Pinpointing Fragility: Integrating Resilience Indicators into Risk Evaluation

Benoît Pichon , Sophie Donnet, Isabelle Gounand, Madhur Anand, Sonia Kefi

Ecosystems globally are increasingly threatened by climate change and human pressures, yet current ecosystem risk assessments predominantly emphasize exposure to stressors while overlooking intrinsic ecosystem resilience—the capacity to absorb and recover from disturbances. Here, we advocate for an integrated framework that explicitly incorporates resilience into ecosystem risk assessments and demonstrate its value in the context of dryland desertification. Through bibliographic analyses of the desertification literature, we reveal a persistent disconnect between resilience research and desertification risk assessments. We then propose pathways for integration and illustrate this approach using a global dataset of dryland sites to show how accounting for resilience reshapes our understanding of desertification risk. By bridging theoretical resilience science and applied risk assessment, our framework offers a conceptual and practical foundation for pinpointing dryland areas most at risk, thereby supporting proactive management in a warming, drying world.