Resilient livelihoods: Approaches to resilience assessment

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Session host: International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD)

Organizer: International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD)

About the workshop

ICIMOD has been carrying out several case studies together with its partners across the Hindu Kush Himalaya to develop resilience markers and is looking to integrate these markers into a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework. This thematic session therefore aims to bring a common understanding on resilience assessment of socio-ecological systems through stock taking of different global and regional approaches and methodologies.

In the leadup to COP27, this session will provide a way forward to identify a common framework to measure locally led adaptation and resilience-building actions by integrating into an M&E system.

Objectives

• Improve understanding on socio-ecological resilience
• Share various approaches/methods to measure resilience and bring a common understanding on a resilience assessment framework
• Explore ways to integrate resilience assessment into an M&E framework for leveraging resources and ensuring quality delivery

Target audience

Academia, practitioners, development workers, monitoring and evaluation personnel, researchers, etc.

Background

There are as many as 70 definitions of resilience in the literature on development studies, which naturally creates ambiguity around this concept on paper – and even more so to operationalize and empirically practice it on the ground. Resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, feedbacks, and therefore the same identity. For mountain environments and livelihoods, however, resilience is the ability of a socio-ecological system to anticipate, reduce, accommodate, or recover in a timely and efficient manner from the effects of disturbance for a transformative and forward-looking change.

Although there are several methods and approaches for resilience assessments, it is still difficult to find a good empirical proxy or a marker of resilience. Establishing baselines and measuring resilience remain a challenge in practice and are a key frontier in research too. This is particularly because of evidence gaps in understanding resilience building (resilience of what to what?) largely related to socio-ecological complexities and limited knowledge on the nature of feedbacks in the system arising from the uncertainty and time lags from the impacts of climatic as well as socio-economic changes.

Agenda

Wednesday, 30 March 2022 | 13:45–15:15 NPT (UTC+05:45)