Another collaborative paper now available is entitled “Toward Principles for Enhancing the Resilience of Ecosystem Services” (see full citation at the bottom). This is a paper (the wonderful Oonsie Biggs as lead author) that the Resilience Alliance Young Scholars network has had accepted to the Annual Review of Environment and Resources to be in print in November. It’s currently available via the Annual Review’s online service.
The paper provides a great overview of key concepts inherent to resilience thinking and working toward sustainability. For those interested in the academic literature on the resilience of social-ecological systems, this provides an easy entry point to learn about several key components of resilience – the need for diversity (social and ecological), the importance of slow variables (and what that means), taking a complex adaptive systems approach (and what that means), and several others.
It also provides a nice means of taking a first look at ecosystem services and what these are. The paper avoids direct discussions of trade-offs among ecosystem services (like agriculture for food vs. biofuels or setting aside land for conservation vs. for provision), but these conflicts are outlined in detailed in another paper (“The Importance of Social Drivers in the Resilient Provision of Ecosystem Services” in Global Environmental Change).
The full citation is Biggs, R. et al. 2012. “Toward Principles for Enhancing the Resilience of Ecosystem Services”, Annual Review of Environment and Resources 37:3.1-28.
michaelschoon 