Towards Operationalizing Ecological Resilience for Infrastructure Decision-Making

While definitions of resilience from ecology recognize the potential for systems to shift between multiple stable states and adapt to a changing environment, traditional engineering assessments of infrastructure resilience overemphasize stability and recovery. These engineering approaches may be limiting society's ability to effectively adapt and manage change. We propose to incorporate ecological resilience ideas into engineering projects by leveraging mathematical models, originally developed to describe ecological systems, to identify and describe equilibria in socio-technical systems. We present a conceptual case study of coastal communities facing competing pressures of urban growth and managed retreat to exemplify the use of these tools. We discuss how metrics of ecological resilience relate to existing definitions of resilience in engineering and their implications for infrastructure decision-making.