for actions (Weise et al, 2020).…”

Towards a bridging concept for undesirable resilience in social-ecological systems

“…For example, it might result in “societal adaptation and resilience to sustained unsustainability” (Blühdorn, 2016, p. 10) or it might be used to justify initiatives favouring incremental adaptation only (Reyers et al , 2018). Once the normative assumptions around resilience ‘of what’, ‘to what’, ‘for whom’ and ‘at what timescale’ are made explicit, this enables a more reasonable distinction of how and why change towards sustainability can be implemented (Helfgott, 2018; Weise et al , 2020). Scholars working on the interrelated paradigm of sustainability have argued that the politics of unsustainability (Blühdorn, 2016, p. 9) turned “sustaining the unsustainable into an imperative,” rather than aiming to deliver structural changes to prevent undesirable social conflicts and ecological collapse.…”

“…As a descriptive concept, resilience incorporates insights from engineering, ecological, social-ecological, epistemic and intersubjective roots (Holling, 1973). How to define or measure resilience can vary widely across these perspectives (e.g., the notion of ‘equilibrium’ is considerably different between engineering and social-ecological narratives; Powell et al , 2014; Weise et al , 2020). As its use across academic disciplines has expanded and been refined for interdisciplinary collaboration over the years (Gao et al , 2016; Tu et al , 2019), so has its implicitly normative use (e.g., aims of ‘building resilience’; Biggs et al , 2015), especially in the translation of scientific work to policy and practice (Davoudi et al , 2012) and/or to transdisciplinary applications where scientific knowledge is co-created with stakeholders from various sectors (Lang et al , 2012).…”

“…Resilience that is desirable for one may be undesirable for others (Helfgott, 2018). Furthermore, elements of time and scale are also relevant for understanding the undesirability of resilience (Weise et al , 2020): focusing on short-term benefits can undermine long-term desirable outcomes (Oliver et al , 2018), and prioritizing only local or global scales can impair the assessment of cross-scale interconnectedness (Reyers et al , 2018), even with an aim of overall benefits to wider society (e.g., the framing of the UN Sustainable Development Goals). Therefore, to ensure clear communication and to facilitate collaboration across disciplines, it is essential to critically analyse the concepts being referred to, distinguishing desirable and undesirable aspects of resilience and the normative assumptions ascribed to them in the resilience literature.…”

Fine-scale variation in projected climate change presents opportunities for biodiversity conservation in Europe

“…Recent climate-adapted conservation concepts include an evaluation of species vulnerability by empirical niche models 12 , use of climatic refugia to shelter species of conservation concern 13 , or the implementation of resilience-oriented ecosystem management 14 . Moreover, a broader shift in governance structures and improved coordination between land managers, politicians and conservation organisations appears critical to the implementation of adaptive biodiversity conservation 15 .…”