IAIA 2016

Mike Jones, CBM, recently co-lead a workshop at the International Association of Impact Assessment conference on Resilience and Sustainability in Nagoya, Japan. The workshop explored the potential for integrating Resilience Assessment into a Strategic Environmental Assessment and comprised a dialogue between Mike (resilience framework) and Roel Slootweg (SEA cases) and reflections from the audience on their experience.

Roel’s cases were about the ecosystem services of water in the Aral Sea, the Nile Delta and the River Rhine in Holland, and reflected how the complexity of these cases lead him to use “resilience thinking” concepts without any prior knowledge of resilience. This made the point that practitioners who work with the complexity of sustainable use of biodiversity in the field have a natural tendency towards the resilience framework. Roel makes the point that what is mostly common sense, is made difficult to understand by the jargon of resilience science.

Responses from the workshop were wide ranging from: “why does life have to be complex and uncertain, its scary to realize that.” to: “it is so complex that it is almost impossible to model and I gave up.”

The dialogue showed that resilience assessment can be integrated into SEA. Workshop material will be used for a short paper for the professional journal Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal.