General scope: Resilience is the capacity of a system to maintain or recover certain functions while undergoing shocks and stresses. It emerges from the many interactions between people and natural and/or artificial system components, and the capacity of people to adapt. Under the threat of climate change, national and international conflicts, habitat destruction, and biodiversity loss, we urgently need to understand and better manage the complexity and intertwining of the environmental and social systems on our planet. The time is here to help create a genuinely resilient society. We work on food security, flood protection, continuous energy supply, sustainable cities, management of (semi)natural systems, and so forth. All these topics involve aspects of resilience. We need to involve other people in our resilience thinking, and build a community of resilience thinkers. Hence this course: making the resilience community happen. We invite you to participate!
During this course, the participants become acquainted with different resilience concepts and their application from an interdisciplinary perspective. Accordingly, we will address how resilience theory can be used to tackle fundamental and societal issues from a socio-economic and bio-physical perspective and will provide a critical reflection on the relevance, use, and applicability of the concept of resilience. The objective of this course is thus to connect resilience concepts to viable applications by offering an efficacious analytical/computational approach. Participants will work in teams on the conceptualization and quantification of the resilience of a particular system. In the end, each team presents suggestions for a practical way to improve the resilience of the studied system.
In the course, Agent-Based Modelling will be used as the primary modelling tool. Hence, one day focuses on a practical introduction to programming in NetLogo for the construction of an Agent-Based Model to represent a modelled system. ABM stands out for its potential to model the variety of human sociality and behaviour.
We will focus particularly on:
- Definitions, characteristics, and determinants of resilience and how this varies between scientific disciplines;
- The identification of resilience-related problems;
- The quantification of resilience, including modelling, measurement, analysis, and prediction, and options for management and governance of the systems’ resilience.
This course is primarily intended for PhD students, academics, R&D people from industry, and people working on the interface of academia and policy-making, interested in resilience and Agent-Based Models, regardless of specialization. We actively seek cross-fertilization between disciplines, and academia and industry.
Target group: The course is aimed at PhD candidates, postdocs, and other academics
Course duration: 5 days
Contact: PE&RC Office: office.pe@wur.nl
Registration of interest: You can register your interest HERE (note: this is not an official registration).
