Dr. Yiheyis Taddele Maru
Dr. Yiheyis Taddele Maru is a social-ecological systems research scientist at CSIRO. He started his profession as a veterinarian and now has a post-graduate diploma in rural & natural systems management and a Ph.D. in integrative systems research, modeling, and building resilience & sustainable development of rural communities.
At CSIRO, Yiheyis has been conducting inter- & trans-disciplinary research for building sustainable indigenous livelihoods, biosecurity, and rural communities in Australia, as well as agriculture innovation research for food security and agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa.
His current work is to:
1) Provide review & advice and mainstream resilience thinking (resilience adaptation) into drought and biosecurity resilience planning for sustainable development
2) Build partnerships and link resilience-vulnerability performance assessment models to improve animal health surveillance & biosecurity in Australia
3) Develop approaches for exploring agricultural adaptation limits and options for transformation.
4) See his key publications here.
Your Call to Action for the Transformations Community:
I want to share a couple of observations from my experience working on applied research on resilience thinking as encompassing the related concepts of resilience, adaptation, and transformation that together tell us the nature and extent of change that could or need to happen to achieve valued social-ecological goals. I share these observations to motivate critical reflection and testing.
1. In our hyperconnected world, traps -mutually reinforcing feedbacks that maintain or drive a social-ecological system towards an undesirable state - are ubiquitous. The study on traps is still in its infancy. I believe it is important to do more research and understand traps to design effective transformation pathways.
2. No more can we design effective interventions to address complex problems of a system of interest without considering how each intervention will contribute to resilience, adaptation, or/and transformation of the system in the face of stresses, shocks, and deep uncertainty about the future.
