The Resilience Alliance is back on track with annual meetings after Covid, and Nebraska professors Craig Allen and Gwendwr Meredith and alumnus Emily Rowen took part in the Norway meeting May 6-10.
“It's good to know that the group is still up and running and there are still new horizons to tackle in these ideas of transformations and lots of other ideas,” Allen said upon returning.
The network of scientists and practitioners discussed possibly combining with the Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society and becoming a society for social-ecological systems research. Meredith said she and others are planning to attend the PECS-III conference in Montreal in August.
The Resilience Alliance, founded in 1999, preceded PECS and came up with resilience theory. Members meet yearly to discuss new aspects and practices of resilience theory. Thirty people from around the world came to this year’s meeting and broke into five working groups.
Allen took part in discussions on food security and agricultural resilience and a working group, Pathway Diversity. This group is looking at economic ways of making systems more resilient.
Meredith took part in the Community of Practice working group, and Rowen took part in the Assessing Assessments group.
Rowen said her group is hoping to synthesize many different resilience assessments using the seven principles of resilience outlined in the book Principles for Building Resilience: Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Social-Ecological Systems.
“I came away with lots of what I'm calling ‘itchy’ ideas that I will have to scratch by looking into them further,” she said. “It's always great to see how others are thinking about resilience and implementing it in their research.”
The group stayed outside the Heathland Biosphere Reserve and toured the conservation area one day. Allen said the group typically meets in a place where research and learning on social-ecological systems is going on.
Both Meredith and Rowen stayed in Norway for an extra week to continue talks with their working groups and work on papers for publication. Meredith said her group also debriefed on the last year of Zoom meetings, set rules of engagement for future meetings, developed plans for the upcoming PECS-III conference, and developed a timeline for creating a short podcast series.
“Meeting with my collaborators was incredibly valuable,” she said. “We meet regularly on Zoom, but an in-person meeting is so much better for the collective learning process.”
Additional Photos from the Trip:
