Implementing “Deep Resilience”: Embracing Complexity and Systems Thinking in Adaptation and Resilience

In the face of the deep uncertainty associated with the pace and severity of climate change and other non-stationary economic and environmental drivers, the field of climate adaptation and resilience must move beyond simply managing risks and promoting recovery to embracing a deeper resilience that encompasses the reorganization and transformation of economies, communities, and ecosystems. Deep uncertainty refers to the inability to predict future pathways with confidence, and the inability to determine the likelihood of often extreme and opposing alternate futures. Deep uncertainty exposes profound weaknesses in traditional decision-making frameworks. Rather than viewing resilience as a quality of bouncing back to previous ecological and social conditions, deep resilience embraces the capacity for systems to reorganize and make major adjustments in form and structure, often over short timescales. Traditional responses to uncertainty, such as over-designing infrastructure for greater robustness, often fall short as they assume well-defined problems and solutions. Incremental approaches to climate and other non-linear impacts also seem insufficient given the accelerating pace of climatic, economic, social, and political change. Such drivers reveal that overly narrow interventions may overlook critical interactions within social-ecological systems, depend on inappropriately precise and fixed data, or promote largely incremental adjustments that may not encompass the true scale of impacts and challenges – or emerging opportunities and synergies.

The term deep resilience has been used to describe a new set of approaches that explicitly link problems as divergent as flood and drought prevention for the same location and integrate solutions across systems and sectors. By focusing on the need for resilient interactions between projects, proposed solutions may become more cohesive and coherent to promote cross-sectoral and systemic resilience. When decision makers assume that deep uncertainty is a defining quality of these problems, proposed solutions can make uncertainty-tolerant use of ecosystems and nature-based solutions (NbS), governance systems, and freshwater resources.

Despite the potential of deep resilience to answer the dangers of deep uncertainty, there remains a significant gap in understanding how to operationalize these concepts effectively, necessitating further investigation into its practical applications and policy implications. This research topic aims to explore the concept of deep resilience as a framework, particularly for climate change adaptation and resilience interventions. Specifically, it seeks to understand how deep resilience is being implemented, how it can be operationalized and evaluated, how it can be financed, and how it can facilitate a transition from identifying narrowly siloed problem statements to more integrative solutions. The goal is to answer key questions such as: How can deep resilience projects be effectively implemented and assessed? What are the best practices for managing uncertainty and change? How can technical decision-makers adopt a more holistic approach to problem-solving?

To gather further insights into the boundaries of deep resilience, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

● Case studies of deep resilience for managing uncertainty and change
● Operational frameworks for deep resilience
● Evaluation metrics for deep resilience projects
● Financing models for deep resilience initiatives
● Transition strategies for technical decision-makers
● Integrative approaches to problem-solving in climate adaptation
● Cross-sectoral and systemic resilience strategies
● Nature-based solutions (NbS) in the context of deep resilience
● Governance systems that support deep resilience
● Management of resilient freshwater resources in uncertain climates