Resilience and adaptation

Resilience has long been closely linked with sustainability. Aspects of resilience, especially self-sufficiency and self-reliance, are commonly encountered within land-managers’ understandings and practices of sustainability. Broadly defined as a system’s capacity to recover from disturbance or ‘shock’, actions to build ecological, social and economic resiliencies relating to land are critical to achieving sustainability. Achieving resilience and adaptation have become central aims of government policy responses to a range of land-centred environmental threats including drought and flooding, climate change, and energy security.

Resilience focused analysis needs to consider types of disturbance (environmental, political, or socio-economic), system vulnerabilities, resistance and recovery, adaptive strategies and practices, diversity, and system autonomy. Fundamental analysis is also required of transitional pathways whereby vulnerable land systems can safely shift to new, more ‘stable’ arrangements, and of the impacts of these changes.

Research at Bangor focused on resilience and adaptation includes:

• Future Oak
• Bangor DIVERSE
• Blight resistance in tomatoes