With all likelihood high complexity is the most evident and dramatic characteristic of not just the economy; it is also the hallmark of our lives. In a complex economy conventional risk management, risk rating and business intelligence technologies are becoming dangerously outdated. The tools and solutions presented in this book have been architectured specifically for turbulence and for a complex economy dominated by shocks, destabilizing events and instability. In particular, the book proposes a new rating model based on resilience, the capacity to withstand such shocks, beyond the increasingly irrelevant but still popular idea of Probability of Default (PoD). Moreover, it is shown how in an interconnected economy rating single companies provides little insight as to its state of health and sustainability and how large-scale systemic analyses of ecosystems of corporations can provide new knowledge and new insights for the global investor. Finally, new approaches to asset allocation and portfolio design based on complexity and resilience are introduced.
Global environmental change is occurring at a rate faster than humans have ever experienced. Climate change and the loss of ecosystem services are the two main global environmental crises facing us today. As a result, there is a need for better understanding of the specific and general resilience of networked ecosystems, cities, organisations and institutions to cope with change. In this book, an international team of experts provide cutting-edge insights into building the resilience and adaptive governance of complex social-ecological systems. Through a set of case studies, it focuses on the social science dimension of ecosystem management in the context of global change, in a move to bridge existing gaps between resilience, sustainability and social science. Using empirical examples ranging from local to global levels, views from a variety of disciplines are integrated to provide an essential resource for scholars, policy-makers and students, seeking innovative approaches to governance.
Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency. "Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change, and seeks to understand the qualities of a system that must be maintained or enhanced in order to achieve sustainability. It explains why greater efficiency by itself cannot solve resource problems and offers a constructive alternative that opens up options rather than closing them down. In Resilience Thinking, scientist Brian Walker and science writer David Salt present an accessible introduction to the emerging paradigm of resilience. The book arose out of appeals from colleagues in science and industry for a plainly written account of what resilience is all about and how a resilience approach differs from current practices. Rather than complicated theory, the book offers a conceptual overview along with five case studies of resilience thinking in the real world. It is an engaging and important work for anyone interested in managing risk in a complex world.
Engineering within Ecological Constraints presents a rare dialogue between engineers and environmental scientists as they consider the many technical as well as social and legal challenges of ecologically sensitive engineering. The volume looks at the concepts of scale, resilience, and chaos as they apply to the points where the ecological life support system of nature interacts with the technological life support system created by humankind. Among the questions addressed are: What are the implications of differences between ecological and engineering concepts of efficiency and stability? How can engineering solutions to immediate problems be made compatible with long-term ecological concerns? How can we transfer ecological principles to economic systems? The book also includes important case studies on such topics as water management in southern Florida and California and oil exploration in rain forests. From its conceptual discussions to the practical experience reflected in case studies, this volume will be important to policymakers, practitioners, researchers, educators, and students in the fields of engineering, environmental science, and environmental policy.
This book interprets how ancient civilizations responded to various stresses, including environmental change, warfare, and the fragmentation of political institutions. It focuses on what happened during and after the decline of once powerful regimes, and posits that they experienced social resilience and transformation instead of collapse.
Discover how to transform stress and other unwanted states into resilience, clarity, and improved wellbeing with this insightful new book Resilience By Design: How to Survive and Thrive in a Complex and Turbulent World delivers the world’s most detailed and research-backed how-to manual to integrate advances from neuroscience and complexity theory with real world expertise, providing practical techniques that you'll want to use every day. Alongside well explained scientific theory, each chapter contains dramatic, real-life stories of people from frontline services, elite sports, and everyday survivors who learned to thrive in high pressure, demanding, and often deadly situations. You'll discover how resilience isn’t just the ability to tough it out; it's dependent upon an interconnected set of skills, techniques, creative processes, and new understandings of how we think, act, and interact with our environments and each other. If you or someone you care about experiences unwanted stress, anxiety, decision fatigue, overwhelm, or burnout, by applying the step-by-step techniques in this book, you'll learn to develop resilience, clarity, improved energy, wellbeing, and overall performance. You'll also learn: There's no such thing as an inherently stressful situation, workplace, or event. How to appreciate and benefit from the hidden information in your unconscious signals and intuitions How to adapt your decision making to meet the challenges of uncertainty, from the complicated and complex, to the outright chaotic When to define your limits and 'line in the sand' so that you never expose yourself to unmanageable risk or potential burnout What is it to, 'Know Thyself', through techniques that change perspective and bring clarity even in uncertain, turbulent times Techniques that can be easily taught to people you care about Lifelong resilience and being at your best is available to each of us, no matter what life throws at you. Resilience By Design was derived from the experiences of hundreds of people on the frontline of emergency services, defense, Olympic level sports, business, art, science, and many other areas of expertise—from firefighters and paramedics to social workers and athletes. This book is written for students and teachers, parents and children, caregivers and patients, athletes and coaches, managers and employees, entrepreneurs, and fortune 500 CEOs, and anyone who wishes to know how to survive and thrive in an ever more complex and turbulent world.
The book describes what it means to say the world is complex and explores what that means for managers, policy makers and individuals. The first part of the book is about the theory and ideas of complexity. This is explained in a way that is thorough but not mathematical. It compares differing approaches, and also provides a historical perspective, showing how such thinking has been around since the beginning of civilisation. It emphasises the difference between a complexity worldview and the dominant mechanical worldview that underpins much of current management practice. It defines the complexity worldview as recognising the world is interconnected, shaped by history and the particularities of context. The comparison of the differing approaches to modelling complexity is unique in its depth and accessibility. The second part of the book uses this lens of complexity to explore issues in the fields of management, strategy, economics, and international development. It also explores how to facilitate others to recognise the implications of adopting a complex rather than a mechanical worldview and suggests methods of research to explore systemic, path-dependent emergent aspects of situations. The authors of this book span both science and management, academia and practice, thus the explanations of science are authoritative and yet the examples of changing how you live and work in the world are real and accessible. The aim of the book is to bring alive what complexity is all about and to illustrate the importance of loosening the grip of a modernist worldview with its hope for prediction, certainty and control.
Ecological resilience provides a theoretical foundation for understanding how complex systems adapt to and recover from localized disturbances like hurricanes, fires, pest outbreaks, and floods, as well as large-scale perturbations such as climate change. Ecologists have developed resilience theory over the past three decades in an effort to explain surprising and nonlinear dynamics of complex adaptive systems. Resilience theory is especially important to environmental scientists for its role in underpinning adaptive management approaches to ecosystem and resource management. Foundations of Ecological Resilience is a collection of the most important articles on the subject of ecological resilience—those writings that have defined and developed basic concepts in the field and help explain its importance and meaning for scientists and researchers. The book’s three sections cover articles that have shaped or defined the concepts and theories of resilience, including key papers that broke new conceptual ground and contributed novel ideas to the field; examples that demonstrate ecological resilience in a range of ecosystems; and articles that present practical methods for understanding and managing nonlinear ecosystem dynamics. Foundations of Ecological Resilience is an important contribution to our collective understanding of resilience and an invaluable resource for students and scholars in ecology, wildlife ecology, conservation biology, sustainability, environmental science, public policy, and related fields.
This ground-breaking Handbook presents a state-of-the-art exploration of entropy, complexity and spatial dynamics from fundamental theoretical, empirical and methodological perspectives. It considers how foundational theories can contribute to new advances, including novel modeling and empirical insights at different sectoral, spatial and temporal scales.
Increasingly, segments of the civil infrastructure are considered to be parts of larger systems, which requires a systems approach for a fuller and proper understanding of and solutions to problems. Unfortunately, the subject of a system or a systems approach is barely covered in a standard civil and environmental engineering curriculum. Most, if not all, civil engineering problems involve interdependency, and hence segmented approaches of learning one individual topic at a time make it difficult for students to learn, understand, and apply rational concepts for the design, construction, and maintenance of larger infrastructure components. System Dynamics for Complex Problems in Pavement Engineering presents an introduction to a systems approach to help readers evolve and develop their capabilities of learning, communicating, and researching through system dynamics modeling and experimentation. Furthermore, it helps students appreciate the need for systems thinking in modeling, analyzing, and proposing solutions for multidisciplinary problems in pavement engineering.
