Work

Mapping research at the nexus of resilience, wellbeing, and environmental sustainability in UK marine and coastal areas

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Resilience is a burgeoning research and policy priority in the UK, adding to existing interest in how to safeguard marine environmental health and improve peoples' wellbeing.Our understanding of the interlinkages among these three concepts is growing, yet there has been no comprehensive documentation of the evidence that considers social resilience alongside human wellbeing and/ or environmental sustainability.A map of the existing evidence that identifies the gaps and areas of focus in the knowledge base would meaningfully inform the direction of future research and policy making.Mapping the evidence base is important to highlight where there are gaps and foci in current evidence.We aimed to document the research undertaken around UK marine and coastal areas that has explored the nexus of social resilience with human wellbeing and/or environmental sustainability.We used a systematic approach to create an evidence map of the nexus research, searching across bibliographic databases of published literature and capturing grey literature.We extracted key study characteristics such as study type, geographic location, and sector, and made this information available in an online, interactive evidence platform that enables users to visualize, explore, and download the evidence.We found that UK research in the nexus tends to be at the community level and in the fishing and tourism industries, typically focusing on coastal flooding risk.Rarely are social resilience and environmental sustainability researched together without also considering people's wellbeing, most often measured as material wellbeing.The map of UK evidence is indicative of where we might expect gaps and foci in the international research, namely a focus on fisheries, material wellbeing, and resilience to a narrow range of perturbations.Future research should address key gaps in the evidence about how the ecological state of the marine and coastal environment interacts with peoples' resilience.Following our work in defining terms and categorizing the nexus research, we identify a need for both research and policy to more clearly define and differentiate the concepts of resilience and wellbeing.

Source: Ecology and Society

DOI: 10.5751/es-17364-310401