2011 – the year of living resiliently?

Published in the February 2011 edition of the TCPA Journal

Experiencing periodic shocks is a normal state for any system – but while our current response to is try to minimise the frequency of such shocks, we should focus more on increasing our ability to deal with them when they do occur, says Riki Therivel

Looking back, 2010 seems to have been the year of shocks. The volcanic eruption in Iceland stranded thousands of travellers, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill severely affected coastal communities in the southern US, the continued financial crisis led to widespread job cuts, the worst snow in decades paralysed much of the country’s transport system, and most recently Northern Ireland suffered water problems. The planning system is reeling from Eric Pickles’ changes, and Eric Pickles is presumably reeling from CALA Homes’ successful legal challenges.

2011 can only be calmer... or can it? The Queensland floods may well only be the opening salvo to yet another year of shocks. Looking back over the years, shocks are, in fact, the status quo at all levels, from the global to the personal. 2009 saw the collapse of Iceland’s banking system, the swine flu ‘pandemic’, a worldwide reshuffling of political priorities in response to Obama’s presidency, and an unusually cold winter; 2008 the trebling and then plunging of oil prices and the nationalisation of several UK banks; 2007 the UK floods and the start of the credit crisis; 2006 a heat wave and the Avian flu ‘pandemic’ scare; and on it goes backwards in time through more floods and heat crises, London bombings, 9/11, foot and mouth, the petrol crisis, changes in government, wars, hunger and plagues, back to Neolithic times.

During any given decade, only the rare person will not have contact with birth, death, new relationships and the dissolution of old ones, illness, changes in employment or other abrupt changes in their living arrangements.

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we know that there will be shocks; we just don’t know what the shocks will be.

Thinking about how socio-economic and environmental systems operate, this makes sense. A period of slow growth and accumulation – the growth of a woodland, formation of a community group, a seed turning into a bean plant – is typically followed by a period of decline, which can be quite short and sharp. The woodland burns down, a key member of the community group moves away, the bean plant dies with the first frost. This is the shock. Depending on the system’s resilience, the end result can be a re-organisation into an equally ‘good’ new state, for instance a charred field with young trees growing in it, or it can be a decline to a worse state, like the dissolution of the community group or the current situation in Haiti. Fig. 1 shows this in picture form.

Once a system has sunk to a worse state, it can be disproportionately difficult to get back to the better state. The final trigger that causes a pond to eutrophy or an economic system to collapse – to cross its tipping point – will often be much smaller than the effort needed to make the pond or economic system healthy again. Fig. 2 shows this.

Those systems that have slower, larger-scale cycles of growth, accumulation, decline and re-organisation typically act as buffers for smaller, faster systems. The climate, soil bacteria, global economic systems, or social networks built up by long-time residents can act as reservoirs of stability for the occasional oil spill, mortgage failure, or person who cannot shovel their drive after a snowfall. But when these slow, large-scale systems themselves are progressively worn down, then their ability to act as buffers declines. The threshold at which the systems go into a state of decline gets reduced, a bit like one epileptic seizure reducing the threshold at which another seizure gets triggered.

What does all of this mean for the planning system, particularly in the brave new age of Neighbourhood Plans and National Policy Statements? One option – the predominant response of developed countries over the last few decades – is to try to minimise shocks. We have been building higher flood defences, requiring infrastructure providers to adhere to given standards of service, and establishing international monetary or climate change protocols to try to prevent unwanted change. This has facilitated increasing levels of efficiency, but also makes us complacent and dependent on the standards and protocols to deal with all eventualities. Clearly this approach has not worked.

Resilience

Another option is to accept that shocks will happen, and to increase our ability to deal with them – our resilience. The Resilience Alliance has been researching how this can be done, and has developed values to help increase our resilience. Not all of them lend themselves directly to the planning system, but some of them do, particularly if we think beyond the confines of Local Development Documents and Local Development Plans:

o Embrace variability rather than control it. Instead of increased flood defences, ‘just in time’ production, and air conditioning, this would involve designing homes to cope with floods, having industrial processes that can cope with delayed parts, and having windows that open in offices and trains. Controversially, it might mean people accepting that there may be an occasional power outage or water shortage. The Highways Agency’s road signs on motorways which recommend slower speeds in response to upcoming traffic problems are a good example of responding to variability.

o Build in redundancy or duplication, so that if one aspect fails the other one can take over. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill would have been a minor blip for BP if the oil platform had had a back-up blow-out preventer. When the Icelandic volcano erupted, people who were travelling somewhere that could be reached by train or car as well as by air – duplicate transport modes – were able to get home relatively quickly. Homes that have rainwater collectors and wood-burning stoves will be able to cope with the occasional water or power outage better than those that do not. Communities with ‘spare’ land can convert this to food production or temporary shelter if necessary.

o Maintain a degree of modularity or disconnectedness, since over-connected systems are susceptible to shocks and transmit them rapidly. In the Middle Ages, villages would shut themselves off during times of plague. This is much harder to do in today’s interlinked world, but modern equivalents are dikes and noise bunds, security barriers at airports, gated communities, and measures to prevent the spread of foot and mouth disease or invasive species such as the ‘killer’ shrimp.

o Recognise the importance of slow variables like carbon cycles, biodiversity, our health, and a sense of community. Although slow variables can cope with individual minor shocks, a drip-feed of shocks can weaken them, with severe consequences down the line. A steady trickle of greenhouse gas emissions is now leading to climate change. Smoking or lack of exercise affects our health over time, making us more vulnerable to smaller shocks like colds. Defra’s promotion of the importance of ecosystem services is an example of this approach. It would also mean giving greater weight in decision-making to things like high-quality agricultural land, water cycles, and established social networks.

o Create tighter feedback loops between human actions and environmental outcomes. Many of our impacts occur away from us: in other countries where our food is grown and our clothes are manufactured, or in other parts of the UK where our energy is produced and waste disposed. If, instead, we all had to live like the residents of the Biosphere experiment who survived in a closed three-acre structure for two years, our behaviour would rapidly adapt: we would pump out less air pollution, manage our waste more carefully, and think carefully about what we acquire. NIMBYism would disappear since everything would be in our back yards. Examples of this approach include greater emphasis on re-use and recycling (for example of building materials), environmental taxes and subsidies such as the vehicle tax and the renewable energy Feed-In Tariff, charging by weight for household waste disposal, community ownership of infrastructure projects, and carbon quotas.

o Promote and sustain diversity in all forms (environmental, social and economic). This principle runs counter to the common approach to decision-making, which promotes efficiency, targets and guarantees, but it is diversity that allows us to respond to change in different ways and provides a source of future options. This approach also involves promoting experimentation, pilot projects, leadership and locally developed rules. The Merton Rule, South Hams District Council’s temporary planning permission for the Landmatters permaculture community, and NESTA’s Neighbourhood Challenge programme (see http://www.nesta.org.uk/areas_of_work/public_services_lab/neighbourhood_challenge)are examples. Community-led plans – for instance those detailed at www.clp-se.org.uk – already provide impressive examples of diverse, locally developed rules.

Putting resilience thinking into practice

Transition Towns/Initiatives that aim to respond to the challenges of peak oil and climate change already exemplify many aspects of resilience thinking, and could act as a model for future neighbourhood planning. These locally-led initiatives aim to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, promote shorter supply chains and fewer ‘food miles’, support local businesses, and promote individual responsibility for our actions.

Local Development Documents, National Policy Statements and other plans and policies could help to promote the values that increase resilience, for instance through actions like the ones listed above.

Incorporating questions about resilience into Environmental Impact Assessments and Strategic Environmental Assessments is another approach. This could be as simple as asking whether the proposed project or plan helps to embrace variability, build in duplication and modularity, support slow variables and diversity, and build in tighter feedback loops. A more comprehensive approach to resilience assessment is set out by the Resilience Alliance, and involves identifying resilience of what and to what, key players, models of change, alternate states, interactions between thresholds, assessment against resilience attributes, and implications for management interventions.

Resilience also has a personal dimension: perhaps a starting point is to aim to individually become more resilient in 2011. Given all the changes that are likely to take place, we will certainly need to be.

o Riki Therivel is a partner of Levett-Therivel, and a Visiting Professor at Oxford Brookes University’s Department of Planning. The views expressed here are personal.

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Sources of further information on putting resilience thinking into practice

o Resilience Alliance – www.resalliance.org/

o Transition Network – www.transitionnetwork.org/

o Low Carbon Communities – www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/what_we_do/consumers/lc_communities/lc_communities.aspx

Fig. 1 Cycles of (inexorable) change

Adapted from Resilience Alliance (2007) Assessing resilience in social-ecological systems, http://www.resalliance.org/index.php/resilience_assessment

Fig. 2 It is much easier to stay in a better state than to re-emerge from a worse state

Adapted from B. Walker and D. Salt (2006) Resilience thinking, Island Press, Washington.