Abstract for:Resilience concepts for system dynamics applications in socio-ecological systems

Resilience is, at its basics, the systems’ ability to withstand a shock while continue providing the same essential functions it currently provides. Understanding how resilient a system is and how such condition can be improved is a key element of any resilience study.  To do so, it is necessary to analyse the behaviour of the system during and after it has been affected by significant change on its environment. System dynamics focuses on analysing complex systems’ behaviours over time and testing its sensitivities to the changes on the environment and the system itself. Surprisingly there is only a small number of studies where system dynamics has been explicitly applied to assessing resilience. While there might be many reasons for this underdevelopment, we hypostatise that resilience ambiguity and fussiness is one of the main factors holding back researchers and practitioners from applying system dynamics to resilience problems. This paper addresses this gap by operationalising concepts in the resilience literature to system dynamics applications.