Integrating ecosystem services and resilience toward sustainability

In the Anthropocene era, humanity has considerably altered the functioning of Earth, resulting in global and inter-related social, economic and environmental crises. In response, resilience, ecosystem services (ES) and sustainability have gained tremendous popularity in the scientific, policy and management arenas. However, less attention has been paid to the relationships between ES and resilience and how these concepts interact with sustainability. We, therefore, analyzed the concepts of ES and resilience, their relationships, strengths and weaknesses to determine how resilience and ES could be together operationalized for sustainable forest management.
This analysis, based on a literature review and on interviews with experts, shows that resilience and ES are closely intertwined. They meet in the social-ecological system perspective where resilience determines the capacity of the system to face disturbances and thus to provide ES and is influenced, in turn, by human actions taken to response to changes in ES. In a narrower sense, resilience is defined as the ability to maintain ES. Finally, in some ES classifications, resilience is treated as an ES among others.
The resilience approach contributes to improve the ES approach and vice versa: resilience introduces the temporal dimension in ES while ES help integrating the multiple dimensions, scales, methods and points of views as well as their interactions in resilience. Resilience may be mandatory to ES and vice versa as a loss of resilience/ES could jeopardize ES/resilience. In conclusion, pairing ES and resilience is essential to promote policies toward sustainable forest management. However, caution should be exercised to avoid traps of one concept overriding the other.