Resilience Assessments

The aim of a resilience assessment is to understand the resilience of a reef system in order to inform management. These assessments specifically target resilience indicators and do not necessarily involve repeating surveys, as opposed to routine or responsive monitoring.

Resilience assessments can help to:

• Identify sites that have coral communities likely to be more resilient to climate change and other human stressors
• Identify differences among sites in exposure to stressors
• Assess the vulnerability of communities to help identify priority areas for management and specific types of interventions
• Evaluate whether current MPAs include high resilience sites
• Help managers to prioritize management actions or strategies that will reduce stress at the greatest number of sites, at high resilience sites, and/or at sites that are a conservation priority for other reasons
• Provide an early warning of decreases in important resilience drivers
• Provide information to adaptively manage coral reefs following major disturbances, such as coral bleaching events or severe storms
• Identify the strengths and weaknesses of governance systems

Diver conducting fish surveys. Photo © Kydd Pollock

Key considerations for using the results of resilience assessments to inform management efforts include:

• Build local support for resilience assessments –through engaging stakeholders, managers, and decision-makers in all stages of the assessment
• Align assessment timing with decision-making processes and anticipated disturbances (e.g., forecasted bleaching event) which provide opportunities for increased awareness of climate impacts on reefs
• Standardize recording of resilience assessment costs and provide a cost-benefit analysis of potential management actions to decision makers to help prioritize management actions
• Use locally relevant social and ecological resilience indicators