Embedding resilience

Pressures on social-ecological systems are increasing, and therefore resilience becomes more important. When external pressure is applied to social-ecological systems, it reveals their underlying structure and its embedded resilience, or the lack of it. This project focuses on improving this structure to enhance resilience. It uses two methods: system dynamics and agent-based modelling. Both can model a system in action. The first provides a system-level overview of feedback loops, while the second can tackle heterogeneity and emergent pattern. Three existing cases will be used to study different types of external pressure and their influence on resilience in the structure of social-ecological systems. For every case a model using both system dynamics and agent-based modelling will be built. This combination promises to reveal extra insights since the strengths of the methods are complementary. This project will help to understand how resilience can be enhanced in systems. It will also yield operable methodological knowledge on combining system dynamics and agent-based modelling.