An article on nature-based biopsychosocial resilience has been published in Environment International.
Click on the article below to read the full version.
Overview of the article:
The RESONATE project aims to use Nature-based Therapies (NBTs) to help build individual and
community resilience. But resilience, a bit like sustainability and well-being, is a bit of a slippery term.
Everyone sort of knows what it means, but somehow it gets used by different people across different fields,
in different ways, making it hard to talk to and understand each other. This is also true in the field of
nature and health. So far ‘resilience’ in this field has mainly been used to describe how Nature-based Solutions (NBSs)
such as urban wetlands and parklands, can help make communities more resilient to, i.e. better able to cope with,
climate change-related outcomes such as floods and urban heat islands. But there is also a long history
of the term being used to talk about how contact with nature can help individuals build their own personal resilience
in terms of coping better with difficult life events (e.g. relationship breakdown) and daily hassles (e.g. end of day fatigue).
It is also not always clear if resilience is a ‘thing’, i.e. a set of resources that communities and individuals have
(e.g. a preparedness plan or resilient personality), or the processes by which these resources are deployed
to help mitigate stress (e.g. community action or emotion regulation).
In this first paper from the RESONATE project, we argue that resilience is all of these things. Our innovation
is the development of a framework that clearly shows how the different types of resilience resources
and processes are connected together and to describe the mechanisms by which nature underpins them.
At the heart of our framework, we make the distinction between ‘social-ecological resilience’,
which relates to the resilience of whole communities and is what people tend to mean when they talk about
Nature-based Solutions and resilience, and ‘biopsychosocial resilience’, which focuses on individual-level biological
(e.g. immune function), psychological (e.g. coping strategies) and social (e.g. friend networks) resources.
In the paper, we review a broad range of evidence spanning many scientific disciplines which shows that
both types of resilience are built and maintained by contact with the natural world and can be drawn on
in times of stress. Further, we argue that there are three stages in the stress cycle where these resources
can be used – a preventive stage, an initial response stage, and a recovery stage and that these three stages
reflect different uses of resilience resources. For instance, a renovated wetland may stop a city flooding
(preventive resilience), street trees may help mitigate the health effects of a very hot day (response resilience),
and strong social ties may help a community recover more quickly from a storm event (recovery resilience).
The paper then outlines how different types of intervention can better support people’s interactions
with nature to help build and maintain resilience resources. This part is key for the RESONATE project
because it lays out a pathway for how we will evaluate the effectiveness of the different nature-based
Case-Studies in terms of their ability to build both individual and community-level resilience.
As such this first paper provides the critical theoretical foundation for the rest of the RESONATE project.
Read the article here: