Resilience: Getting back on your feet when everything comes crashing down
Europe is under threat. But we can’t let geopolitical turmoil distract us from the biodiversity crisis, warns biology professor Jens-Christian Svenning. Because not only do we still need a living planet – nature might have something important to teach Europe about resilience.
Imagine a forest. Now imagine a forest fire. The landscape is left naked and brown: so much green life, lost forever. But then as time passes, new life begins to emerge. Shoots break through the soil, new trees start to appear – maybe even different species unknown to the old forest. The forest returns in a new form, adapted to this new reality.
Conference on Europe’s Resilience on 7 May
Our world has become unpredictable, and we must prepare ourselves for an uncertain future. But how? Join us for this year’s MatchPoints conference on Thursday 7 May to explore resilience, the key to Europe’s future.
The conference will bring together leading experts, decision-makers, businesses and members of the public for inspiring presentations, debates, workshops and networking.
Meet Professor Francis Fukuyama, operating advisor at Goldman Sachs Nana Bule, Professor Derek Beach, former ambassador Friis Arne Petersen and deputy director of the Danish Chamber of Commerce Jakob Ellemann-Jensen, among others, to explore themes including food, water, energy, biodiversity and health.
The forest’s capacity to renew itself in response to adversity is an important example of nature’s resilience. And you might also have encountered discussions of resilience in the media and public debate recently, particularly in the context of the new geopolitical challenges Europe is facing: it’s become quite a buzzword. At the upcoming MatchPoints conference under the theme of Resilience in a Challenged Europe, experts from a variety of fields will explore forms of resilience. One of them is the prominent biology professor Jens-Christian Svenning, director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Center for Ecological Dynamics in a Novel Biosphere (ECONOVO) at Aarhus University:
“It’s a good idea to examine resilience from multiple angles, and I strongly believe that we can learn a great deal from nature’s resilience, including when it comes to Europe’s current situation,” he says.
Variation is key to resilience
Nature always finds a way. Take the beaver, for example.
“A century ago, the beaver was almost extinct in Europe and Asia. Today, the population is at least 1.5 million. “And by the 1920s, the European bison population had been reduced to just a few dozen animals in captivity; the current population descends from just 12 genetic founders, but today numbers over 10,000 individuals,” says Jens-Christian Svenning.
We find even more dramatic examples of nature’s resilience further back in time. After the last ice age, huge swathes of northern Europe were ecologically devastated. But healthy new ecosystems emerged once again. The same pattern of resilience has repeated throughout the earth’s history after other extreme events, such as the meteorite impact that wiped out the dinosaurs and many other species in a mass extinction event 66 million years ago – although it took a long time, nature recovered.
“Some of the factors that contribute to resilience in biological systems are variation and redundancy. A lot of species have overlapping functions. If one species disappears, others can take over. At the same time, biological systems have an enormous potential for growth. If the conditions are right, there’s great potential for a comeback,” Svenning explains.
Variation – or diversity – makes systems more resilient – and this also goes for Europe’s current situation, for example in relation to energy and defence:
“If we make ourselves dependent on just a few energy sources, we are vulnerable. The same applies if we base our entire defence on a few centralised units. If we have variation and redundancy, we’re more robust,” he says.
According to Svenning, agriculture also has something to learn from nature’s resilience. If a single crop is planted over large areas, it becomes more vulnerable to disease and climate change. Just as with natural biological systems, variation is the way forward.
Biodiversity is part of the solution
Svenning warns that reliance on nature’s resilience must not become a crutch, lulling us into a false sense of security when it comes to challenges like climate change and loss of biodiversity. Because even though nature can bounce back, this can take an extremely long time – hundreds or even thousands of years. And in such scenarios, human beings will suffer more than the biological systems we rely on:
“Human societies are much less resistant to crises in nature than nature itself. We’re going to really be suffering long before nature does,” he says.
That is why it makes sense to keep biodiversity on the agenda at a time when defence and security are the primary focus.
“Despite these other crises, it’s still important to safeguard biodiversity, because it’s an absolutely central part of why our planet is a good place to be, from quality of life and human thriving to robust ecosystems that provide clean water, pollination and climate regulation.” At the same time, robust and biodiverse ecosystems can mitigate the effects of climate change, for example by reducing flooding and making landscapes more resilient to drought and extreme weather events. If we focus solely on the immediate security challenges and ignore biodiversity, we risk exacerbating the long-term crises, which may ultimately also lead to instability. “In that sense, biodiversity is also part of the solution to Europe’s resilience,” says Svenning.
Like a forest after a fire, Europe must also find new ways to become resilient – without losing the fundamental preconditions of our existence that biodiversity provides us with. iversiteten giver os.