Resilience Practice - Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function

Resilience Thinking, published by Island Press in 2006, addressed an essential question: As the natural systems that sustain us are subjected to shock after shock, how much can they take and still deliver the services we need from them? Resilience Practice takes the notion of resilience one step further, applying resilience ideas to real-world situations and exploring how systems can be managed to promote and sustain resilience.
Resilience Practice will help people with an interest in the 'coping capacity' of systems-from farms and catchments to regions and nations-to better understand how resilience thinking can be put into practice. It offers an easy-to-read but scientifically robust guide through the real-world application of the concept of resilience and is a must read for anyone concerned with the management of systems at any scale.


Brian Walker is past Chief of Australia's CSIRO Division of Wildlife and Ecology and is currently the Program Director of the Resilience Alliance.  Walker has degrees in agriculture and ecology from universities in South Africa and Canada. His interests are in ecosystem function and dynamics, particularly in regard to resilience of tropical savannas and rangelands. He lectured at the University of Zimbabwe for six years and was then Professor of Botany and Director of the Centre for Resource Ecology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg until 1985, when he moved to Australia as Chief of the CSIRO Division of Wildlife and Ecology.
He was leader of the International Decade of the Tropics Program on Responses of Savannas to Stress and Disturbance from 1984 to 1990, and of the Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems Project of the IGBP from 1989 to 1998, and is a past Chair of the Board of the Beijer International Institute for Ecological Economics in the Swedish Academy of Science. He has co-authored two books, edited seven, written over 150 scientific papers and is on the editorial boards of five international journals.
He received the Ecological Society of Australia's Gold Medal for 1999. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.