Resources

This is a powerful article written by Atiq Kainan Ahmed, one of the prominent DRR and CRM experts in the Asia-Pacific region. This article was published as an OP-ED in 'The Jakarta Post ' and sends a mindful message to the DRR, climate, development, and risk management communities. Although much progress has been made in risk governance since the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, the community still failed to anticipate this massive pandemic of COVID-19. We are still taking our actions in 'silos' and 'doomed into our own domains' the article says. It flags the need to break out of these silos before moving ahead with any wholesale effort of transformation or change in the future. It says, we need to 'rethink passionately' before attempting any meaningful change or positive transformation. One has to come out of their siloed comfort zones first and then look for solutions that are conducive to the whole system with coherence.

Forests in the Tibetan Plateau are thought to be vulnerable to climate extremes, yet they also tend to exhibit resilience contributing to the maintenance of ecosystem services in and beyond the plateau. So far the spatiotemporal pattern in tree resilience in the Tibetan Plateau remains largely unquantified and the influence of specific factors on the resilience is poorly understood. Here, we study ring‐width data from 849 trees at 28 sites in the Tibetan Plateau with the aim to quantify tree resilience and determine their diving forces. Three extreme drought events in years 1969, 1979, and 1995 are detected from metrological records. Regional tree resistance to the three extreme droughts shows a decreasing trend with the proportion of trees having high resistance ranging from 71.9%, 55.2%, to 39.7%. Regional tree recovery is increasing with the proportion of trees having high recovery ranging from 28.3%, 52.2%, to 64.2%. The area with high resistance is contracting and that of high recovery is expanding. The spatiotemporal resistance and recovery are associated with moisture availability and diurnal temperature range, respectively. In addition, they are both associated with forest internal factor represented by growth consistence among trees. We conclude that juniper trees in the Tibetan Plateau have increased resilience to extreme droughts in the study period. We highlight pervasive resilience in juniper trees. The results have implications for predicting tree resilience and identifying areas vulnerable to future climate extremes.

In support of the Upper Mississippi River Restoration (UMRR) partnership, we have been working towards an ecological resilience assessment of the system. Our first manuscript provides the foundation for our assessment, as well as an overview of historical changes and ecological understanding of the river. Working with UMRR agencies, we conceptualized the river-floodplain system as three interconnected sub-systems: lotic channels, lentic off-channel areas, and floodplains. From there, we identified controlling variables that affect major resources within each sub-system, and described those relationships as they are known. The system description provides a framework as we continue on to the assessing phase of our assessment to better understand how controlling variables influence major resources, relying on long-term spatially extensive data sets. There is growing interest in applying resilience concepts to natural resource management; however, there are few published applications of these frameworks from which to learn. We hope the UMRS resilience assessment can provide insight to others on our approach while also improving our understanding of the Upper Mississippi River System's ability to adapt to change.

If resilience theory is to be of practical value for policy makers and resource managers, the theory must be translated into sensible decision-support tools. We present a set of resilience attributes, developed to characterize human-managed systems, that helps system stakeholders make practical use of resilience concepts in tangible applications. These resilience terms can facilitate the modeling of resilience behavior within systems, as well as support those lacking access to sophisticated models. Our goal is to empower policy makers and resource managers to put resilience theory to work in the real world.

Low carbon resilience (LCR) refers to climate change strategies that integrate and achieve co-benefits between greenhouse gas emissions reduction (mitigation) and planning designed to reduce vulnerability to climate change impacts (adaptation). To date, most strategies focus on one or the other of these two goals. This paper demonstrates the potential value of their integration, explores examples of low carbon resilience strategies, and considers options for their implementation in Canada.