General Resilience to Cope with Extreme Events

TLDR

Resilience research has focused on specific disasters, but rare, intense shocks demand a broad‑spectrum, general resilience that enables social‑ecological systems to adapt or transform to unfamiliar extreme events. The study aims to develop processes for building general resilience, an emerging and crucial research area.

Abstract

Resilience to specified kinds of disasters is an active area of research and practice. However, rare or unprecedented disturbances that are unusually intense or extensive require a more broad-spectrum type of resilience. General resilience is the capacity of social-ecological systems to adapt or transform in response to unfamiliar, unexpected and extreme shocks. Conditions that enable general resilience include diversity, modularity, openness, reserves, feedbacks, nestedness, monitoring, leadership, and trust. Processes for building general resilience are an emerging and crucially important area of research.