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

Deep uncertainty describes a novel crisis in decision making: the analytical inability to distinguish between the likelihood of quite divergent future pathways, some of which may have disruptive and consequential economic, social and ecological impacts. Deep resilience has recently been proposed as a term to describe an emerging new class of climate change adaptation and resilience interventions to address the crisis of deep uncertainty. Traditional responses by engineers, economics, planners, and resource managers to climate uncertainty have included robustness and flexibility. Both approaches assume that we can define a problem and its solution set in discrete and well-bounded terms.

Drivers such as climate change and many forms of recent social, political, and economic change reveal that overly narrow interventions can ignore interactions with other 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. Promoting robustness to extreme flooding and extreme droughts may simply be unfeasible, while the deferral for additional clarity and certainty about the future through flexibility may not always match the needs of decision makers for action. 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 sharing critical resources between energy, agriculture, and cities. 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.

For this Research Topic, we seek papers that describe deep resilience as an operational and/or policy framework, how deep resilience projects can be evaluated for financing and success, examples of managing with rather than against change and uncertainty, and how technical decision makers can transition from narrow problem definition to more integrative and coherent solutions.