Social resilience of tropical forest ecosystems: A systematic review of core principles and their application

Tropical forest systems (TFSs), play a crucial role in maintaining the planet's ecological balance, supporting life on Earth, and providing different ecosystem services, which are vulnerable to environmental (e.g., severe droughts) and human-induced disturbances (e.g., deforestation).The resilience concept is usually considered in evaluating a forest system under these severe disturbances. However, while resilience evaluations have mainly focused on engineering and ecological perspectives, the integration of social core resilience principles (3SRPs)- learning and experimentation (P5), participation (P6), and polycentric governance (P7)- remains limited. This study performs a systematic review of papers published between 2000 and 2024, focusing on social resilience in tropical forest systems to assess the application of the 3SRPs, following the (PRISMA) framework for systematic reviews, and identify the research gaps in social-based resilience studies. The keywords "resilience", "forest", and "ecosystem services" were searched in the "Web of Science" and "Scopus" databases from 2000 to 2024. The 24-year timeframe captures the evolution of resilience theory from early ecological foundations to contemporary social-ecological applications. The results show that despite the recognition of social aspects in selected studies (49), 55% of studies have considered one social principle, 12% studies taken two principles into account (i.e., P6 and P7), and only 8% of reviewed studies have incorporated all three social principles together in their assessments. Social aspects such as stakeholders' participation and governance are often overlooked, with the majority of evaluations focusing on ecological criteria. There is a crucial need for an integrated approach that considers social and ecological criteria to assess forest resilience, with an emphasis on the effective application of 3SRPs.