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
Keywords: Resilience indicators, Ecovillages, Resilience Tracker, resilience assessment
