The 2025 Resilience Alliance short course is being offered in collaboration with the Society for Social-Ecological Systems (SocSES).

The course is designed for graduate students (Masters and PhD) and post-doctoral researchers. It will be delivered online the week of October 27-31, by a team of international scholars.

Returning to an online format, this week-long course will draw on the expertise of scholars in the RA network to explore key resilience concepts in the context of climate change. The program is designed to facilitate collaboration and learning among a diverse network of students and researchers from around the world. Approximately 25 applicants will be accepted to participate in the course.

THEME
Resilience science and climate change. For this year's edition, the course aims to apply a resilience lens to climate change. We will focus on foundational resilience concepts and research methods used in studying social-ecological systems with an emphasis on place-based case studies. Topics will draw on the expertise of the lecturers and include: resilience foundations, urban systems and climate justice, the SETS framework (Social Ecological Technological Systems), approaches to transformative change with insights from IPBES, and ecosystem services in production landscapes with climate change conflicts.

FORMAT
The five-day course will be asynchronous with two online sessions daily, that combine lectures, group discussions, applied activities, and offline readings. Participants will meet for two 75-minute sessions each day. Most sessions will be between the hours of 15:00 - 18:00 UTC. Additional sessions held outside of these hours will be offered and recorded to accommodate multiple time zones. A course pack with the full program, readings, and other material will be shared one month in advance. Attendees are expected to participate fully throughout the course.

LECTURERS
Allyson Quinlan (Convener) - Resilience Alliance, Canada
Reinette Biggs - University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
Garry Peterson - Stockholm Resilience Center, Sweden
Steven Lade - Australia National University & SRC
Marta Berbes - University of Waterloo, Canada
Michael Schoon - Arizona State University, USA
Natalia Aristizabel - McGill University, Canada

HOW TO APPLY
Post-graduate students (Masters & PhD) and early-career researchers are invited to apply by completing the online application form. We are seeking to gather a diverse team of participants from across the globe, with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. We want to know your motivations for participating in the course.

Click here to submit your application.

Application deadline is September 5, 2025.

COST
There is no fee to apply. Students accepted for the course will be required to pay a registration fee of $150 USD for SocSES members and $300 USD for non-members. A limited number of grants are available to qualifying students who are unable to fund their attendance.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

www.resalliance.org/courses

Please direct any questions to Allyson Quinlan (editor@resalliance.org)

In collaboration with the Global Ecovillage Network, a resilience assessment of 20 communities spanning 18 months, brought together nearly 60 people from communities in 18 countries. Between October 2022 and May 2024, the global Community of Practice (CoP) met regularly online to learn about resilience, share stories of climate change impacts and risks, and to organize local workshops and activities.

In this way the CoP members were guided in a resilience assessment process that benefitted from connecting across cultures, regions and languages by sharing and discussing outputs, producing detailed reports, and listening and learning from one another.

The resilience assessment of 20 ecovillage communities was structured using the Wayfinder guide and was one component of a large, ambitious project coordinated by the Global Ecovillage Network, that was funded by The Rasmussen Foundation and involved a whole system approach to better understanding Ecovillage resilience in the context of a global polycrisis and +2.5 degree global warming scenario.

As part of the social-ecological resilience assessment, community representatives worked closely with co-leads Allyson Quinlan and Anna Kovasna to co-create 31 indicators that align with a set of six well established resilience attributes. The co-produced Resilience Tracker tool was then applied in each community to provide a state of resilience picture for each community and to compare common strengths and weaknesses across the network.

A follow up project beginning April 2025 will include further advances with the Resilience Tracker tool linking to local monitoring practices and the development of guidance on community-based early warning systems.

Link to the full report: Ecovillage Resilience, Collaborative Pathways for Navigating the Polycrisis

The value of in-person meetings for an international network of researchers cannot be overstated. We made the most of this rare opportunity to reconnect with colleagues and friends, while working to share research updates and synthesize findings across a set of projects at the forefront of resilience practice. 

Building on the outputs of five separate research teams that are all looking at different aspects of resilience assessment and measurement, a synthesis group began the process of creating a toolbox framework to guide researchers and practitioners towards selecting tools for different contexts and purposes. With six manuscripts at different stages of development, we are looking forward to sharing this work over the coming months. 

A strength of the RA has always been how the network brings together researchers at different stages in their careers. The last two gatherings in particular saw most of the working groups being led by early-career researchers, providing valuable experience while also bringing forth new ideas and ways of working together and laying the foundation for continued and future collaborations.  

In addition to advancing the resilience assessment toolkit, we were treated to guest presentations on place-based research while visiting the Nordhordland biosphere reserve and connecting with researchers from the University of Bergen.

The 2024 RA science meeting was made possible with support from the Vkrf Rasmussen Foundation.

Welcome to Pathways to Sustainability:
Social-ecological resilience
and transformation across multiple scales

We are excited to invite the world's foremost thinkers and advocates of place-based social-ecological scholarship to PECS3 in Montreal Canada (12-15 August 2024) to share ideas on how to transform sustainable development to better contend with the challenges of the Anthropocene informed by issues and solutions in multiple knowledges and values. This conference is co-hosted by The Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society, the Resilience Alliance, and NSERC ResNet.

Visit the conference website: www.pecs2024.com

From the publishers website: https://islandpress.org/books/applied-panarchy

Panarchy was coined by combining the Greek god of nature (Pan) with the Greek word arkos for rules. Thus, panarchy is "nature's rules" and provides a framework to understand change in social-ecological systems and for managing complex environmental issues. Panarchy represents a means for managing the issues that emerge from the interaction between people and nature. That interaction sometimes generates surprises, often the result of slow changes that can accumulate and unexpectedly shift a linked system of humans and nature into a qualitatively different regime (e.g., coral reef systems shifting from coral-dominated to algal-dominated). That regime may be not only impoverished, but also effectively irreversible. Thus, understanding how such change occurs, within and across scales, is critical to achieving a sustainable society. Applied Panarchy explores how these concepts have diffused to relevant academic disciplines in environmental, social and ecological sciences, as well as applied fields of law, policy, economics, engineering, and resource management. Such understanding has influenced the practice, governance and management of our planet and has critical importance moving forward in the Anthropocene.