Realizing resilience for decision-making

Researchers and decision-makers lack a shared understanding of resilience, and practical applications in environmental resource management are rare. Here, we define social-ecological resilience as a property of social-ecological systems that includes at least three main characteristics — resistance, recovery and robustness (the ‘three Rs’). We define socio-economic resilience management as planning, adaptation and transformational actions that may influence these system characteristics. We integrate the three Rs into a heuristic for resilience management that we apply in multiple management contexts to offer practical, systematic guidance about how to realize resilience. Researchers and decision-makers lack a shared understanding of resilience. Here, the authors define social-ecological resilience as including three characteristics of social-ecological systems — resistance, recovery and robustness — and show how this framework can help resilience management.