Page - 416 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

416 Resilience thinking is part of systems thinking in complexity science, and has two central foci: one is to strengthen the current social-ecological-technological system to live with change by enhancing the ability to adapt to potential external pressures, in order to retain its essential functions and identity; the other is the abil- ity to shift development pathways from those that are less desirable or unsustainable to ones that are more desirable or sustainable –also referred to as transformability (Walker et  al. 2004; Folke et  al. 2010). A distinction is often made between general resilience and specified resilience (Walker and Salt 2006). General resilience refers to the resilience of a system to all kinds of shocks, including novel ones, whereas specified resilience refers to the resilience ‘of what, to what’  – in other words, resilience of some particular part of a system (related to a particular control variable) to one or more identified kinds of shocks (Walker and Salt 2006; Folke et  al. 2010). While sustainable development is inherently normative and positive, this is not necessarily true for the resilience con- cept (Pickett et  al. 2013). For example, development may lead to traps that are very resilient and difficult to break out of. The desirability of specified resilience, in particular, depends on careful analysis of resilience ‘of what, to what’ (Carpenter et  al. 2001) since many examples can be found of highly resilient systems (e.g. oppressive political systems) locked into an undesirable system configuration or state. It also may refer ‘to whom’ as a recognition of environmental inequity (e.g. Pickett et  al. 2011). In general, both the sustainability and the resilience concepts (particularly gen- eral resilience) are not easily applicable to the city scale (Elmqvist et  al. 2013a). Cities are centres of production and consumption, and urban inhabitants are reliant on resources and ecosystem services  – including everything from food, water and construction materials to waste assimilation  – secured from locations outside of cit- ies. Although cities can optimize their resource use, increase their efficiency and minimize waste, they can never become fully self-sufficient (Grove 2009). For that reason, it is not sufficient to de-couple cities from resource use (UNEP 2013), rather, cities need to be re-coupled with the regional and global ecosystems in which they are contained (Zhu et  al. 2017). Therefore, individual cities cannot be considered “sustainable” without acknowledging and accounting for their teleconnections (Seto et  al. 2012)  – in other words, the long-distance dependence and impact on ecosystems, resources and populations in other regions around the world (Folke et  al. 1997). Virtually all living systems from the local to the global scale are open and inter- connected networks. To achieve resilience for urban health, there is a need to better understand the health and well-being effects of interventions at multiple scales of complex urban systems (Brelsford et  al. 2017). Further, as Markelova and Mwangi (2012) point out, referring to Cash and Moser (2000), it is necessary to ascertain the appropriate scale for evaluating benefits from complex systems, and choosing the appropriate scale depends on numerous factors such as the specific objectives of a study, the level of accuracy, and the value system chosen by the evaluator. In addi- tion, interventions will not be effective “when a particular problem issue is managed T. Elmqvist et al.