Resilience in Practice: BRIDGES students learn how to design Resilience Assessments

Resilience thinking generates new insights and perspectives into old problems:

University of Idaho Resilience Assessment Workshop in Moscow, Idaho, March 22-24. 

Workshop facilitator Paul Ryan of the Australian Resilience Centre shared his wealth of experience in assessing system resilience, both at the theoretical level and as a practice helping communities to anticipate and respond strategically to the threats of a changing climate. In small groups, participants worked through the basic steps of a simulated basin-scale resilience assessment process. By identifying our model system's drivers and feedback loops, and the thresholds/tipping points between different potential states, we were able to come up with ideas for targeted actions directed toward those aspects of the overall dynamic system we could best influence. While attendee affiliations were skewed towards the natural sciences, social sciences were also represented in healthy numbers, and interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration ended up driving many of the small-group planning and brainstorming sessions. Both directly through anecdote, and indirectly by example, Ryan effectively demonstrated the value of good facilitation skills in collaborative planning environments.