GSI Seminar: Dr Chris Boulton - Case Studies of Resilience

Resilience, the ability for a system to recover from perturbations, has become an important research topic in climate science, since a loss of resilience can show that a system is losing stability. In some systems, this may show the approach towards a tipping point, where seemly small perturbations to the system can produce a large, often hard to reverse changes to its state. Climate tipping points, such as Amazon rainforest dieback and collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) would have globally reaching effects and as such, any early warning of impending climate tipping points would be of great benefit.

Here we explore how to measure changes in resilience and discover the loss of stability of the Amazon rainforest seen from observations since the early 2000s using remotely sensed data. Then using the same framework, we measure the resilience of countries to the COVID-19 pandemic and delve into the reasons why some coped much better than others. Finally, we look to social media to see if the loss of resilience of certain ideals or regimes can be determined and if ‘social tipping points’ can be detected. To do this we analyse social media content leading up to the 2010 Arab Spring.