Resilience concepts in the time of COVID-19
Marta Berbés, School for the Future of Innovation in Society
"Watching our reaction during a crisis offers insights that are not obvious when the system is functioning as it's meant to."
- Marta Berbés, KER fellow 2020
Background
If you want to understand how to keep a body healthy, it is important to study bodies that are sick. The same goes for communities and resilience; we can learn a lot by studying communities in times of crisis. While the principles of resilience may be well established, there’s still much we don’t know about how they play out on the ground and how best to harness them.
Research question
How are the principles of resilience playing out during the current crisis?
Methods and findings
By surveying 100 resilience experts on the coping responses they’ve observed and what principles those responses exemplify, Marta Berbés aimed to advance theory and increase conceptual clarity on resilience and vulnerability in order to help us better prepare for the next crisis.
Partners
-
Resilience Alliance
Deliverables
Berbés classified more than 100 adaptation or coping mechanisms of COVID-19 worldwide, hosted a panel with other resilience thought leaders and submitted a manuscript to Ecology & Society. She published an article based on this work in Ecology & Society.
Marta Berbes Blazquez
ASU School for the Future of Innovation in Society
Academic Fellow, 2020
Marta Berbés is an assistant professor. Her research considers the human dimensions of social-ecological transformations in rural and urban ecosystems with an emphasis on vulnerable populations. Her work is informed by resilience thinking and political ecology at a conceptual level, and it’s practically oriented toward qualitative, participatory and anticipatory research methods. Her specific topics of interest include power and access dynamics in ecosystem services, scenario planning, resource extraction, ecohealth, climate change adaptation and transformation.