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Resilience thinking: A review of key concepts

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Enhancing landscape resilience is gaining traction as a way to address the triple challenge: ensuring the well-being of a growing global human population, while mitigating and adapting to climate change, and reversing biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. Resilience theory provides a framework for understanding how social-ecological systems persist, adapt, and transform in response to disturbances and changes, whether predictable or not. From a literature review, this paper identifies and discusses eight critical attributes likely to foster resilience of complex adaptive social-ecological systems: integrity, diversity, redundancy, connectivity, flexibility, participation, effective polycentric and multi-layered governance, and accountability. Embracing these attributes helps maintain or build resilient systems that can navigate uncertainty and surprise.

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17528/cifor-icraf/009316
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