Resilience to specified kinds of disasters is an active area of research and practice. However, rare or unprecedented disturbances that are unusually intense or extensive require a more broad-spectrum type of resilience. General resilience is the capacity of social-ecological systems to adapt or transform in response to unfamiliar, unexpected and extreme shocks. Conditions that enable general resilience include diversity, modularity, openness, reserves, feedbacks, nestedness, monitoring, leadership, and trust. Processes for building general resilience are an emerging and crucially important area of research.

Perrings, C., M. Williamson, E. B. Barbier, D. Delfino, S. Dalmazzone, J. Shogren, P. Simmons and A. Watkinson 2002. Biological Invasion Risks and the Public Good: an Economic Perspective. Conservation Ecology 6(1):1. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-00396-060101

Traditional environmental and resource economics uses rational choice theory to guide the evaluation of alternative policy options to correct market failure. Behavioral economics, however, has challenged this conventional mindset by showing how people frequently make choices and state values that deviate from the presumption of rationality, i.e., behavioral failures. This article explores the potential of behavioral economics to advance the science of environmental and resource economics. We address four questions: (1) How can behavioral failures affect thinking about environmental policy? (2) When are behavioral failures relevant to the science of environmental economics? (3) Is behavioral failure just another form of market failure? (4) Do we have a new behavioral-environmental second best problem? We conclude that the evidence from behavioral economics remains insufficient to support the wholesale rejection of rational choice theory within environmental and resource economics. But this does not mean anomalous behavior is non-existent; nature's goods and services frequently lack the active market-like arbitrage needed to encourage consistent and rational choice. We believe it is crucial to identify the economic circumstances, institutional designs, and social contexts in which rational choice theory works and those where it fails to capture observed behavior.