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Measuring resilience is essential to understand it

Nature Sustainability volume 2, pages 895–897 (2019)Cite this article

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The terms sustainability, resilience and others group under the heading of ‘stability’. Their ubiquity speaks to a vital need to characterize changes in complex social and environmental systems. In a bewildering array of terms, practical measurements are essential to permit comparisons and so untangle underlying relationships.

Human population growth and aspirations for higher living standards lead to our overexploiting the land and oceans, disrupting the global climate and driving species to extinction. Ineluctably intertwined relationships between ecological, social, economic and political factors characterize these problems — a complexity that challenges our understanding of them. In the hope of gaining insights, various metrics synthesize complex changes among multiple variables seeking to permit comparisons across different kinds of measurements at widely different spatial and temporal scales. Like ‘sustainability’, ‘resilience’ is a widely used term, one of a myriad under the broad umbrella of ‘stability’.

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Fig. 1: Changes in an index of the harvest of wintering woodcocks and the US stock index.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Stuart L. Pimm

  2. School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Ian Donohue

  3. Theoretical and Experimental Ecological Station, CNRS, UPS, Moulis, France

    José M. Montoya & Michel Loreau

Authors
  1. Stuart L. Pimm
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  2. Ian Donohue
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  3. José M. Montoya
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  4. Michel Loreau
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Correspondence to Stuart L. Pimm.

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Pimm, S.L., Donohue, I., Montoya, J.M. et al. Measuring resilience is essential to understand it. Nat Sustain 2, 895–897 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0399-7

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