Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function by Brian Walker & David Salt

Author:Brian Walker & David Salt [Walker, Brian & Salt, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science, General, Environmental Science, nature, Environmental Conservation & Protection
ISBN: 9781610912310
Google: LAEBev5Ljr8C
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2012-08-06T23:41:49.356520+00:00

Adding Value

Unlike other management approaches that seek to measure and improve on the condition of specific environmental or economic assets, a resilience assessment doesn’t produce some particular level or amount of resilience that can be compared between catchments. The Namoi was not (and probably could not be) shown to be more or less resilient than the Central West.

What was achieved was an engagement in the catchment’s complexity by most of its important stakeholder groups. These people—managers, farmers, businesspeople, and so forth—were encouraged to view their catchment as a self-organizing system that changes over time, but with limits to this self-organizing ability, and hence a system that could lose its identity if it moved too far in certain directions.

In the Central West the assessment encouraged an attempt to conceptualize how the system could exist in a variety of states, and the pathways between them. The stakeholders were attempting to understand what was giving their region its identity, and how this could change and what might cause that change.

In the Namoi they attempted to identify critical levels of change beyond which their system might organize into something different. They also made clear connections between the condition of their groundwater resources and the level of cover of natural vegetation. They acknowledged the connection between the groundwater resources and the economic and social well-being of the region.

Both catchment action plans are now completed for this stage. Both CMAs agreed that the resilience assessment was worth the effort. The Namoi reported that the resilience framework provided “a fresh lens to look at tired problems.” Their management board felt that because of working through the resilience assessment, there had been an “un-cluttering of the NRM agenda.” Central West CMA reported that the process gave them a more focused approach and an ability to examine how each system may impact on another.

In an assessment of the value of applying a resilience framework to catchment action plans (NRC 2011), the Natural Resources Commission said the Central West and Namoi CMAs showed that resilience thinking

•Helps develop a holistic picture of how the landscape functions and test assumptions

•Helps manage complexity by focusing on the few most important things

•Is a useful concept to engage the community in strategic planning

•Embraces change and builds capacity to manage for natural variability and extreme events.

Each CMA has developed a report of its initial assessments. These can be accessed online: at http://www.namoi.cma.nsw.gov.au/274456.html for the Namoi plan and at http://cw.cma.nsw.gov.au/AboutUs/strategicplanning.html for the Central West plan.

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