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đź“… Join the next one.An Impact Trust Open Dialogue with the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Global Resilience Partnership, Africa Climate & Development Initiative, SEEDS India and Susanne Moser Research & Consulting.
In November 2025, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Global Resilience Partnership and Future Earth launched Resilience Science Must-Knows – nine insights synthesised from decades of research and refined through dialogue with 160+ decision-makers across 134 organisations. Grounded in scientific research, the report aims to provide practical guidance for those seeking to invest in building build systemic resilience by supporting decision-makers addressing resilience challenges at multiple scales – from community preparedness and corporate risk strategies to national adaptation planning.
The synthesis is framed around general resilience – resilience to a multitude of risks and disturbances, many of them unknown. It highlights resilience as the triple capacity of coping, adapting and transforming, and explicitly rejects the notion of “bouncing back to business as usual.”
Yet how do such syntheses travel? In climate philanthropy conversations, resilience and adaptation are increasingly conflated – adaptation is often framed as what remains to be done when mitigation fails or falls short. In practitioner communities, questions persist about whose knowledge counts, what capacities are missing from the framework, and what “transformation” actually means in specific places.
This dialogue brings together the Stockholm Resilience Centre synthesis team with practitioners from India, South Africa, and the US to explore what these insights illuminate when they land in specific contexts – and what they occlude. In the spirit of wax and gold, we ask: can the Must-Knows help decision-makers move beyond conventional resilience speak into harder conversations about justice, process, and whose knowledge and futures count?
The dialogue seeks to explore questions that emerge when synthesis meets practice:
Translation across contexts. How do globally-synthesised insights land in specific places—Gujarat villages, Cape Town townships, funding boardrooms, democratic vs. authoritarian governance contexts? What resonates, what needs adapting, what new questions emerge?
The capacities we name – and those we don’t. The Must-Knows foreground coping, adapting and transforming. Where does anticipation come into these – the capacity households and communities have to read signals and take informed decisions before shocks arrive? What about resistance – the inherent strength that allows communities to protect or fortify against impacts? And how do we recognise and include the traditional knowledge and environmental wisdom that communities already hold, but which may or may no longer serve as robustly as it once did?
Resilience, adaptation, and the vocabulary problem. In resilience science, adaptation is one capacity constituting resilience. In policy and philanthropy circles, resilience and adaptation are often paired as synonyms (particularly in the climate context), or adaptation is treated as the forward-looking version of bouncing-back resilience. This isn’t a semantic rabbit hole – it’s the work we must do. How do these terms travel, and what’s lost or gained in translation? Why is it important to stay in that clarifying conversation?
Unbundling transformation. The report explicitly rejects “bouncing back to business as usual” and calls for transformation. But what does that mean in practice? The term remains high-level and open to interpretation. What kinds of investment, governance, and community action would follow from taking transformative resilience seriously? What’s enabling and what’s getting in the way?
Resilience governance. The Must-Knows assume certain enabling conditions. But resilience science has been developed largely in democratic contexts, while most of the world doesn’t live in democracies. What does resilience building mean when governance itself is hostile – whether in long-standing authoritarian contexts or democracies undergoing rapid change? Which of the nine hold regardless of political context? Which need fundamental rethinking? Are they generic enough to be adapted, yet robust enough to hold?
This dialogue is part of The Impact Trust’s 2026 theme: wax and gold. An Ethiopian concept, it names the difference between how things are said (the wax) and the truth they contain (the gold).
Even the title Must-Knows invites this inquiry. The phrase sounds forceful and authoritative – but is there space for flexibility, for choice, for context? Policymakers do ask “what do I have to know?” in a field as ambiguous as resilience. Yet the question remains: must knows for whom?
Similarly, in resilience work more broadly, vocabulary can obscure as much as it reveals. The language of “coping, adapting, transforming” travels smoothly – but can sidestep harder questions about whose resilience is being built, at whose expense, and what transformation actually demands of existing power arrangements. Can communities be resilient without knowing the language? Can ecosystems figure out how to persist without our jargon? And if so, what is the gold that the Must-Knows contain – and what wax might we need to melt away to find it?
Cibele Queiroz (Stockholm Resilience Centre / Global Resilience Partnership) is s a senior researcher on social-ecological resilience, expert on food systems resilience, bottom-up transformations and the complex connections between environment and conflict. She serves as Director of Knowledge of the GRP and co- leader of the Conflict and Collaboration Research Theme at the SRC. As one of the co-leads of the Resilience Science Must-Knows process she will reflect on the background to this initiative, how the nine MKs emerged, how decision-makers feedbacked on the process, and where the synthesis is heading next. She brings clarity on the distinction between general and specified resilience, and why the triple capacity framing (coping, adapting, transforming) matters.
Gina Ziervogel is Director of the African Climate and Development Initiative and Professor in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. A geographer by training, she has 25 years of experience in the field of adaptation and vulnerability to global environmental change, working closely with a range of actors across scales from the neighbourhood and NGO level to cities, provinces and national level to better understand opportunities to adapt to climate risk given governance and inequality challenges. She was a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th Assessment report, Cities, settlements and key infrastructure chapter. Alongside her academic papers she has co-written a book about the Cape Town drought with science journalist Leonie Joubert, collaborated with a film maker on a documentary about community water stories and published a climate justice comic aimed at high school students. She asks the essential questions: resilient to what? For whom?
Manu Gupta (SEEDS India) with 30 years building community resilience across South Asia. UN Sasakawa Award winner, Ashoka Fellow, and on boards of several CSO alliances. His approach centres on “localising leadership” and grafting innovation onto traditional wisdom. He brings a practitioner critique: the need to elevate anticipatory capacity as a core dimension, to recognise communities’ inherent “resistance” capacities, and to make visible the traditional knowledge that already enables resilience in crisis-affected communities.
Susi Moser works on climate change as an independent researcher and consultant at the science-practice interface and continually thinks about what it takes to translate insights into practice. She brings the implementation lens: how do we close the gap between knowing and doing? She has written extensively on the need to define and distinguish resilience – not as a semantic exercise but as the substantive work of grappling with implications. She raises a fundamental challenge: resilience science has been developed largely in democratic contexts, but most of the world doesn’t live in democracies. What does resilience-building mean when governance itself becomes hostile?
This is not a webinar. It is a deliberative, interactive dialogue – an invitation to engage, to listen, to explore what connection actually requires in times like these.
This dialogue is part of The Impact Trust’s 2026 Open Dialogue series, anchored in Sem ena Werq—the Ethiopian tradition of “wax and gold,” where speech carries two layers: the surface meaning and the deeper truth beneath. This year’s conversations explore how we listen for what lies beneath the noise.