Resilience is the capacity of socio-ecological systems to support the achievement of goals in response to stressors– even when these stressors interact unpredictably over time. All fisheries are socio-ecological systems in which humans and natural ecosystems interact. Resilient fisheries have the capacity to resist, recovery from, adapt to, or transform in response to disturbances such as price shocks, demographic changes, storms, and changes in the distribution and abundance of fish such that they can continue to generate desirable levels of food, profits, jobs, biodiversity, and other ecosystem services over time.
There has been a significant amount of research and exploration into what makes one system more or less resilient than another. Various authors and groups have created lists of attributes thought to collectively characterize a resilient system, both in general as well as in relation to specific threats (e.g., the threat of climate change). Our General Resilience Attributes Checklist draws on this research, combining and adapting attribute lists from The Stockholm Resilience Center, The Resilience Alliance + Transition Movement, and a recent examination of specific climate-resilience criteria for fisheries.
It is necessary to consider resilience in a holistic way because resilience is a property of systems and each component of a socio-ecological system is highly connected to the others. For example, a lack of resilience in the socio-economic domain (e.g., a scarcity of livelihood options) or in the governance domain (e.g., poorly-designed regulations that fail to effectively control harvest) can lead to the degradation and potentially the collapse of a fishery even if the ecological domain has a high degree of diversity and redundancy. Thus, the more attributes of resilience a system has, and the more fully they are realized, the more likely the system will be to maintain its desirable human and natural attributes in the face of a shock or stressor.
Finally, it is critical to recognize that the property of resilience itself is inherently neither good nor bad. Having all the attributes of resilience will not ensure that the outcomes will be desirable or that goals will be met. A system can be resilient while simultaneously being in a highly degraded state (consider, for example, an overfished fishery which may take years or decades to recover). It is therefore necessary to consider these resilience attributes in addition to the building blocks of sustainability – some way to evaluate stock status using the best available science and local knowledge, a way to adjust fishing mortality in response to those evaluations, ways to maintain sustainable stock size and age structure, ways to maintain desirable yields and profits year after year, and ways to hold fishermen and managers accountable to sustainability standards.