Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Journal Article
    Resilience and Global Sustainability
    (2010) Folke, Carl; Gunderson, Lance
    "Last year, Ecology and Society published an article on planetary boundaries, a sister article to a shorter version in Nature, reflecting the dynamic preconditions of the biosphere for a prosperous development of human societies. Within less than a year, the planetary boundaries concept has reached international policy efforts as witnessed in the quote above. Also, work on social-ecological systems and integrated science for resilience and sustainability, the focus of this journal, is truly escalating worldwide, witnessed, for example, in millions of hits on search engines. It is in the context of integrative science that we are really pleased to be editors of Ecology and Society. We are not specializing into a well-defined niche within a well-defined discipline. We are exploring, experimenting, and encouraging publication of work that takes us into new terrain, that not only generates information and knowledge, but that helps us understand the complex nature of intertwined social-ecological systems in the context of resilience and sustainability at all scales and across them."
  • Journal Article
    Aligning Key Concepts for Global Change Policy: Robustness, Resilience, and Sustainability
    (2013) Anderies, John M.; Folke, Carl; Walker, Brian; Ostrom, Elinor
    "Globalization, the process by which local social-ecological systems (SESs) are becoming linked in a global network, presents policy scientists and practitioners with unique and difficult challenges. Although local SESs can be extremely complex, when they become more tightly linked in the global system, complexity increases very rapidly as multi-scale and multi-level processes become more important. Here, we argue that addressing these multi-scale and multi-level challenges requires a collection of theories and models. We suggest that the conceptual domains of sustainability, resilience, and robustness provide a sufficiently rich collection of theories and models, but overlapping definitions and confusion about how these conceptual domains articulate with one another reduces their utility. We attempt to eliminate this confusion and illustrate how sustainability, resilience, and robustness can be used in tandem to address the multi-scale and multi-level challenges associated with global change."
  • Working Paper
    Aligning Key Concepts for Global Change Policy: Robustness, Resilience, and Sustainability
    (2012) Anderies, John M.; Folke, Carl; Ostrom, Elinor; Walker, Brian H.
    "Globalization, the process by which local social-ecological systems (SESs) are becoming linked in a global network, presents policy scientists and practitioners with unique and dicult challenges. Although local SESs can be extremely complex, when they become more tightly linked in the global system, complexity spirals as multi-scale and multi-level processes become more important. Here, we argue that addressing these multi-scale and multilevel challenges requires a collection of theories and models. We suggest that the conceptual domains sustainability, resilience, and robustness provide a suciently rich collection of theories and models but overlapping denitions and confusion about how these conceptual domains articulate with one another reduces their utility. Here we attempt to eliminate this confusion and illustrate how sustainability, resilience and robustness can be used in tandem to address the multi-level and multi-scale challenges associated with global change."