A Proposal for “Deep Resilience”: Responding to the Crisis of Deep Uncertainty
One of the most insightful papers I’ve seen about climate change was published as a World Bank report in 2012. Led by Stephane Hallegatte, the authors introduced the term “deep uncertainty,” which they defined as “a situation in which analysts do not know or cannot agree on (1) models that relate key forces that shape the future, (2) probability distributions of key variables and parameters in these models, and/or (3) the value of alternative outcomes.” In other words, we cannot distinguish between the likelihood of radically different alternative futures.
Deep uncertainty is a big concern for the World Bank and many other finance institutions and agencies because they invest in long-lived assets: infrastructure and policy and governance systems locked in a matrix of social, economic, political, and technological shifts. Climate change is perhaps the newest aspect of deep uncertainty, especially with regard to the water cycle.
Concerns over deep uncertainty are what led to the founding of AGWA, as well as groups such as the Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty. Deep uncertainty is especially challenging for quantitative decision makers like economists and engineers and for projects that have the least tolerance for failure, inefficiency, and low reliability. Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways (DAPP or adaptation pathways) may be the best known technical methodology created for coping with the issue.
For several years, AGWA has approached deep uncertainty by suggesting that we divide our knowledge into two boxes: one containing issues and impacts that merit decisive, robust interventions, and then a second box of all of the residual uncertainty, which we need to address by being flexible in order to avoid climate traps.
I’d like to propose an additional approach — one that has been evolving in my mind since the start of the pandemic. One of the most significant responses to deep uncertainty is to pursue what I have started calling “deep resilience.” For now, I would define deep resilience as developing more durable, resilient solutions by expanding the scope of problems being addressed in order to create reinforcing, interlocking, and synergistic solution sets.
Deep resilience is how we connect Covid-19 response, ecosystem restoration, extreme weather hazards, poverty alleviation, and quality of life issues into a common framework. Emerging areas such as nature-based solutions or resilient WASH almost inherently work via deep resilience. Recent examples of deep resilience include building urban lakes for storm water control, parks, and storage in Thailand, defining “water reserves” in Mexico via new governance frameworks, reengineering sponge cities in China, capturing floodwaters for aquifer recharge in California, and “giving land back to the sea” in the Netherlands to alter coastal geomorphology trends.
These ideas are also emerging in terms of broader programs. BMZ in Germany launched last May a new initiative called One Health that encompasses human, ecological, and climate “health” — all necessary together for generating articulated solutions.
The response to complex problems may not always be through simplification. Sometimes we need complex, interlocking solutions to solve complex, interlocking problems.
Can we use the concept to generate hydropower or to irrigate crops? Absolutely. The opportunity lies in how we define problems — how we link issues (and institutions) at the beginning of a project. I’ve also come to understand that we need to trust that stakeholders want us to develop innovative solutions that span disciplines and agencies, public and private sectors. They want messier problems that can become more whole and integrative. More permanent.
Most of all, Covid-19 has helped many of us see the systems we interact with and, in many cases, the scale and seriousness of the challenges embedded within those systems. I sense that many of us — especially young people — are asking for solutions commensurate with those challenges.
Perhaps deep resilience can describe our aspirations in the same way that deep uncertainty defined our fears.
John Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA