Resilience and complex systems

Another article in SEED Magazine, by Carl Folk, on the ecological term resilience applied to other complex systems like the global economy. The author defines resilience as "the capacity of a system—be it an individual, a forest, a city, or an economy—to deal with change and continue to develop," in other words, to respond to perturbations and even catastrophes in innovative ways.

So what does this mean? For one,

"systems are understood to be in constant flux, highly unpredictable, and self-organizing with feedbacks across multiple scales in time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmark features of complexity."

This ability of a complex system to adapt to variations does not necessarily mean that such adaptation is smooth or predictable. Indeed, the non-linearity of feedback loops means that complex systems can behave in what seems erratic (from the perspective of a linear model). This includes wild oscillations between dramatically different positions, such as a lake fluctuating between hyperoxygenation and algal bloom, or for that matter the Earth going from polar regions covered in dense vegetation (as during the Mesozoic era) to iced-over tropical regions (Snowball Earth).