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Learning Research Service Volunteer Engagement

This multi-year project assesses the capacity of selected island and coastal communities to anticipate, adapt to, and benefit from environmental change. The approach is informed by transciplinary "resilience theory" developed by the Resilience Alliance research group, to examine the stability dynamics of linked systems of humans and nature, or social-ecological systems (SESs). According to the conceptual framework, three related attributes of SESs determine their future trajectories: resilience (the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks), adaptability (the capacity of actors in the system to influence or manage resilience), and transformability (the capacity to create a new stable system when ecological, economic, or social structures make the existing system untenable). There is a strong emphasis on the science-society linkages, local knowledge, and social learning to this study.

Locations for this project include UPEI and coastal communities on PEI and throughout the Gulf of St. Lawrence.