About Resilience

Resilience.org aims to support building community resilience in a world of multiple emerging challenges: the decline of cheap energy, the depletion of critical resources like water, complex environmental crises like climate change and biodiversity loss, and the social and economic issues which are linked to these. We like to think of the site as a community library with space to read and think, but also as a vibrant café in which to meet people, discuss ideas and projects, and pick up and share tips on how to build the resilience of your community, your household, or yourself.

What is Resilience?

Resilience is a rich and complex concept. It has roots in systems theory, and it has a variety of interpretations and applications including for ecosystems management, disaster preparedness, and even community planning. Our interpretation is based on the work of the Resilience Alliance, the leading scholarly body working on the resilience of social-ecological systems. In that field, resilience is commonly defined as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and re-organize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks.

Learn more about our approach at our Fundamentals page.

Building Community Resilience

The interconnected environmental, energy, economic, and equity crises of the 21st century are posing complex and often-unpredictable challenges to communities around the world. But conventional forms of urban planning, design, and governance—often centralized, hierarchical, and inflexible—are ill-suited to these new realities. It’s time to go beyond piecemeal urban sustainability efforts and meaningfully equip our communities for the the challenges. It’s time to build our communities’ resilience.

Learn more in our publications about Community Resilience Building.

What Information Can You Find Here?

We publish news, research, and analysis in five broad categories: Energy, Economy, Environment, Food & Water, Society.

The articles, reports, and analyses on resilience.org explore the implications of these issues across broad areas including geopolitics, ecology, population, finance, urban design, health, and even religious and gender issues. We also publish many articles which demonstrate practical models of how to respond to these issues in your community.

We welcome original content, and we especially invite independent researchers, industry insiders, journalists, specialists, and activists to submit their insights relevant to these issues. We attempt to be at all times both accurate and current. The opinions, inferences, or calculations within individual news items are the responsibility of the author alone, and the editors of resilience.org do not necessarily support them.

Who Are We?

Resilience.org is a program of Post Carbon Institute (PCI). From 2004 to 2012 the site was known as “Energy Bulletin.” Over the years Energy Bulletin broadened its coverage from peak oil and energy to include other resource depletion, related issues, and articles which describe, encourage or educate on meaningful responses — in essence, the task of building resilience. From this came the inspiration to create resilience.org.

The articles section of this site is maintained by three editors: Kristin Sponsler and Simone Osborn in Bristol (UK), and Bart Anderson in California (US). Adam Grubb (writing as Adam Fenderson) and Liam Cranley of Melbourne, Australia, founded Energy Bulletin in 2004. In January 2009, Energy Bulletin was adopted as a core program by the Post Carbon Institute and in 2012 relaunched as resilience.org. Except for PCI, resilience.org is unaffiliated with any private, government, or institutional body.

Policies

Editorial Policy

We welcome constructive criticism at all times, and invite all readers to send feedback via our Contact form. Final discretion on the posting of all content remains with the editors, and we also reserve the right to abbreviate as we feel space and relevance dictate.

Reposting Policy

You are free to repost original articles written by Post Carbon Institute (as noted in the author’s bio at the bottom of the article) with attribution to resilience.org and a link back to the original article. All other original articles on Resilience.org require permission from the original author; please use our Contact form to request this permission.

Guidelines

Contact Us

You can email the editors via the Contact form.