Using a resilience thinking approach to improve coastal governance responses to complexity and uncertainty: a Tasmanian case study, Australia.

Conventional approaches to environmental governance and management are limited in their responses to uncertainty and complexity of social-ecological system (SES) change. Prevailing neoliberal and efficiency-based mindsets tend to focus on avoiding risk and creating "fail-safe" systems. In the last decade, resilience thinking has emerged as a means to transition from risk-averse, and command-and-control governance approaches towards those that are more adaptive, innovative and collaborative. To examine the practical usefulness of a resilience thinking approach, we used a complex, multi-layered case study of Tasmanian coastal governance. Drawing on the diverse expertise and a variety of key governance actors, we identified crucial problems being experienced with the Tasmanian coastal governance regime and discussed potential contributions of resilience thinking to address them. Thematic analysis of the results revealed three major contributions: resilience thinking (1) provides a way to think about change and uncertainty; (2) is compatible with proactive and entrepreneurial leadership; and (3) effectively considers issues of scale in the decision-making process. We conclude by offering practical suggestions towards devolved leadership and improved cross-scale collaboration, and consider the possibility of a hybrid resilience and risk-based approach to coastal management and governance.

Consolidating new paradigms in large-scale monitoring and assessment of forest ecosystems.

Forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services from which people benefit, and upon which all life depends. However, any rational decision related to the maintenance and enhancement of the multiple functions provided by the forests needs to be based on objective, reliable information. As such, forest monitoring and assessment are rapidly evolving as new information needs arise or new techniques and tools become available. Global change issues and utilities from ecosystem management are distinctively to be considered, so that forest inventory and mapping are broadening their scope towards multipurpose resources surveys. Recent changes in forest management perspective have promoted the consideration of forests as complex adaptive systems, thereby highlighting the need to account that such approaches actually work: forest monitoring and assessment are then expected to address and fully incorporate this perspective at global scale, seeking to support planning and management decisions that are evidence-based. This contribution provides selected considerations on the above mentioned issues, in the form of a commented discussion with examples from the literature produced in the last decade.

Resilience and social change: Findings from research trends using association rule mining.

This study analyzed the historical development of resilience with respect to multidisciplinary aspects using association rule mining (ARM). ARM is a rule-based machine-learning approach tailored to identify validated relations among multiple variables in a large dataset. This study collected author keywords from all resilience-related literature in the Web of Science database and examined the changes in validated resilience-related topics using ARM. We found that resilience-related research tends to diversify and expand over time. Although topics and their academic fields related to engineering and complex adaptive systems were prominent in the early 2000s, psychosocial resilience and social-ecological resilience have received significant attention in recent years. The increasing interest in resilience-related topics linked to psychological and ecological factors, as well as social system components, can be attributed to the impact of a series of complex and global events that occurred in the late 2000s. Recently, resilience has been conceived as a way of thinking, perspective, or paradigm to address emergent complexity and uncertainty with vague concepts. Resilience is increasingly being regarded as a boundary spanner that promotes communication and collaboration among stakeholders who share different interests and scientific knowledge.

FiNCO farms for knowledge exchange: A Colombian seed for a good Anthropocene.

Returning to Earth's safe operating space requires driving social-ecological transformations toward a new human-nature configuration, while navigating changes and creatively dealing with crises. Family farms in the Colombian Andes have been navigating changes by using modalities of integrated management that recognize family interdependence with nature, which illustrates social-ecological resilience on a small scale. We potentiated family farming by creating FiNCO (Farms for knowledge exchange) as a strategy that renews the connection between disciplines, academia and farmers, and the rural and urban sectors, in order to promote knowledge co-production and landscape stewardship. In this sense, FiNCO is considered as a seed for a good Anthropocene. This paper is an invitation to plant FiNCO seeds in different social-ecological contexts and to share those experiences as an ideal way to create abilities to transform the upcoming humanity challenges into opportunities for humanity's needed transformation.

Project Earthrise: Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of inVIVO Planetary Health.

The "Earthrise" photograph, taken on the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, became one of the most significant images of the 20th Century. It triggered a profound shift in environmental awareness and the potential for human unity-inspiring the first Earth Day in 1970. Taking inspiration from these events 50 years later, we initiated Project Earthrise at our 2020 annual conference of inVIVO Planetary Health. This builds on the emergent concept of planetary health, which provides a shared narrative to integrate rich and diverse approaches from all aspects of society towards shared solutions to global challenges. The acute catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn greater attention to many other interconnected global health, environmental, social, spiritual, and economic problems that have been underappreciated or neglected for decades. This is accelerating opportunities for greater collaborative action, as many groups now focus on the necessity of a "Great Transition". While ambitious integrative efforts have never been more important, it is imperative to apply these with mutualistic value systems as a compass, as we seek to make wiser choices. Project Earthrise is our contribution to this important process. This underscores the imperative for creative ecological solutions to challenges in all systems, on all scales with advancing global urbanization in the digital age-for personal, environmental, economic and societal health alike. At the same time, our agenda seeks to equally consider our social and spiritual ecology as it does natural ecology. Revisiting the inspiration of "Earthrise", we welcome diverse perspectives from across all dimensions of the arts and the sciences, to explore novel solutions and new normative values. Building on academic rigor, we seek to place greater value on imagination, kindness and mutualism as we address our greatest challenges, for the health of people, places and planet.

Can Resilience Thinking Be Integrated into the Strategic Environmental Assessment Process?

This commentary discusses strategic environmental assessment (SEA) in the context of global environmental change and presents a brief overview of the science of social-ecological systems and the resilience thinking and practices that result from it. Resilience thinking and assessment have the potential to make a significant contribution to SEA, if SEA is applied (as intended) as a proactive tool for assessing development sustainability during the process of making plans, policies, and programs. So far, there is little indication that social-ecological system (SES) resilience ideas are being applied to SEA, and from a complex systems perspective, it seems that cognitive and social biases may be the primary barriers to both the improvement of SEA practice and the application of SES resilience science to SEA practice. Resilience thinking can be integrated into SEA, provided that leadership in the SEA community can create a social movement for change in practice and the policies that affect SEA procedures. Principles of complexity, uncertainty, self-organization, and cooperative problem solving may be the most important cognitive barriers to change and can be overcome through education and a learning-by-doing approach to the application of resilience assessment when appropriate in a SEA process. A deliberate change process can be undertaken in an action research approach that monitors and adapts the process according to the lessons learned in practice. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2018;14:571-577. © 2018 SETAC.

A general neurologist's perspective on the urgent need to apply resilience thinking to the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's disease.

The goal of this article was to look at the problem of Alzheimer's disease (AD) through the lens of a socioecological resilience-thinking framework to help expand our view of the prevention and treatment of AD. This serious and complex public health problem requires a holistic systems approach. We present the view that resilience thinking, a theoretical framework that offers multidisciplinary approaches in ecology and natural resource management to solve environmental problems, can be applied to the prevention and treatment of AD. Resilience thinking explains a natural process that occurs in all complex systems in response to stressful challenges. The brain is a complex system, much like an ecosystem, and AD is a disturbance (allostatic overload) within the ecosystem of the brain. Resilience thinking gives us guidance, direction, and ideas about how to comprehensively prevent and treat AD and tackle the AD epidemic.