Transcript North Spit, Tuktoyaktuk © Parewick, 2005 Things Change, We Change: Planning for Community Resilience in the Canadian Arctic When Things Change How do human.

North Spit, Tuktoyaktuk
© Parewick, 2005
Things Change, We Change: Planning for Community Resilience in the Canadian Arctic
When Things Change
How do human communities cope with change and uncertainty? What distinguishes the
community that bounces back from hard knocks and the one that comes apart at the seams? Is
there a formula for community resilience?
Resilience
Complex Adaptive Systems
Human communities are complex adaptive systems: every one exhibiting its own composite
of dynamic traits and social-ecological linkages on a number of scales. Interpreting Holling’s
representation of the adaptive cycle, a window of opportunity occurs during the uncertain
backloop of a system’s response to disturbance which favours novelty and experimentation.
Just such a window has opened in the Canadian Arctic in response
to increasingly apparent climate change. Coastal communities
There are pursuing practical local solutions to problems occasioned
by rising sea levels, decreasing sea ice extent and duration,
increased wave action, declining water levels in rivers and
lakes, permafrost melting, and unpredictable weather.
Source: Berkes et al., 2003, after Holling, 1986
The Adaptive Cycle
A stylized Mobius strip tracing ecosystem phases
of exploitation (or growth), conservation, release
(“creative destruction” or collapse) and
reorganization. Resilience is the third dimension
missing in this image: it expands and contracts
with the various system phases to alternately
emphasize conservative and creative adaptive
strategies.
© Parewick, 2005
Ground ice profile,Tuktoyaktuk ice house wall
Panarchy
© Parewick, 2005
Rapid erosion at Angus Lake (to
left), west of Sachs Harbour. Note
recently realigned ATV trail and
proximity of Sachs River (right) .
“The capacity of a system to absorb disturbance, undergo
change and still retain essentially the same function,
structure, identity, and feedbacks.”
Source: Resilience Alliance (www.resalliance.org)
The Resilient Community
“A resilient community is one that takes intentional action
to enhance the personal and collective capacity of
its citizens and institutions to respond to and influence
the course of social and economic change.
Shoreline floodplain, Tuktoyaktuk
Acknowledgements
Partners in this project to date include the communities of Sachs Harbour and
Tuktoyaktuk, NWT, and Gjoa Haven and Arctic Bay, NU; the Municipal and
Community Affairs Department of the Government of the Northwest Territories;
Natural Resources Canada; the Aurora Research Institute; the Northern Science
Training Program; the Climate Change Impacts and Adaptations Program; the
Knowledge, Outreach and Awareness Program of Infrastructure Canada, and a host
of wonderful individuals too numerous to list here.
Presented at the Arctic Coastal
Dynamics Workshop – Groningen
The Netherlands, October 2006
Source: Gunderson and Holling, 2002
General Sustainability Model
Community planning is cyclical function. It is a vehicle for
regularly revisiting collective circumstances in a public sphere in
order to guide development-related decision-making. The
general sustainability model argues for management approaches
that emphasize learning and the enhancement of system
resilience. This project proposes a series of community-guided,
researcher-facilitated case studies towards the development of a
“learning” model of planning that will better account for factors
the community sees as contributing to its resilience.
This project recognizes that these established mechanisms for managing local change
represent both a body of accumulated experience to be mined as well as key
community functions that should be explored by those seeking to understand and
support community adaptation.
Planning for Resilience
This project uses community land use planning process as a vehicle for examining
climate change adaptation in four case study hamlets. Open, community-guided
planning exercises informed by participatory action methodology and principles
derived from resilience theory are facilitated by the researcher in each collaborating
community. Findings from related research are introduced as part of the planning
process in order to integrate ongoing climate change science with local knowledge
and practical, local governance functions. Engaging community members in timely
knowledge-sharing, discussion, analysis and planning respecting their ongoing
adaptation is an immediate objective of this project, with the longer-term goal being
the fostering of social learning and institutional “memory” in support and enhance
community sustainability.
…resilience is not a fixed quality within communities.
Rather, it is a quality that can be developed
and strengthened over time.”
Source: The Community Resilience Manual, 2000
“We really don’t believe scientists anymore because they
never report anything. Why don’t they give information to us and
why don’t they want to know from us?”
Louie Autut, Chesterfield Inlet
© Parewick, 2005
Condemned shoreline housing, Sachs Harbour
“A nested set of adaptive
cycles at different scales, that
exhibits cross-scale
interactions”
Comparison of Community Planning and Resilience Approaches
Conventional Municipal Plan Characteristics
Resilience Assessment Characteristics
(after Hodge, 1998)
(after The Community Resilience Manual, 2000)
Source: Leduc (in press)
Four Dimensions of Community Resilience
People
Organizations
Source: Resilience Alliance
Panarchial Connections
© Parewick, 2005
A central theme in Resilience Alliance research is that conventional management
concepts must be revisited keeping the inherently unpredictable nature of adaptive
systems in mind. Addressing community challenges – be they economic,
environmental, social, or health-related – at the local level has long been a job for
community members active or employed in local government, community services,
law enforcement, and a host of related non-governmental organizations. Community
planning and development work comprise a suite of institutionalized practices that
have evolved in support of their efforts to keep pace with the continual adaptation
needed to sustain their populations.
[email protected]
These questions are being addressed by a number of disciplines. A community development
worker will have one perspective. Community health staff have another. Disaster management
practitioners are also pursuing these themes as they look beyond crises to recovery and
mitigation. And every community will have its own ideas too.
For some time, scientists in such diverse fields as ecology and economics have been studying
complex systems in order to better understand and model the world around us. Reductionist
thinking has failed to capture the multiple networks of repeated interactions that characterize
relationships between individual agents and environments. Feedback loops, cascading effects
and symbiotic behaviours count amongst the expressions of complexity arising from evolving,
intertwined systems. Early study of transformational processes in ecosystems
(C.S.Holling,1986) has been built upon in recent years by a multidisciplinary group of
collaborators known as the Resilience Alliance.
When We Change
Kathleen Parewick
Department of Geography, Memorial University, St. John’s
Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada
As postulated by Gunderson and Holling (2002), there are two nested
system connections which are fundamental to adaptive capacity. The
“revolt” connection can cause changes in one social-ecological cycle
to destabilize a larger and slower one. The “remember” connection
aids renewal by drawing down the accumulated knowledge residing
in a larger, slower cycle. Envisioning the community in these
panarchic terms, local governance
institutions reside at an intermediate level between shorter
cycles of individual, familial and operational knowledge and
adaptation, and those larger ones of the indigenous
worldview and a host of external factors.
Source: Berkes et al., 2003, adapted from
Gunderson and Holling (2002)
Core features:
 Focused on physical environment and infrastructure
 Long-range and forward-looking (10-20 years)
 Takes a comprehensive view of community circumstances
 Establishes general, broad-based development policy and guidance
Core Features:
 Focused on people, organizations and capacity-building
 Forward-looking but reflecting on past experience
 Takes a multi-function, sustainable system approach
 Offers broad-based perspective on community processes
Generally also includes:
 Ties to social and economic objectives
 Detailed planning analyses
 Staged implementation
 Capital improvements guide
 Community design guidelines
Outcomes emphasizing:
 Strategic allocation of internal resources
 Leveraging of outside resource
 Strengthened local ownership
 Citizen involvement in decision-making and implementation
 Integrated social and economic goals
Community mobilization and collaboration as a means to
progress
Standard contents: statistical profile and projections; descriptions of
existing conditions and anticipated development; development goals
and objectives; binding policy statements regarding various classes of
development (i.e. residential, commercial, transportation, public
institutions…). Detailed implementation usually administered through
companion development regulations or by-laws.
Standard contents: community “portrait” incorporating
qualitative information concerning local attitudes, organization
and communication and an inventory of keystone resilience
factors; statements of community issues, goals and resiliencebuilding priorities; best practice summaries; and consensus-based
local action plan.
Resources
Relationships
References
Berkes, Colding and Folke (2003). Navigating Social-Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for
Complexity and Change. Cambridge University Press.
Centre for Community Enterprise (2000). The Community Resilience Manual: A Resource for Rural
Recovery and Renewal. CCE-distributed on-line via www.cedworks.com
Hodge (1998). Planning Canadian Communities: An Introduction to the Principles, Practice and
Participants (Third Edition). Methuen.
Holling (1986). The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems: local surprise and global change.
In Sustainable Development of the Biosphere (Clark and Munn, eds.), Cambridge University Press.
Gunderson and Holling, eds. (2002). Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural
Systems. Island Press.
Leduc (in press). Inuit Economic Adaptations for a Changing Global Climate. Paper presentation at
Canadian Society of Ecological Economics Conference, October 2005.
Resilience Alliance website - www.resalliance.org