Network REsilience, viability, SUStainability

Informations

Funding country

France

Acronym

RESUS

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2015

End date

-

Budget

52,000 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

The aim of this network is building a strategy for improving and disseminating the methodological advances of the network teams in defining sustainable management policies based on viability theory. The teams of this network claim indeed that viability theory can help provide a mathematical meaning to concepts of resilience, vulnerability, sustainability, adaptation capacity, with both precision and faithfulness to the usual meaning of these concepts. This mathematical translation of the concepts shows the advantage of identifying clearly different problems and their difficulties. In particular, this approach differentiates between modelling the system's dynamics, defining the objectives of the management and searching action policies for reaching these objectives. The main originality of viability is stating the management objectives as constraints to respect rather than a quantity to maximise. This makes it a natural conceptual tool for dealing with sustainable management problems. Resilience is expressed in this framework as the capacity of the system to recover the conditions in which it can sustain the management objectives after a perturbation. Moreover, this approach provides a set of numerical tools, in constant improvement, that can help compute viable or resilient management policies. The teams of the network have a significant experience of these tools and their application to a variety of case studies in biodiversity of ecological services management. In this ecologico-economic perspective, the case of fisheries and agricultural land use are particularly illustrative. The consortium aims at still improving these methods and tools, in particular by comparing them with potential competitors, at disseminating them more broadly and at building ambitious proposals in European and international call for projects.