Resilience and sustainability
Our support systems such as food, water, energy and nature are increasingly tightly coupled, propelled by a population increasing in numbers, inequality and in wealth. Add to this the unbalances from climate change and it is clear that increased turbulence is here to stay. As a consequence, we need to balance our drive for ever increasing efficiency, with enhancing resilience to turbulence.
Resilience is a simple, yet far reaching concept: a complex system is resilient if it can absorb a disturbance, while at the same time learning and adapting to become better system. Like a grain of sand in an oyster, the disturbances not only challenge the system, but they are at the same time its education. Increasingly gaining traction as a richer and more precise concept than sustainability, resilience is both actionable and enlightening.
What are the products, services, strategies that build resilience and what are the associated new forms of collaboration?
The Resilience Garage
This is an engagement workshop to look at a city, an industry or a business risk through the lens of resilience – and define practical actions. Garage’s have been held in Amsterdam, New Delhi and Singapore. The Resilience Garage is organised in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative:
Download the Resilience Garage One Pager
The Resilience Garage is a form of peer review or Resilience Assurance Review performed by trans-disciplinary and cross-sectorial teams of resilience experts for the purpose of improving the likelihood of success of the reviewed project. Overall, the purpose of the Resilience Garage is to accelerate the rigorous application of resilience theory in practice and the refinement of resilience theory based on practical experience and empirical evidence.
The first Resilience Garage was held in Amsterdam in 2014, at a historic shipyard, at Shell’s initiative and sponsorship in the context of a CEO-led initiative, the Resilience Action Initiative (Dow, DuPont, IBM, McKinsey and Co., Shell, Siemens, Swiss Re, Unilever and Yara). Participants were widely spread across corporate, academic, NGO and government sectors. This Garage reviewed two projects: one of which on the challenges of Norfolk, Virginia, put forward by the Rockefeller Foundation 100 Resilient Cities. See “a dispatch from Christine Morris, the Chief Resilience Officer of Norfolk.” .
Further Garages were held in Delhi, Singapore, Mexico, New York, Dallas and San Francisco.
Download the Mexico City Garage_Newsletter Article
