A framework for integrating resilience indicators into risk assessments

Globally, ecosystems are increasingly threatened by climate change and human pressures, yet ecosystem risk assessments predominantly emphasize exposure to stressors while overlooking intrinsic ecosystem resilience-the capacity to absorb and recover from disturbances. We advocate for an integrated framework that explicitly incorporates resilience into ecosystem risk assessments. Through a co-citation analysis on risk assessment and resilience literature for drylands, we identified a persistent disconnect between resilience research and desertification risk assessments. We then developed a framework for integrating resilience indicators into these risk assessments to capture the ability of the vegetation to respond to disturbances. We illustrated such integration using a global dataset of dryland sites to show how accounting for resilience reshapes our understanding of desertification risk by identifying the most fragile areas showing signs of low resilience while experiencing faster changes in climate conditions. Finally, we identified the opportunities and limitations to upscaling this framework at larger scale. By bridging theoretical resilience science and applied risk assessments, our framework offers a conceptual and practical foundation for identifying dryland areas most at risk, thereby supporting proactive management in a warming, drying world.