Core Components | Approach – Resilience Design

Key Takeaways

All Resilience Design interventions are guided by a design process that is informed by a site’s unique constraints, opportunities, and ecological influences.
Build healthy soils to support plant health, reduce erosion and irrigation demands, and sequester carbon.
Maximize biodiversity for perennial stability on the site by layering ground covers, crops, vegetables, shrubs, vines, fruit, support plants, and multipurpose trees.
Slow, spread, sink, and bank rainwater in the soil to reduce erosion and increase yearround availability of water for plants.
Resilience Design is centered on the needs of the community, is built on the use of locally available resources, and focuses on ensuring that all aspects of the design are well-protected.

Resilience Design brings regenerative agriculture to the humanitarian sector, backed by advanced science.

Drawing heavily from permaculture design, passive water harvesting, nature-based solutions, agroecology, and agroforestry, it promotes tailored, community-led interventions informed by robust assessments and analyses. The RD Approach uses local knowledge and resources to create an ecologically-driven, whole system design. It prioritizes hydrological stabilization, creating living soils, and building biodiverse systems.

Whole Systems DesignWhole Systems Design

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SoilsSoils

RD prioritizes soil health through deep soil preparation, integration of diverse organic matter, microbe inoculation, ground covers, mulching, planting a variety of vegetation types and layers, biofertilization, and embedding plant material via chop-and-drop techniques, among others, to provide a regenerative supply of nutrients to the soil. This supports a healthy and living soil microbiome that is needed to supply plants with a steady stream of macro and micronutrients.

Phasellus fermentum malesuada phasellus netus dictum aenean placerat egestas amet. Credit: LOREM
Phasellus fermentum malesuada phasellus netus dictum aenean placerat egestas amet. Credit: LOREM

BiodiversityBiodiversity

RD planting strategies increase the level of functional and structural biodiversity through layering annual and perennial vegetation to ensure stability and meet diverse production goals.

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HydrologyHydrology

The RD approach to rainwater management supports erosion control and increases water availability in the soil, helping reduce the impacts of flooding, drought, and erratic rainfall. With these types of weather patterns increasing in frequency and intensity, stabilizing the hydrology of the land is critical.

The RD Approach encourages farmers and those who work with them to start at the top of the landscape and observe how water flows across the site. Once the slopes and nutrient flows are understood, micro and macro rainwater harvesting and flood mitigation techniques – such as contour planting, bioswales, half-moon berms, check dams, soil pitting, and more – are used to prevent soil erosion and increase water and nutrients banking in soils for optimal plant production and health.

Explore the 4-step methodology

Approach

Core Components of the RD Approach