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 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 Impact Trust 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?
Read the Resilience Science Must-Knows below: