Network REsilience, viability, SUStainability – RESUS

These following directions will be privileged in these collaborations:
• Testing the methods and tools on a variety of applications related to sustainable development such as fishery management, agricultural land management or global change management related to planetary boundaries.
• Improving the methods and tools (computing viability kernels and resilience basins, simulation approaches);
• Fostering and strengthening the development of mathematical definitions of concepts based on viability theory (such as resilience, adaptive capacity, vulnerability, robustness) and their use in sustainability management; consider links with other important properties of dynamical systems such as tipping points.

* development of nesw collaborations on viability theory related research
* submission of a european project

* développement of more efficient methodes and hence more easily applicable to concrete case stuides
* development of strong case studies within european and international projects

* articles in international journals
* software prototypes

The aim of this network is building a strategy for improving and disseminating the methodological advances of the network teams in defining sustainable management policies based on viability theory.
The teams of this network claim indeed that viability theory can help provide a mathematical meaning to concepts of resilience, vulnerability, sustainability, adaptation capacity, with both precision and faithfulness to the usual meaning of these concepts. This mathematical translation of the concepts shows the advantage of identifying clearly different problems and their difficulties. In particular, this approach differentiates between modelling the system's dynamics, defining the objectives of the management and searching action policies for reaching these objectives. The main originality of viability is stating the management objectives as constraints to respect rather than a quantity to maximise. This makes it a natural conceptual tool for dealing with sustainable management problems. Resilience is expressed in this framework as the capacity of the system to recover the conditions in which it can sustain the management objectives after a perturbation.
Moreover, this approach provides a set of numerical tools, in constant improvement, that can help compute viable or resilient management policies. The teams of the network have a significant experience of these tools and their application to a variety of case studies in biodiversity of ecological services management. In this ecologico-economic perspective, the case of fisheries and agricultural land use are particularly illustrative.
The consortium aims at still improving these methods and tools, in particular by comparing them with potential competitors, at disseminating them more broadly and at building ambitious proposals in European and international call for projects.