Resilience
Sensing

About our work

A fundamental risk to our world is the crossing of tipping points leading to…

Damaging, sudden, irreversible changes in our life-support systems

Those life-support systems include the biosphere and climate and also the social systems that support us, including but not limited to the economy, food and health systems. Those systems interact such that tipping in one system (e.g. the climate) can trigger tipping in another system (e.g. food production), leading to yet further tipping points, like escalating conflict.

Our cultures need to be resilient to the systemic risk of such cascading tipping points.

Our Mission

To help decision-makers, communities, and practitioners understand and address these profound risks, we propose creating a Resilience Sensing System that enables them to:

Identify and understand cascading tipping point risks,
Sense whether and to what degree they have cultural resilience to these, and
Identify opportunities to mitigate impacts and build cultural resilience.

From traditional Hazard Monitoring to Resilience Sensing

Hazard Focused

System Focused

Single domain

Multi Domain

Reactive

Proactive

What happened? or might happen

How iS the system coping and changing

Limited integration

Integrated and networked

Information rich, action poor

Actionable intelligence for decisions

Our aim is to

co-create this Resilience Sensing System with the people who will use it.

It will bring together early warning methods for tipping points with diverse data stream- climate, ecological, markets, conflict, survey, news and social media to monitor the resilience of interconnected natural and social systems. A shared toolbox will let researchers contribute new methods and data, whilst a co-created dashboard will translate the science for decision-makers, communities and practitioners.

We aim to test these methods on real-world case studies and develop new indicators of cultural resilience: how strongly a society responds to shocks, and how quickly it recovers. The system will sense gains in resilience as well as losses, so that cities, countries and communities can see whether the measures they are taking to build resilience are working.

SUSTAINABILITY RESILIENCE SECURITY

What is Resilience?

To us, resilience means the ability of a system: a forest, a supply chain, a power grid, or an entire city or system to recover from shocks

Resilience is like a cup of coffee

Full cup

Strong, resilient system

Titling

Early signs of stress, resilience declining

Spilling

Tipping point crossed, crisis or collapse

Our goal
detect the tilt and act before the spill

Co-creating the Resilience Sensing System

Our co-creation approach

A Resilience Sensing System will only be useful if it responds to the decisions, risks and realities faced by the people who use it.

We are therefore developing the system through an iterative process of co-creation with decision-makers, practitioners, researchers, communities and other potential users.

Rather than designing a dashboard first and asking people to use it, we are starting with the decisions it needs to support. Together with stakeholders, we are exploring questions such as:

What changes in resilience do you need to detect?
What decisions should this information inform?
What signals would give you confidence to act?
How should cascading risks, uncertainty and opportunities for building resilience be communicated?

Our co-creation journey

We follow an iterative co-creation process to ensure the Resilience Sensing System is useful, trusted and relevant. Insights from each stage feed back into the next cycle, enabling continuous learning and improvement.

1

Listen

Engage with diverse stakeholders to understand challenges, decisions and needs.

2

DEfine

Identify priority use cases, decisions, indicators and data needs together.

3

Co-design

Work together to co-create concepts, indicators, dashboards and ways to communicate insights.

4

Prototype

Develop prototype tools and dashboard concepts based on shared requirements.

5

Test

Test prototpes with users in real-world contexts and gather feedback.

6

Learn & Refine

Learn from feedback and evidence to improve and adapt the system.

Insights and learning flow back to the start of the cycle

Why this matters

This iterative approach ensures the Resilience Sensing System is scientifically robust, practically relevant and genuinely useful for decision-makers, communities and practitioners.

What are we co-creating?

Through workshops, focused consultations and future testing, we aim to co-create:

The use cases and decisions the system should support;
Indicators and signals of resilience loss and resilience gain;
Ways of identifying cascading risks and tipping dynamics across interconnected natural and social systems;
Approaches for communicating early warnings, uncertainty and possible interventions;
The design and functionality of a user-facing dashboard; and
A shared framework that can be adapted to different sectors, places and decision contexts.

Feedback loop diagram showing phases. #1 Raw data #2 Processing & Quality Control #3 Indicators & Signal #4 Insights & early warnings #5 Decisions & Interventions #6 Resilient Outcomes

Who do we want to work with?

Resilience crosses sectors and scales, so we want the co-creation process to be equally diverse.

We are interested in working with national and local government, cities, businesses, humanitarian, philanthropic and development organisations, civil society and community organisations, climate and environmental practitioners, infrastructure and service providers, researchers, and others making decisions about sustainability, resilience and security.

Different users will need different information. Understanding those differences, and identifying what they have in common, is central to the project.

An iterative co-creation journey

2026 – Explore and Listen

Our initial workshops and stakeholder engagement are identifying priority decisions, use cases, indicators and user requirements.

Exeter Climate Forum 2026 — First co-creation workshop

Our first multi-stakeholder workshop brought together expertise from organisations including the Met Office UK, C40 Cities, UNHCR, WWF and the University of Exeter.

Participants explored what a Resilience Sensing System should tell different users, how cascading risks should be represented, and what would make the resulting information actionable.

Global Tipping Points Conference 2026, Malaysia — Expanding the conversation

We took the learning from Exeter to Sunway University in Malaysia, broadening the cocreation process to include perspectives and applications from Asia and the Global South, further testing the emerging design principles.

Prototype, test and refine

Insights from these engagements will inform the development of prototype tools and dashboard concepts.

These will be taken back to potential users for testing and refinement, creating an iterative cycle between scientific development, user experience and real-world application.

Join the co-creation process

We are actively looking for people and organisations interested in helping shape the Resilience Sensing System

You might contribute by sharing a decision-making challenge or use case; participating in a workshop or consultation; helping us identify relevant indicators or data; testing emerging concepts and prototypes; or exploring how resilience sensing could be applied within your organisation, city, community or sector.