Ecosystem Resilience

Under the Environment (Wales) Act 2016, public bodies have a duty to ‘maintain and enhance biodiversity’ and to ‘promote the resilience of ecosystems’. But what is ecosystem resilience?

An ecosystem is a natural environment, the animals and plants that live within it (including us!) and the ways that they interact with each other. Ecosystems provide us with many things, such as the cycling of water, growing our food, and the enjoyment we get from being outside in nature. These are often called Ecosystem Services.

An ecosystem that is resilient can adjust and continue to provide ecosystem services when things around it change. Our ecosystems need to be resilient to cope with the pressure that development places on them, and to cope with the challenges of climate change.

There are 4 qualities that resilient ecosystems have:

• Diversity – essentially biodiversity, resilient ecosystems support a wide variety of species.
• Extent – the larger the ecosystem, the more resilience it has.
• Condition – a difficult aspect to measure, an ecosystem in good condition is able to function properly, maintain the populations of species within it, and provide ecosystem services
• Connectivity – there must be enough connections throughout the ecosystem to allow species to move through it, so that they can find food and breeding sites, and also move away from danger.

Together, these 4 qualities are often called Aspects of Ecosystem Resilience.

Ideally, developments should not negatively affect any of the aspects of ecosystem resilience and should improve them. One way of doing this is to create and protect Resilient Ecological Networks – networks of habitats in good condition, that link up protected sites across the wider landscape. This concept is strongly promoted in National Planning Policy.

For more information on Resilient Ecological Networks, you may wish to read the Practitioners Guide to Resilient Ecological Networks produced by Natural Resources Wales.