Background/Objectives
Deep uncertainty describes a novel crisis in decision making: the analytical inability to distinguish between the likelihood of quite divergent future pathways, some of which may have disruptive and consequential economic, social and ecological impacts. Deep resilience has recently been proposed as a term to describe an emerging new class of climate change adaptation and resilience interventions to address the crisis of deep uncertainty. Deep resilience has been used to describe a new set of approaches that explicitly link problems as divergent as flood and drought prevention for the same location and sharing critical resources between energy, agriculture, and cities. By focusing on the need for resilient interactions across systems and between projects, proposed solutions may become more cohesive and coherent to promote cross-sectoral and systemic resilience, especially for the emerging practice and need for climate adaptation to address challenges with large scale and systemic climate transformation -- with the latter a major new emphasis in the outcomes from Dubai's COP28 in late 2023. When decision makers assume that deep uncertainty is a defining quality of these problems, proposed solutions can make uncertainty-tolerant use of ecosystems and nature-based solutions (NbS), governance systems, and dynamic freshwater resources in ways that play to their strengths rather than to mask their gaps through narrowly defined climate projections.
Rather than using a surgeon's narrow focus, we believe that deep uncertainty requires a comprehensive, holistic, interlocking approach to resilience and adaptation. We will present cases of applying deep resilience approaches to planning, policy, and infrastructure design and operations worldwide. Our hope for this talk is to promote a more substantive approach to resilience that draws on a more global and systematic set of lessons.
Approach/Activities
By analyzing some of the large-scale projects and project-level adaptation and resilience development methodologies emerging globally, we have identified what we believe to be the issues and qualities necessary to mainstream more inclusive, coherent, and effective approaches to climate risk assessment. Already, we see key institutions, such as the UK development agency FCDO, advocating for deep resilience in their programs and investments as a way to move out of silos and towards implementing more integrated approaches.
Results/Lessons Learned
Our sense is that many institutions -- especially global finance institutions -- are shifting from simple de-risking using a handful of climate model outputs to considering a much broader array of potential drivers and interactions. We believe there is a large movement from de-risking to resilience. The transition to systems thinking and managing with complexity is critical and timely.
Early insights from our work on deep resilience reveal that over-predictive and narrowly focused approaches to climate adaptation, especially for specific sectors or infrastructure investments that interact with other systems, are more likely to multiply risks and create "brittle" solutions, often with little adaptation substance. Problem definition and analytical assessments undertaken early in a project require significant revision, as do implementation and monitoring. These are the areas where deep resilience has proven useful as a concept. Moreover, nature-based approaches are more credible through a deep resilience framing, since the project emphasis shifts to how ecosystem services may themselves be responsive, dynamic, and increasingly uncertain with ongoing climate change. Deep resilience emphasizes how we can manage projects to play to these qualities as strengths given an evolving climate.