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Better integration of resilience and climate change adaptation can help building climate-resilient development. Yet, resilience and adaptation to climate change have evolved largely along parallel paths with little cross-fertilization. Conceptual vagueness around resilience makes it challenging to ascertain what elements of resilience thinking have the greatest potential to enhance climate change adaptation and contribute to broader sustainable development goals. This article distills nine principles from the resilience literature to build a framework to assess 224 climate change adaptation strategies proposed by researchers and practitioners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Our analysis concludes that adaptation strategies in this data set emphasize initiatives that increase social and ecological diversity, strengthen learning processes, build functional redundancy, enhance connectivity between social and ecological elements, pay attention to the management of slow variables, and provide mechanisms for increasing participation and polycentric governance. At the same time, the adaptation options examined generally lacked a system's perspective, suggesting that there is still important work ahead to move toward a climate-resilient development model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Nancy Grimm's research has focused on ecology and hydrology of aridlands and cities. • Research evolved from studying existing phenomena to visioning sustainable futures. • Key themes are connectivity, heterogeneity, systems thinking, disturbance, resilience. • She has supported longterm research, mentoring, and transdisciplinary collaboration. The hydrology and aquatic ecology of arid environments has long been understudied relative to temperate regions. Yet spatially and temporally intermittent and ephemeral waters characterized by flashy hydrographs typify arid regions that comprise a substantial proportion of the Earth. Additionally, drought, intense storms, and human modification of landscapes increasingly affect many temperate regions, resulting in hydrologic regimes more similar to aridlands. Here we review the contributions of Dr. Nancy Grimm to aridland hydrology and ecology, and applications of these insights to urban ecosystems and resilience of social-ecological-technological systems. Grimm catalyzed study of nitrogen cycling in streams and characterized feedbacks between surface water-groundwater exchange, nitrogen transformations, and aquatic biota. In aridlands, outcomes of these interactions depend on short- and long-term variation in the hydrologic regime. Grimm and colleagues applied hydrological and biogeochemical insights gained from study of aridland streams to urban ecosystems, integrating engineering, social and behavioral sciences, and geography. These studies evolved from characterizing the spatial heterogeneity of urban systems (i.e., watersheds, novel aquatic systems) and its influence on nutrient dynamics to an approach that evaluated human decision-making as a driver of disturbance regimes and changes in ecosystem function. Finally, Grimm and colleagues have applied principles of urban ecology to look toward the future of cities, considering scenarios of sustainable and resilient futures. We identify cross-cutting themes and approaches that have motivated discoveries across Grimm's multi-decadal career, including spatial and temporal heterogeneity, hydrologic connectivity and regime, disturbance, systems thinking, and resilience. Finally, we emphasize Grimm's broad contributions to science via support of long-term research, dedication to mentoring, and extensive collaborations that facilitated transdisciplinary research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increased interest in managing resilience has led to efforts to develop standardized tools for assessments and quantitative measures. Resilience, however, as a property of complex adaptive systems, does not lend itself easily to measurement. Whereas assessment approaches tend to focus on deepening understanding of system dynamics, resilience measurement aims to capture and quantify resilience in a rigorous and repeatable way., We discuss the strengths, limitations and trade-offs involved in both assessing and measuring resilience, as well as the relationship between the two. We use a range of disciplinary perspectives to draw lessons on distilling complex concepts into useful metrics., Measuring and monitoring a narrow set of indicators or reducing resilience to a single unit of measurement may block the deeper understanding of system dynamics needed to apply resilience thinking and inform management actions., Synthesis and applications. Resilience assessment and measurement can be complementary. In both cases it is important that: (i) the approach aligns with how resilience is being defined, (ii) the application suits the specific context and (iii) understanding of system dynamics is increased. Ongoing efforts to measure resilience would benefit from the integration of key principles that have been identified for building resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]