Resilience – the good, the bad and the ugly

By David Salt

Some 17 years ago a former boss of mine, Dr Brian Walker, approached me to write a book with him that made the science of resilience more understandable and engaging. That text, Resilience Thinking(Island Press, 2006), would become one of the first widely read, popular science books on the subject of ecological resilience. In my humble opinion, Resilience Thinking played an important role in bringing the ideas around resilience into the mainstream, raising the very notion of ‘resilience’ to the status of being a buzzword (with all the good and bad that comes with this).

At the time that Brian approached me I knew little about resilience science (and I was also ignorant about Brian being one of the world’s leading researchers in this field; I knew him as the ridiculously overworked Chief of CSIRO Wildlife and Ecology, where I had been his Communications Manager). When he asked me to co-author a book with him, a few years after this, I was a freelancer. Indeed, I was an ageing freelance science writer that was growing increasingly cynical about ‘science being the answer’ to the world’s growing sustainability challenge.

When Brian began explaining what resilience thinking was my first thought was ‘it’s just another bit of tricky science that will supposedly boost efficiency and save us all, while we dig the planet into an even deeper hole’, just like many of the other ‘breakthroughs’ I had covered and promoted over the years.

Well, I was quite wrong about this. By the time I had finished writing Resilience Thinking, I looked at the world anew. Things that had befuddled me in the past, now made sense. I looked at the world with different eyes and became a proselytiser for the cause. It really was an epiphany; so much so that I would go on to write a second book with Brian (Resilience Practice, Island Press 2012), numerous articles on the theme, and lecture on the topic.

Though, I should be careful using the world ‘proselytise’ because resilience thinking has been criticised by some as looking like a religion (it’s not, it’s an ever-developing science with all the peer review and validation that comes with that) with adherents that sometimes come across as acolytes (God, I hope I don’t sound like one). Because, for all the value and insight that comes with resilience thinking, it has collected some unfortunate baggage along the way. But let’s begin with the positives.

The good

When I finished writing Resilience Thinking I suddenly realised that while we used the word ‘resilience’, the book was actually a guidebook to ‘complexity’ (and complex adaptative systems). Though I had written about complexity in the past, this was the first time the concepts wrapped up under the cloak of complexity came together and made sense.

The world is a complex system operating at multiple linked scales. I am a complex system, so is my family, my region, my country; all these systems are linked in lesser or greater ways; all are constrained by their histories to some extent; will change over time (adaptive cycles); are capable of self-organisation in the face of disturbance and have the capacity to sustain their identities (resilience), but only up to a certain point (thresholds) beyond which they take on new ways of being.

When these insights are applied to the world around me, I realise, in a very fundamental way, that my big problem with the world is that I always expect that things (events, people, history) to be rational (that people always act rationally, for example) when in fact they are complex (and often irrational). Rationality is just our way of simplifying things, of dealing with the uncertainty that goes hand in hand with complexity. It’s a great approach in the short term but brings wretched results in the longer term as the complex systems around us self-organise around our efforts to optimise, simplify and hold things steady.

Attempting to explain ‘resilience thinking’ to others gave me a framework that explained for me why optimisation is such a flawed model (maybe ‘partial’ or ‘incomplete’ are better adjectives here) to move us towards ‘being sustainable’; why ‘efficiency’, while being important, is never the answer to long term sustainability; why ‘stability’ is a myth and attempts to hold things steady actually reduces a system’s resilience. These and many other epiphanies became clear as I applied the insights from resilience thinking to systems around me.

So, I would say that, for me, ‘resilience thinking’ is jam packed with inspiration and insight about the world around me. Possibly more important, however, I am aware of many readers of Resilience Thinking who came away with their own epiphanies about their own systems of interest.

When people begin considering the complexity of their own system(s) (looking for thresholds, seeing adaptive cycles, reflecting on where their sources of resilience might lie) they too begin to see the world in a different way, and are excited by the insights that pop up.

The bad

Unfortunately, descriptions of ‘complexity’ become very complicated all too quickly (though please don’t confuse these terms). It takes time (and some patience) to absorb ‘resilience thinking’. And, like complexity itself, resilience thinking is not a linear process in which you read ‘the formula’ press a button and the answer is delivered (‘the answer to your question on resilience is 43’).

Resilience thinking is more of a culture in which stakeholders in a system investigate their system, assess different facets of its resilience (where are the thresholds, what is its space of safe operation; where does it sit in the adaptative cycle, what are the system’s levels of adaptability and transformability, and so on), decide on a course of action, monitor and adapt around that decision; and then iteratively go through that process (compile, assess, act) again and again; learning, adapting, experimenting and transforming as you go.

That’s all good and well, and it’s what we should all be doing all the time, but managers, decision makers and policy people need simpler and linear processes to inform their actions and decisions. Resilience thinking is sometimes seen as ‘nice (if time and resources are unlimited) but unhelpful (in the real world)’ when it comes to getting on with things.

Also, many of the insights emerging from the application of resilience thinking are quite dependent on a particular context and may not hold in a different context. On top of this (and maybe because of this), one person’s insights often vary from the insights another person finds when applying resilience thinking.

Some people have accused resilience thinking of being somewhat vague. Others have even suggested that this is deliberate and even important when it comes to framing complexity. One philosopher asked: “Does resilience exhibit conceptual vagueness, and, if so, is that beneficial? Can looseness in concepts and meanings lend itself to shedding light on unsolved problems? While resilience research has established that redundancy is an asset for complex adaptive systems, does a similar finding also hold for conceptual frameworks?”

All of which is to say is that while resilience thinking can be inspirational, it can also be problematic in its implementation.

And the ugly

While acknowledging this, I do believe it’s an important first step in re-evaluating our failing approach to sustainability (an approach largely based on simplistic linear thinking, technology and efficiency).

I’m happy to acknowledge the good with the bad. Where I get extremely frustrated, however, is where political leaders and corporate spin masters see ‘resilience’ as an opportunity to claim action while actually doing nothing (or continuing with their environmentally damaging activity).

Our last national conservative government claimed they were building a ‘resilient’ Great Barrier Reef while subsidising and expanding the country’s fossil fuel sector. (Our new national government appears to be doing much the same.) Carbon emissions are killing our Reef.

In a similar vein, one of Australia’s biggest companies, BHP, co-funded the Australian Coral Reef Resilience initiative to protect the ‘resilience’ of the reef while continuing to expand their fossil fuel pollution.

When climate-charged wildfires tore apart coastal communities along New South Wales (NSW) coastline in 2019/20 (our Black Summer), the NSW Government created a new overarching recovery agency called Resilience NSW (because who can have enough resilience, and the NSW government is there to provide it). Two years later and instead of fires, unprecedented floods devasted NSW coastal communities. A government enquiry found that Resilience NSW (an agency that hadn’t even found its feet) had failed and should be abolished.

These are just a few local examples where the ideas of resilience are inappropriately used (and abused). This happens everywhere. The problem here is that resilience is complex, most people don’t have the opportunity to have a deep engagement with it, and politicians are quick to exploit that ignorance; in the first place to hide behind it, in the next to use it as the scapegoat.

In a rational linear world, they wouldn’t get away with this. But, of course, we don’t live in a rational world, do we?

Banner image: Resilience thinking is about people, landscapes, society, ecosystems and complexity. Depending on how it is applied it can be good, bad or ugly. (Image by David Salt)

Taking Indigenous knowledge and values seriously: The second transformation of national environmental law

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By Peter Burnett

In an earlier blog I argued that Professor Graeme Samuel’s 2020 review of the EPBC Act amounted to a call for five transformations in national environmental law. Last time I wrote about transforming a system that is focused on process to a focus on outcomes. Today I write about the second transformation.

Something really struck me about Anthony Albanese’s election-night victory speech last May. After the usual ‘humbled by victory’ thank you, and the standard ‘bring Australians together’ call for unity, Albanese launched into what sounded like the passionate policy speech he had wanted to give all along, but couldn’t, because of Labor’s ‘small policy target’ strategy.

Warming up as he tripped across our future as a ‘renewable energy superpower’ and a more ‘just society’, Albanese reached full voice with:

And together we can embrace the Uluru Statement from the Heart. We can answer its patient, gracious call for a voice enshrined in our constitution. Because all of us ought to be proud that amongst our great multicultural society we count the oldest living continuous culture in the world.

After the frustrations of weeks of restrained ‘don’t frighten the horses’ language (central to their election campaign), it was a relief to hear this leadership.

I also felt that the ground had shifted. Just as the election of the ‘Teal’ independents expressed our national desire, finally, to address climate change properly, Albanese’s confident commitment to the 2017 Uluru Statement marks, in my opinion, our desire to take the next major step towards reconciliation with our First Nations people.

When the ground shifts, everything moves

The implications of this commitment don’t stop with a referendum on an Indigenous ‘voice’ to Parliament. Or even with the other elements of the Uluru statement, truth-telling and treaty.

With Rio Tinto’s 2020 destruction of the Juukan Gorge caves still fresh in many memories (an act done with the ‘consent’ of the Traditional Owners), Graeme Samuel’s strong criticism of Indigenous tokenism in his review of the EPBC Act, and his implicit call for a transformation in environmental policy to take Indigenous knowledge and values seriously, now feel mainstream.

Mainstream such sentiments might now be, but integrating them into our national environmental law is still complicated and challenging.

Providing for ‘respectful consideration of Indigenous views and knowledge’ will take time and investment. Indigenous knowledge doesn’t grow on trees and respectful engagement will have to move at a pace with which Indigenous people are comfortable.

It is the same with our Indigenous heritage protection laws, which don’t just need to protect Indigenous values and set national standards, but fully resourced; and that includes building capacity for extensive and respectful engagement.

This is where the 2020 Juukan Gorge disaster showed up major weaknesses in the existing system. The caves in the gorge were probably eligible for protection under a National Heritage listing, but no-one had nominated them.

There was also a safety net: an old and supposedly temporary law from the 1980s allowed the environment minister to issue an Aboriginal heritage protection order, provided the place was under threat. But when lawyers for the Traditional Owners called the minister’s office about invoking that law to save the Juukan Gorge caves, the minister’s staff failed to put them onto the right officials.

So, no application was made.

We can’t let important values fall through the cracks because we were waiting for Indigenous people to fill-out a white-culture nomination form, or because someone rang the ‘wrong’ phone number.

Finally, Samuel recommended a move to true joint management of federal national parks on Indigenous land, such as Uluru-Kata Tjuta. Again, this will require significant capacity building. As he put it, ‘the magnitude and significance of a transition to greater decision-making for Traditional Owners should not be underestimated.’

It doesn’t stop with EPBC

Taking Indigenous knowledge and values seriously in environmental policy is not limited to the transformation recommended by Professor Samuel under the EPBC Act.

Now we need to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

When UNDRIP was first adopted by the UN in 2007, Australia was one of only four countries to vote against it. Thankfully, we reversed our position only two years later.

Now, belatedly, a parliamentary committee has started looking at UNDRIP’s domestic application.

This declaration raises a lot of issues, but I’ll zero-in on the clause that links most strongly with the EPBC Act.

Article 32 states that Indigenous peoples have the right to control development or use of their lands and other resources. Specifically, for development projects such as mines or roads, it requires governments to:

consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources. [Emphasis added]

The implication is that, in addition to the respectful engagement proposed by Professor Samuel, Traditional Owners should have a right to veto developments.

The brings in the Native Title Act, which gives native title holders a ‘right to negotiate’ but not a veto.

This Act is complex but, in general, if negotiations over, say, a proposed mine, are unsuccessful, the matter will go to arbitration. In theory, an arbitrator such as the Native Title Tribunal could stop a mine from going ahead, but the more likely outcome is that development will proceed under conditions, which might include negotiated compensation.

Where is all this going?

The Indigenous affairs agenda for 2023 is looking packed.

In addition to the referendum on the Voice to Parliament, the government’s environmental package based on the Samuel Review will, hopefully, transform environmental law concerning Indigenous knowledge and values, as Samuel recommended.

We may even see a change to the Native Title Act to give native title holders the right to veto proposed developments.

These reforms are not just politically ambitious, but resource-intensive. The political passion the Prime Minister displayed on election night will need to extend to opening the national wallet!

Banner image: Kata Tjuta in the Northern Territory. Graeme Samuel recommended a move to true joint management of federal national parks on Indigenous land. (Image by sgrabus from Pixabay)

To be or not to be? It’s really a question about whether we adapt or transform

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By David Salt

To my mind, the word ‘transform’ is one of the most over used and abused words in the realm of sustainability scholarship and policy. It’s up there with the terms ‘resilience’ and ‘sustainability’, all of which have been rolled out so many times for so many mixed purposes that they have become panchrestrons (a fancy way of saying ‘buzz word’; a panchreston is an explanation that is used in so many different cases that it becomes almost meaningless).

The word itself seems harmless; ‘transform’ simply means to change into something else. In common parlance, however, it’s rolled out whenever someone wants to emphasise that the change we need has to be BIG! We’re not talking minor refinement or incremental reform here, we’re talking TRANSFORMATION! And this is problematic for several reasons. Consider this example.

Transformative change

In 2019, following the most comprehensive assessment of its kind, IPBES (the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) announced 1,000,000 species have been identified as threatened with extinction and that the rate of species extinction is accelerating. What do you do in the face of such alarming news? IPBES called for ‘transformative change’; and by that they meant a “fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.”

At the time I was sceptical anyone would listen because while no-one liked seeing biodiversity collapse, no government was going to introduce the wholesale changes being demanded. “The American way of life is not up for negotiation,” said President George Bush (Snr) at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, in a breathtakingly insular and cynical remark that all national leaders parrot in their own way.

This particular IPBES announcement in 2019 followed on decades of similar assessments saying much the same kind of thing (something I discussed here). Each time one of these biodiversity reports came out they were heralded with catchy, headline-seeking stats (‘a million species on the chopping block’), dire warnings (‘we’re heading for the abyss’) and demands for a new and even more ambitious set of policy targets (‘this time we must respond with BIG change’).

However, the IPBES announcement explicitly called for ‘transformation’ and even listed what that meant: “fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.” Now, I actually agree with everything IPBES is saying, but I disagree with the manner in which it was communicated. In some ways it’s pushing hyperbole to a new level, ‘the stakes are existential and the only solution is changing everything’. Predictably, the report got lots of media and disappeared without a trace. And biodiversity collapse continues at an accelerating pace.

What are we actually calling for?

Transformation IS big and very challenging. Be careful invoking it if you haven’t got a pathway for how it might be achieved because simply demanding it to happen can be less than useful.

Why is it so challenging? I think the school of resilience thinking has some useful ideas here. Indeed, the ideas of ‘transformation’ and ‘adaptation’ are central concepts in a resilience framing of the world.

The system you are interested in – be it a farm, a region, a forest or some other ecosystem – has its own identity (emerging from its structure, function and feedbacks). This system can absorb disturbance, self-organise, and still continue to sustain its identity up to a point. Push the system beyond this point, this threshold, and system loses its identity, it becomes something else.

Adaptation is about managing your system so that it holds onto its identity. It’s about stopping it from crossing a threshold or, if it does cross one, moving it back across to restore that identity (engineer a crossing to get back into a desired regime). It might even involve moving thresholds to create a larger ‘safe-operating space’.

Transformation is about creating a new and different system, to create a new way of making a living. An example comes from South Eastern Zimbabwe where, in the 1980s, ranchers transformed their cattle ranches to game hunting and safari parks when the livestock industry proved unviable.

Transformation is hard as the existing system has a lot of inertia and sunk investment. Fossil fuel companies have long resisted the growth of renewable energy; neoliberalism will defend itself to the death as will autocratic dictatorships. Or, if you want to look at a smaller scale, a farm or business or even a golf club, will take a lot of persuading to transform their enterprise into something quite different because their identity is central to their very existence (and each system has made long-term investments in staying as they are).

Transformative capacity

For transformation to occur, resilience thinking says there are three important factors needed. The first is to get beyond denial. The ‘rule of holes’ is to stop digging when you realise you’re trapped in one. If your farm, business, golf club or energy sector is not sustainable in a changing climate-ravaged world then you need to acknowledge it and accept your existing ‘identity’ might have to transform.

However, even if you accept the need for transformation, what are you going to ‘transform’ to? The second factor is the ability to explore options for transformation. A resilient society is one that encourages experimentation in order to explore options.

And, if an experiment works (if, for example, the golf club works better as a multi-function community centre producing food), the third factor needed for transformation is a capacity to upscale the successful experiment so it becomes the norm everywhere.

These three factors add up to transformative capacity, and each presents major challenges for the managers of the system. Which is why calls for transformation are often made but rarely result in anything happening at all; it’s just too difficult.

To be or not to be…

What happens instead is resistance and denial (think of 50 years of climate wars), and token efforts at adaptation (think announcements of the latest techno gadget that will improve efficiency by X%). Because, at the end of the day, no national leader is going to suggest that the identity of their country (or the many electorally important sectors that have traditionally been the strength of that country) should be transformed into something else. What they will say, instead, is that by making the existing system work better (grow faster, be more efficient, etc) we can solve the mounting challenges that confront us (thereby breaking the ‘first rule of holes’).

So, when IPBES called for ‘transformative change’ to meet the challenge of collapsing biodiversity, I say ‘good luck to them’. However, without an honest engagement with what it is they are proposing when they invoke ‘transformation’, a systems approach, I can’t see anything changing (and so far I’m right).

Adapt or transform is a pretty big choice*, it’s as fundamental as the Hamlet’s reflection with ‘to be or not to be’; because it’s all about the essence of the system we care about, its identity.

* Should you adapt or transform? Actually, it’s not a binary choice. On the surface, it may appear there’s a tension between adapting and transforming. But the tension is resolved when you consider the system at multiple scales, because making the system resilient at a regional scale, for example, may require transformational changes at lower scales. Adapting and transforming are actually complementary processes, and adaptability and transformability are complementary attributes of a resilient system.

Banner image: “So, what do you reckon, Yorick. Should we adapt or transform?” (Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, with Yorick’s skull; photographer: James Lafayette. Image by WikiImages from Pixabay)

Getting results: the first transformation of our national environmental law starts with ‘standards’

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By Peter Burnett

‘All that’s gold does not glitter’.

So opens the poem that Bilbo Baggins, a Hobbit, wrote to his cousin Frodo, the hero of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

In my last blog I argued that, underlying the definitely non-glittering recommendations of the Samuel Review of Australia’s main national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, lay policy gold, a call for five major transformations in law and policy.

The first of these was to shift from a regulatory regime that was prescriptive and focussed on processes, to one built around the setting and pursuing of national environmental outcomes.

In doing so we would get away from our current ‘box-ticking’ approach to regulation, under which decision-makers (typically the environment minister) consider various factors such as biodiversity loss and the precautionary principle but, at the end of the day, decide pretty much anything they want to.

The main driver of this shift in Professor Samuel’s recommended reforms is the creation of statutory ‘national environmental standards.’

Standards both old and new

We are already used to environmental standards in dealing with certain issues. We have, for example, had standards for ambient air quality and contaminated site remediation for decades.

But we have gone down a different track with nature conservation. Early battles focused on saving precious places from development and indeed the environment movement in Australia was built on some of these, such as the (unsuccessful) fight to save Lake Pedder in the 1970s and the (successful) fight to save the Franklin River in the 1980s.

These were more battles of the heart than the head.

Things shifted in the 1990s. Under the banner of ‘sustainable development’, or, in Australia, ‘Ecologically Sustainable Development’ (ESD), we became more focused on conserving entire landscapes and ecosystems.

But we struggled to pin down exactly what we were trying to achieve. Unable to answer the question, ‘how much environment is enough?’, something we could have worked out if we had done enough science and environmental monitoring, we defaulted to a legalistic approach in which we asked decision-makers to ‘consider’ or ‘have regard to’ certain principles such as precaution or intergenerational equity.

The trouble with such principles is that they are too general to serve as standards and instead become ‘mandatory considerations’ in discretionary decision-making (ie, boxes to be ticked).

The only real limit on this discretion-based decision-making is the ability of the courts to strike down a truly egregious decision on grounds of ‘irrationally’.

The first transformation

Discretionary, bottom-up decision-making is no way to achieve a consistent and ecologically sustainable outcome. Professor Samuel therefore recommended flipping the system on its head: spell out what an ecologically sustainable environment looks like, partly through National Environmental Standards and partly through a comprehensive environmental planning regime, and then require that individual development decisions comply with these standards and plans.

Although transformative, this change seems straight-forward enough; why haven’t we been doing this all along?

One reason is ‘path dependency’. Because many conservation problems first emerged as place-based or issue-specific concerns, we started dealing with them on a reactive, case-by-case basis. This is how our system deals with most issues, environmental or otherwise. As such it was as comfortable as a pair of old slippers — and in we slipped.

Another reason is that we haven’t had the comprehensive environmental information or the deep ecological understanding we needed to draw a line between harm that ecosystems can absorb without losing their identity (resilience), and harm that they cannot absorb. We still can’t do that precisely, although technology and good science have brought us a long way.

More significantly, it is only now that most members of the political class, and indeed a majority in society, are coming to understand and accept that if we don’t act soon, it may be too late.

What would these standards look like?

If standards are central to halting environmental decline, what would they look like? Well, the devil is in the detail, but Professor Samuel included some draft standards in his report, so I’ll use elements of the threatened species standard to give you a brief taste.

In part, this draft standard just repeats some existing formulae, for example that approved developments should not be ‘inconsistent with’ relevant recovery plans.

On the other hand, it also introduces new requirements. One of these is that decisions must take cumulative impacts into account. Another is that decisions must avoid adverse impacts to critical habitat and ensure ‘no net reduction’ of critical habitat.

Note the use of the word ‘net’, which implies that environmental offsets could be used.

So, would they work?

My general view is that Samuel’s draft standards would deliver significant marginal gains, but are not worded tightly enough to halt further major environmental decline.

Just looking at the examples above, I think the following changes (and complementary measures) are needed to make the standard strong enough to halt decline:

it is not enough that developments ‘not be inconsistent with’ recovery plans — they need to comply with plans; moreover, the plans themselves must spell things out with much greater precision than existing plans, eg by mapping critical habitat to be protected
taking cumulative impacts into account is a significant advance, but doing so requires a major national exercise in gathering and maintaining environmental data over time
if a species is to recover, decision-makers must not approve impacts to critical habitat, rather than simply ‘avoiding’ them
further, if there is to be ‘no net reduction’ in critical habitat, then offset rules would have to be so stringent that I doubt whether they can be met in practice, which probably means that the word ‘net’ should go from this requirement.

And will standards become reality?

Having National Environmental Standards would be truly transformative for environmental decision-making and in my view they could indeed be policy gold, as long as we get the detail right.

By the same token, standards lack lustre for a reason. As you can see from these brief examples, formulating the right words of protection is not that hard. The real challenge is to build political support for the tough decisions that strong standards imply.

Banner image: Good clear environmental standards could provide a pathway to transform our national environmental law into something that makes a real difference. (Image by David Salt)