The roles and potential of resilience-based management for sustainable decision-making in geoengineering

In its most general conceptualization, resilience refers to a natural, social, or engineered system’s capacity to absorb shocks, adapt, and recover. Resilience has gained significant traction across technical and non-technical disciplines. The multidisciplinary adoption of resilience has led to a wealth of conceptual and operational declinations.

Engineering research has led to the formulation of a quantitative framework in which resilience is defined as the capability of a system to attain and maintain a target level of functionality over a pre-determined time interval (for instance, the service life of an engineered geostructure). Correspondingly, a resilience index is defined operationally as the integral of a functionality metric over a control period. Functionality is parameterized for multiple “dimensions” of a system representing its physical, environmental, financial, and institutional projections among others. Resilience indices pertaining to the respective dimensions can be aggregated to obtain a multidimensional index.

The adoption of a resilience-based paradigm in geoengineering disciplines would foster ethical decision-making for at least five main reasons.

First, the operational definition of resilience is closely related to sustainability as the modeling and estimation of resilience requires a forward-looking approach to the future evolution of a geosystem. Maximizing resilience entails the pursuit of sustainability and vice versa. The necessity of acknowledging and modeling the dynamic nature of geosystems forces researchers, practitioners, decision-makers and other stakeholders to focus on processes such as climate change, whose effects would need to be addressed quantitatively in analysis and design.

Second, the resilience modeling process allows a multi-level (i.e., dimension-specific and/or aggregate) insight into the resilience of a geosystem and, consequently, facilitates the adoption of rational and holistic decision support systems. This perspective fosters multidisciplinary interactions and a more collective and non-sectorial strategic planning for the adaptive management of geosystems.

Third, the possibility to explicitly model the environmental resilience of geoengineering design and the inclusion of environmental resilience in decision-making systems would foster the wider adoption of environmentally and financially sustainable technical options such as nature-based solutions.

Fourth, requiring the explicit consideration of the future stages of a geosystem would stimulate and accelerate the ongoing transition of geoengineering design paradigms to evolutionary formats involving a greater use of observational and non-deterministic (e.g., reliability-based, performance-based) approaches in which uncertainties are modelled, processed, and reported explicitly. Such transition is ethically virtuous as it steers geoengineering design towards a higher technical standard and towards a more explicit pursual of adaptive management and sustainable cost-performance optimization.  

Fifth, the promotion of a resilience-based culture could support decision-makers and regulators in adopting forward-thinking and sustainable strategies due to an enhanced understanding by society of the importance of accounting for medium- and long-term effects of management actions in lieu of only focusing on short-term efficiency.

This study presents illustrates the main features of the resilience modeling framework in the context of geoengineering, provides insights into the correspondences between conceptual aspects and operational implications of the resilience-based paradigm, and discusses its implications for ethical and sustainability-oriented decision-making.