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Summary Globally, financial services are well positioned to contribute to the transformation needed for sustainable futures and will be critical for supporting corporate activities that regenerate and promote biosphere resilience as a key strategy to confront the new risk landscape of the Anthropocene. While current financial risk frameworks focus primarily on financial materiality and risks to the financial sector, failure to account for investment externalities will aggravate climate and other environmental change and set current sustainable finance initiatives off course. This article unpacks the cognitive disconnect in financial risk frameworks between environmental and financial risk. Through analysis of environmental, social, and governance ratings and estimates of global green investments, we exemplify how the cognitive disconnect around risk plays out in practice. We discuss what this means for the ability of society at large, and finance in particular, to deliver on sustainability ambitions and global goals.

Key insights on needs in urban regional governance - Global urbanization (the increasing concentration in urban settlements of the increasing world population), is a driver and accelerator of shifts in diversity, new cross-scale interactions, decoupling from ecological processes, increasing risk and exposure to shocks. Responding to the challenges of urbanization demands fresh commitments to a city–regional perspective in ways that are explictly embedded in the Anthopocene bio- techno- and noospheres, to extend existing understanding of the city–nature nexus and regional scale. Three key dimensions of cities that constrain or enable constructive, cross scale responses to disturbances and extreme events include 1) shifting diversity, 2) shifting connectivity and modularity, and 3) shifting complexity. These three dimensions are characteristic of current urban processes and offer potential intervention points for local to global action. Urban Studio

Funder: Kjell och Märta Beijers Stiftelse; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100006353, Funder: Familjen Erling-Perssons Stiftelse; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100007436, Funder: Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100011898, Funder: Stockholm University, The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed an interconnected and tightly coupled globalized world in rapid change. This article sets the scientific stage for understanding and responding to such change for global sustainability and resilient societies. We provide a systemic overview of the current situation where people and nature are dynamically intertwined and embedded in the biosphere, placing shocks and extreme events as part of this dynamic; humanity has become the major force in shaping the future of the Earth system as a whole; and the scale and pace of the human dimension have caused climate change, rapid loss of biodiversity, growing inequalities, and loss of resilience to deal with uncertainty and surprise. Taken together, human actions are challenging the biosphere foundation for a prosperous development of civilizations. The Anthropocene reality-of rising system-wide turbulence-calls for transformative change towards sustainable futures. Emerging technologies, social innovations, broader shifts in cultural repertoires, as well as a diverse portfolio of active stewardship of human actions in support of a resilient biosphere are highlighted as essential parts of such transformations.

The interdependence of social and ecological processes is broadly acknowledged in the pursuit to enhance human wellbeing and prosperity for all. Yet, development interventions continue to prioritise economic development and short-term goals with little consideration of social-ecological interdependencies, ultimately undermining resilience and therefore efforts to deliver development outcomes. We propose and advance a coevolutionary perspective for rethinking development and its relationship to resilience. The perspective rests on three propositions: (1) social-ecological relationships coevolve through processes of variation, selection and retention, which are manifest in practices; (2) resilience is the capacity to filter practices (i.e. to influence what is selected and retained); and (3) development is a coevolutionary process shaping pathways of persistence, adaptation or transformation. Development interventions affect and are affected by social–ecological relationships and their coevolutionary dynamics, with consequences for resilience, often with perverse outcomes. A coevolutionary approach enables development interventions to better consider social–ecological interdependencies and dynamics. Adopting a coevolutionary perspective, which we illustrate with a case on agricultural biodiversity, encourages a radical rethinking of how resilience and development are conceptualised and practiced across global to local scales.

The corona pandemic has exposed the interconnected, tightly coupled and vulnerable globalised world. This White Paper sets the scientific stage for understanding and responding to such crises for global sustainability and resilient societies. We provide a systemic overview of the current situation; where people and nature are dynamically intertwined and embedded in the biosphere, placing shocks and extreme events as part of this dynamic; where humanity has become the major force in shaping the future of the Earth system as a whole; and where the rapid expansion of the human dimension has caused climate change, simplification of life on earth, growing inequalities, and loss of resilience to deal with uncertainty and surprise. Taken together, human actions are challenging the biosphere foundation for a prosperous development of civilisations. The Anthropocene reality, of rising turbulence, calls for transformative change towards sustainable futures. Emerging technologies, social innovations, broader shifts in cultural repertoires, as well as a diverse portfolio of active stewardship of human actions in support of a resilient biosphere are highlighted as essential parts of such transformations.

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M We consider two aspects of the human enterprise that profoundly affect the global environment: population and consumption. We show that fertility and consumption behavior harbor a class of externalities that have not been much noted in the literature. Both are driven in part by attitudes and preferences that are not egoistic but socially embedded; that is, each household's decisions are influenced by the decisions made by others. In a famous paper, Garrett Hardin [G. Hardin, Science 162, 1243-1248 (1968)] drew attention to overpopulation and concluded that the solution lay in people "abandoning the freedom to breed." That human attitudes and practices are socially embedded suggests that it is possible for people to reduce their fertility rates and consumption demands without experiencing a loss in wellbeing. We focus on fertility in sub-Saharan Africa and consumption in the rich world and argue that bottom-up social mechanisms rather than top-down government interventions are better placed to bring about those ecologically desirable changes.

Item does not contain fulltext Research practice, funding agencies and global science organizations suggest that research aimed at addressing sustainability challenges is most effective when ‘co-produced’ by academics and non-academics. Co-production promises to address the complex nature of contemporary sustainability challenges better than more traditional scientific approaches. But definitions of knowledge co-production are diverse and often contradictory. We propose a set of four general principles that underlie high-quality knowledge co-production for sustainability research. Using these principles, we offer practical guidance on how to engage in meaningful co-productive practices, and how to evaluate their quality and success. 9 p.

Radical recent developments such as Brexit, the rise of extreme nationalism, the gilets jaunes, polarizing leaders, the Arab Spring, and fundamentalist movements are indications of societal discontent with the status quo. Other societal phenomena such as gender fluidity, veganism, and bartering are also associated with a perceived need to change. The context is the Anthropocene, a human-dominated biosphere challenging the resilience of a livable planet. Such a broad set of developments may be interpreted in the light of new insights from theory of complex systems about what happens as resilience of the current pathway (societal organization as we know it) decreases. Rising fluctuations characterize a phase of uncertainty and exploration, potentially leading into a transition of the system toward a new pathway. We reflect on global changes that may contribute to social destabilization such as rising wealth concentration and environmental degradation and ask how responses may be understood from social-psychological forces such as the need for group identity and managing the terror of mortality. The emerging image is that of a society engaged in multifaceted experimentation. Maintaining such experimentation may help inspire novel pathways to desirable futures, but there is a risk of societies becoming trapped in backward-looking narratives that threaten long-term sustainable outcomes.

We provide consensus on the benefits of nature experience for mental health, and a model for integrating them into urban design., A growing body of empirical evidence is revealing the value of nature experience for mental health. With rapid urbanization and declines in human contact with nature globally, crucial decisions must be made about how to preserve and enhance opportunities for nature experience. Here, we first provide points of consensus across the natural, social, and health sciences on the impacts of nature experience on cognitive functioning, emotional well-being, and other dimensions of mental health. We then show how ecosystem service assessments can be expanded to include mental health, and provide a heuristic, conceptual model for doing so.

The relationship between art and science is one of contrasts and commonalities. We look at one commonality between art and science: the central role of iconic images. We argue that iconic images are the touchstone symbols in both art and science and provide similar functions for both. We propose that these iconic images provoke an openness and a receptivity to our deepest emotional capacities and a connection between those and the dynamics of the broader social-ecological systems in which we operate. Such iconic images may also act as attractors that provoke the emergence of increasing levels of intellectual and aesthetic self-organization, not only at an individual level, but also in terms of larger social, scientific, or artistic fields. Finally, through a combination of this attraction and this connection, iconic images may play a role in transformation.

Much of the Earth’s biosphere has been appropriated for the production of harvestable biomass in the form of food, fuel and fibre. Here we show that the simplification and intensification of these systems and their growing connection to international markets has yielded a global production ecosystem that is homogenous, highly connected and characterized by weakened internal feedbacks. We argue that these features converge to yield high and predictable supplies of biomass in the short term, but create conditions for novel and pervasive risks to emerge and interact in the longer term. Steering the global production ecosystem towards a sustainable trajectory will require the redirection of finance, increased transparency and traceability in supply chains, and the participation of a multitude of players, including integrated ‘keystone actors’ such as multinational corporations. This Perspective examines the global production ecosystem through the lenses of connectivity, diversity and feedback, and proposes measures that will increase its stability and sustainability.

Nearly 40% of seafood is traded internationally and an even bigger proportion is affected by international trade, yet scholarship on marine fisheries has focused on global trends in stocks and catches, or on dynamics of individual fisheries, with limited attention to the link between individual fisheries, global trade and distant consumers. This paper examines the usefulness of fish price as a feedback signal to consumers about the state of fisheries and marine ecosystems. We suggest that the current nature of fisheries systems and global markets prevent transmission of such price signals from source fisheries to consumers. We propose several mechanisms that combine to weaken price signals, and present one example – the North Sea cod – to show how these mechanisms can be tested. The lack of a reliable price feedback to consumers represents a challenge for sustainable fisheries governance. We therefore propose three complimentary approaches to address the missing feedback: (i) strengthening information flow through improved traceability and visibility of individual fishers to consumers, (ii) capitalizing on the changing seafood trade structures and (iii) bypassing and complementing market mechanisms by directly targeting citizens and political actors regarding marine environmental issues through publicity and information campaigns. These strategies each have limitations and thus need to be pursued together to address the challenge of sustainability in global marine fisheries.

Solving one environmental problem may often invoke or intensify another one. Such environmental problem shifting (EPS) is a neglected topic in global sustainability research. Indeed, it is difficult to study as it requires the merging of insights from various research areas. Here we identify relevant studies, and provide an illustration and guidelines for the systematic study of EPS. As a modest thought experiment to illustrate the relevance of EPS, we consider solutions to scarcity of energy resources and climate change that, due to their extreme nature, may lead to considerable environmental problem shifting. We qualitatively assess the likely environmental and socioeconomic impacts of three hypothetical energy futures to highlight the possibility that as we resolve one environmental problem, another may be aggravated. We further present a set of guidelines to study EPS in a systematic and focused way. Here we stress that shifting can be mediated by biophysical as well as socioeconomic mechanisms, which means that its analysis requires a genuine interdisciplinary effort.

Resilience is increasingly recognized as an imperative for any prospect of sustainable development, as it relates to our ability to sustain human well-being and progress under the planetary and societal changes that we face now and into the future. Yet, we are ill-prepared to meet this challenge. We neither fully understand nor manage consistently for resilience of the human and natural systems that we must steward through extraordinary change. A unifying approach and common currency would help us to understand and manage for resilience under uncertain futures. Water is an essential, defining element in human and natural systems. Human civilization and water systems have co-evolved as a coupled system, with the majority of natural freshwater systems transformed to meet our demands. Shifting patters of water availability in space and time will define key pathways and tipping points for our resilience, and thus requirements for water system resilience must guide the trajectories and boundaries of human development. Here, we consider the thesis that water offers a key to unlocking the complex challenge of designing and managing for the resilience of coupled human-natural systems. We examine what constitutes a resilient system, what drives freshwater resilience, and how pathways to human resilience may be charted and navigated through the medium of water. Our theoretical treatise frames a portfolio of research that tests this thesis, including modeling and applications to water and water-dependent systems.

Decades of overuse, misuse, and environmental antibiotic pollution has increased the global pool of resistant bacteria. With estimates of hundreds of thousands of annual human deaths and a lack of new drugs to replace old ones, antimicrobial resistance probably constitutes one of the greatest human health and sustainability challenges of the 21st century. To safeguard treatable infections, a deliberate social-ecological transformation is needed toward stewardship of the global microbiome and long-term sustainable use of antibiotics. We review the foundation for such a transformation using recent insights from sustainability science, evolutionary biology and health, and the understanding of human interactions with microbes as two intertwined complex adaptive systems. A coherent strategy should acknowledge humans as the source of the world's strongest evolutionary force, reflect that antibiotics are building blocks of modern health systems, and strive to build social-ecological resilience to minimize levels of resistance and avoid over dependency on innovation of new drugs. Bottom up opportunities for seeding the transformation include participatory monitoring and stewardship of our personal and environmental microbiomes, as well as collective consumer action. Top down priorities include regular international institutions to coordinate multi-level action.

The concept of ecological solidarity (ES) is a major feature of the 2006 law reforming national park policy in France. In the context of biodiversity conservation, the objectives of this study are to outline the historical development of ES, provide a working definition, and present a method for its implementation that combines environmental pragmatism and adaptive management. First, we highlight how ES provides a focus on the interdependencies among humans and nonhuman components of the socioecological system. In doing so, we identify ES within a framework that distinguishes ecological, socioecological, and sociopolitical interdependencies. In making such interdependencies apparent to humans who are not aware of their existence, the concept of ES promotes collective action as an alternative or complementary approach to state- or market-based approaches. By focusing on the awareness, feelings, and acknowledgement of interdependencies between actors and between humans and nonhumans, we present and discuss a learning-based approach (participatory modeling) that allows stakeholders to work together to construct cultural landscapes for present and future generations. Using two case studies, we show how an ES analysis goes beyond the ecosystem management approach to take into account how human interactions with the environment embody cultural, social, and economic values and endorse an ethically integrated science of care and responsibility. ES recognizes the diversity of these values as a practical foundation for socially engaged and accountable actions. Finally, we discuss how ES enhances academic support for a socioecological systems approach to biodiversity conservation and promotes collaboration with decision-makers and stakeholders involved in the adaptive management of protected areas and their surrounding landscapes.

Over the past century, the total material wealth of humanity has been enhanced. However, in the twenty-first century, we face scarcity in critical resources, the degradation of ecosystem services, and the erosion of the planet’s capability to absorb our wastes. Equity issues remain stubbornly difficult to solve. This situation is novel in its speed, its global scale and its threat to the resilience of the Earth System. The advent of the Anthropence, the time interval in which human activities now rival global geophysical processes, suggests that we need to fundamentally alter our relationship with the planet we inhabit. Many approaches could be adopted, ranging from geo-engineering solutions that purposefully manipulate parts of the Earth System to becoming active stewards of our own life support system. The Anthropocene is a reminder that the Holocene, during which complex human societies have developed, has been a stable, accommodating environment and is the only state of the Earth System that we know for sure can support contemporary society. The need to achieve effective planetary stewardship is urgent. As we go further into the Anthropocene, we risk driving the Earth System onto a trajectory toward more hostile states from which we cannot easily return.

This article explores the links between agency, institutions, and innovation in navigating shifts and large-scale transformations toward global sustainability. Our central question is whether social and technical innovations can reverse the trends that are challenging critical thresholds and creating tipping points in the earth system, and if not, what conditions are necessary to escape the current lock-in. Large-scale transformations in information technology, nano- and biotechnology, and new energy systems have the potential to significantly improve our lives; but if, in framing them, our globalized society fails to consider the capacity of the biosphere, there is a risk that unsustainable development pathways may be reinforced. Current institutional arrangements, including the lack of incentives for the private sector to innovate for sustainability, and the lags inherent in the path dependent nature of innovation, contribute to lock-in, as does our incapacity to easily grasp the interactions implicit in complex problems, referred to here as the ingenuity gap. Nonetheless, promising social and technical innovations with potential to change unsustainable trajectories need to be nurtured and connected to broad institutional resources and responses. In parallel, institutional entrepreneurs can work to reduce the resilience of dominant institutional systems and position viable shadow alternatives and niche regimes.

The European Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) has failed to deliver on social, economic and ecological goals. This failure is in part the result of a number of social–ecological feedback mechanisms. The policy is currently undergoing reform, with unknown practical outcomes. Here, relatively successful fisheries policies outside the European Union are reviewed. Through interviews and workshops with scientists, managers and other stakeholders, complemented with literature reviews, practices that can create incentives for long-term sustainability are investigated. The focus is on how the provision of clear and trusted scientific evidence can stimulate defensible decisions, in turn creating incentives for compliance, leading to positive social–ecological outcomes. Despite differences between Europe and the investigated case studies, the prospects of an increased regionalization within the European CFP provides the best starting point for implementing best practice identified in this study.

Global change issues are complex and the consequences of decisions are often highly uncertain. The large spatial and temporal scales and stakes involved make it important to take account of present and potential consequences in decision-making. Standard approaches to decision-making under uncertainty require information about the likelihood of alternative states, how states and actions combine to form outcomes and the net benefits of different outcomes. For global change issues, however, the set of potential states is often unknown, much less the probabilities, effect of actions or their net benefits. Decision theory, thresholds, scenarios and resilience thinking can expand awareness of the potential states and outcomes, as well as of the probabilities and consequences of outcomes under alternative decisions.

This article examines whether some response strategies to climate variability and change have the potential to undermine long-term resilience of social–ecological systems. We define the parameters of a resilience approach, suggesting that resilience is characterized by the ability to absorb perturbations without changing overall system function, the ability to adapt within the resources of the system itself, and the ability to learn, innovate, and change. We evaluate nine current regional climate change policy responses and examine governance, sensitivity to feedbacks, and problem framing to evaluate impacts on characteristics of a resilient system. We find that some responses, such as the increase in harvest rates to deal with pine beetle infestations in Canada and expansion of biofuels globally, have the potential to undermine long-term resilience of resource systems. Other responses, such as decentralized water planning in Brazil and tropical storm disaster management in Caribbean islands, have the potential to increase long-term resilience. We argue that there are multiple sources of resilience in most systems and hence policy should identify such sources and strengthen capacities to adapt and learn.  2011

Many ecosystem services are in decline. Local ecological knowledge and associated practice are essential to sustain and enhance ecosystem services on the ground. Here, we focus on social or collect ...

In an increasingly complex, rapidly changing world, the capacity to cope with, adapt to, and shape change is vital. This thesis investigates how natural resource management can be organized and practiced to nurture this capacity, referred to as resilience, in social-ecological systems. Based on case studies and large-N data sets from UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BRs) and the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), it analyzes actors and social processes involved in adaptive co-management on the ground. Papers I & II use Kristianstads Vattenrike BR to analyze the roles of local stewards and bridging organizations. Here, local stewards, e.g. farmers and bird watchers, provide on-site management, detailed, long-term monitoring, and local ecological knowledge, build public support for ecosystem management, and hold unique links to specialized networks. A bridging organization strengthens their initiatives. Building and drawing on multi-level networks, it gathers different types of ecological knowledge, builds moral, political, legal and financial support from institutions and organizations, and identifies windows of opportunity for projects. Paper III synthesizes the MA community-based assessments and points to the importance of bridging organizations, leadership and vision, knowledge networks, institutions nested across scales, enabling policies, and high motivation among actors for adaptive co-management. Paper IV explores learning processes catalyzed by bridging organizations in BRs. 79 of the 148 BRs analyzed bridge local and scientific knowledge in efforts to conserve biodiversity and foster sustainable development, provide learning platforms, support knowledge generation (research, monitoring and experimentation), and frame information and education to target groups. Paper V tests the effects of participation and adaptive co-management in BRs. Local participation is positively linked to local support, successful integration of conservation and development, and effectiveness in achieving developmental goals. Participation of scientists is linked to effectiveness in achieving ‘conventional’ conservation goals and policy-makers enhance the integration of conservation and development. Adaptive co-management, found in 46 BRs, is positively linked to self-evaluated effectiveness in achieving developmental goals, but not at the expense of conservation. The thesis concludes that adaptive collaboration and learning processes can nurture resilience in social-ecological systems. Such processes often need to be catalyzed, supported and protected to survive. Therefore, bridging organizations are crucial in adaptive co-management.

The literature on ecosystem management and assessment is increasingly focusing on social capacity to enhance ecosystem resilience. Organizational flexibility, participatory approaches to learning, and knowledge generation for responding adequately to environmental change have been highlighted but not critically assessed. The small, flexible municipal organization, Ecomuseum Kristianstads Vattenrike (EKV) in southern Sweden, has identified win-win situations and gained broad support and legitimacy for ecosystem management among a diversity of actors in the region. Navigating the existing legal-political framework, EKV has built a loose social network of local stewards and key persons from organizations at municipal and higher societal levels. As a ‘bridging organization’, EKV has created arenas for trust-building, knowledge generation, collaborative learning, preference formation, and conflicts solving among actors in relation to specific environmental issues. Ad hoc projects are developed as issues arise by mobilizing individuals from the social network. Our results suggest that the EKV approach to adaptive comanagement has enhanced the social capacity to respond to unpredictable change and developed a trajectory towards resilience of a desirable social-ecological system.

Unprecedented global changes caused by human actions challenge society's ability to sustain the desirable features of our planet. This requires proactive management of change to foster both resilience (sustaining those attributes that are important to society in the face of change) and adaptation (developing new socioecological configurations that function effectively under new conditions). The Arctic may be one of the last remaining opportunities to plan for change in a spatially extensive region where many of the ancestral ecological and social processes and feedbacks are still intact. If the feasibility of this strategy can be demonstrated in the Arctic, our improved understanding of the dynamics of change can be applied to regions with greater human modification. Conditions may now be ideal to implement policies to manage Arctic change because recent studies provide the essential scientific understanding, appropriate international institutions are in place, and Arctic nations have the wealth to institute necessary changes, if they choose to do so.

▪ Abstract We explore the social dimension that enables adaptive ecosystem-based management. The review concentrates on experiences of adaptive governance of social-ecological systems during periods of abrupt change (crisis) and investigates social sources of renewal and reorganization. Such governance connects individuals, organizations, agencies, and institutions at multiple organizational levels. Key persons provide leadership, trust, vision, meaning, and they help transform management organizations toward a learning environment. Adaptive governance systems often self-organize as social networks with teams and actor groups that draw on various knowledge systems and experiences for the development of a common understanding and policies. The emergence of “bridging organizations” seem to lower the costs of collaboration and conflict resolution, and enabling legislation and governmental policies can support self-organization while framing creativity for adaptive comanagement efforts. A resilient social-ecological system may make use of crisis as an opportunity to transform into a more desired state.

Resource managers and scientists from disparate disciplines are rising to the challenge of understanding and moderating human impacts on marine ecosystems. Traditional barriers to communication between marine ecologists, fisheries biologists, social scientists and economists are beginning to break down, and the distinction between applied and basic research is fading. These ongoing trends arise, in part, from an increasing awareness of the profound influence of people on the functioning of all marine ecosystems, an increased focus on spatial and temporal scale, and a renewed assessment of the role of biodiversity in the sustainability of ecosystem goods and services upon which human societies depend. Here, we highlight the emergence of a complex systems approach for sustaining and repairing marine ecosystems, linking ecological resilience to governance structures, economics and society.

This study addresses social-ecological dynamics in the greater metropolitan area of Stockholm County, Sweden, with special focus on the National Urban Park (NUP). It is part of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) and has the following specific objectives: (1) to provide scientific information on biodiversity patterns, ecosystem dynamics, and ecosystem services generated; (2) to map interplay between actors and institutions involved in management of ecosystem services; and (3) to identify strategies for strengthening social-ecological resilience. The green areas in Stockholm County deliver numerous ecosystem services, for example, air filtration, regulation of microclimate, noise reduction, surface water drainage, recreational and cultural values, nutrient retention, and pollination and seed dispersal. Recreation is among the most important services and NUP, for example, has more than 15 million visitors per year. More than 65 organizations representing 175,000 members are involved in management of ecosystem services. However, because of population increase and urban growth during the last three decades, the region displays a quite dramatic loss of green areas and biodiversity. An important future focus is how management may reduce increasing isolation of urban green areas and enhance connectivity. Comanagement should be considered where locally managed green space may function as buffer zones and for management of weak links that connect larger green areas; for example, there are three such areas around NUP identified. Preliminary results indicate that areas of informal management represent centers on which to base adaptive comanagement, with the potential to strengthen biodiversity management and resilience in the landscape.

Humanity shapes freshwater flows and biosphere dynamics from a local to a global scale. Successful management of target resources in the short term tends to alienate the social and economic development process from its ultimate dependence on the life-supporting environment. Freshwater becomes transformed into a resource for optimal management in development, neglecting the multiple functions of freshwater in dynamic landscapes and its fundamental role as the bloodstream of the biosphere. The current tension of these differences in worldview is exemplified through the recent development of modern aquaculture contrasted with examples of catchment-based stewardship of freshwater flows in dynamic landscapes. In particular, the social and institutional dimension of catchment management is highlighted and features of social-ecological systems for resilience building are presented. It is concluded that this broader view of freshwater provides the foundation for hydrosolidarity.

Complex dynamic ecosystems are important natural capital assets. We investigate how Swedish national policy has approached these assets in its work on environmental indicators. In particular, we are interested in whether or not the indicators address ecosystem performance. We discuss our inventory of Swedish indicators in the context of ecosystem services, such as source and sink functions, and the capacity of ecosystems to sustain these functions for human well-being. We find that effective indicators have been developed to reflect energy and material flows within society and how human activities put pressure on the environment. The part of natural capital that concerns living systems is reflected in several of the Swedish indicators in a progressive fashion, but indicators that capture the dynamic capacity of ecosystems in sustaining the flow of source and sink functions need to be further developed. We provide examples of recent developments that have started to address such indicators in the context of ecosystem resilience and environmental change, and discuss directions for their further development. We stress the importance of monitoring ecosystem resilience and performance to avoid undesirable state shifts and building ecological knowledge and understanding of this capacity into environmental indicators and their associated management institutions.

Understanding marine regime shifts is important not only for ecology but also for developing marine management that assures the provision of ecosystem services to humanity. While regime shift theory is well developed, there is still no common understanding on drivers, mechanisms and characteristic of abrupt changes in real marine ecosystems. Based on contributions to the present theme issue, we highlight some general issues that need to be overcome for developing a more comprehensive understanding of marine ecosystem regime shifts. We find a great divide between benthic reef and pelagic ocean systems in how regime shift theory is linked to observed abrupt changes. Furthermore, we suggest that the long-lasting discussion on the prevalence of top-down trophic or bottom-up physical drivers in inducing regime shifts may be overcome by taking into consideration the synergistic interactions of multiple stressors, and the special characteristics of different ecosystem types. We present a framework for the holistic investigation of marine regime shifts that considers multiple exogenous drivers that interact with endogenous mechanisms to cause abrupt, catastrophic change. This framework takes into account the time-delayed synergies of these stressors, which erode the resilience of the ecosystem and eventually enable the crossing of ecological thresholds. Finally, considering that increased pressures in the marine environment are predicted by the current climate change assessments, in order to avoid major losses of ecosystem services, we suggest that marine management approaches should incorporate knowledge on environmental thresholds and develop tools that consider regime shift dynamics and characteristics. This grand challenge can only be achieved through a holistic view of marine ecosystem dynamics as evidenced by this theme issue.

Although some ecosystem responses to climate change are gradual, many ecosystems react in highly nonlinear ways. They show little response until a threshold or tipping point is reached where even a small perturbation may trigger collapse into a state from which recovery is difficult (1). Increasing evidence shows that the critical climate level for such collapse may be altered by conditions that can be managed locally. These synergies between local stressors and climate change provide potential opportunities for proactive management. Although their clarity and scale make such local approaches more conducive to action than global greenhouse gas management, crises in iconic UNESCO World Heritage sites illustrate that such stewardship is at risk of failing.

Recent studies provide compelling evidence for the idea that creative thinking draws upon two kinds of processes linked to distinct physiological features, and stimulated under different conditions. In short, the fast system-I produces intuition whereas the slow and deliberate system-II produces reasoning. System-I can help see novel solutions and associations instantaneously, but is prone to error. System-II has other biases, but can help checking and modifying the system-I results. Although thinking is the core business of science, the accepted ways of doing our work focus almost entirely on facilitating system-II. We discuss the role of system-I thinking in past scientific breakthroughs, and argue that scientific progress may be catalyzed by creating conditions for such associative intuitive thinking in our academic lives and in education. Unstructured socializing time, education for daring exploration, and cooperation with the arts are among the potential elements. Because such activities may be looked upon as procrastination rather than work, deliberate effort is needed to counteract our systematic bias.

This chapter addresses the involvement of water in abrupt and unexpected changes in social–ecological systems. It looks more closely at water’s many roles in reinforcing processes and stabilising feedbacks, and how systems suffer when feedback processes weaken or break. It discusses water-related disturbances and feedbacks, different categories of regime shift and ways of enhancing resilience. The issue of traps is discussed, both green water-related poverty traps, involving self-enforcing mechanisms, and blue water-related rigidity traps, when people and institutions resist change. The chapter explains the use of transformation management to get out of traps. Rapid, accelerating and surprising changes in the Anthropocene era Many of the changes in the GWS are rapid and can be surprising. Some are accelerating, but change can also be smooth and gradual. Most importantly, some change can be turbulent and abrupt, and result in non-linear responses from human, economic or ecological systems, with effects that are difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. Documented cases include the collapse of marine cod fisheries in 1992 (Hutchings, 1996), the collapse of Saharan vegetation 6–8000 years ago (Foley et al ., 2003) and the financial crises of 2008, all of which caused rapid and unprecedented reductions in resource availabilities with abrupt, unforeseen and negative effects on human well-being. The Anthropocene era has seen an increase in the links between humans and the environment, at multiple scales. Freshwater plays a significant role in this context, through its capacity to link different systems and places. Intricate cross-scale interactions play out in novel ways, which connect distant peoples and places (Adger et al ., 2008; Galaz et al ., 2010) reshaping the capacity of the biosphere to sustain human well-being (Folke et al ., 2011) and increasing the risk of abrupt change.

This interdisciplinary paper reports the results of a study into the costs and benefits of eutrophication reduction in the Baltic Sea. A large multidisciplinary team of natural and social scientists estimated nutrient loadings and pathways within the entire Baltic drainage basin, together with the costs of a range of abatement options and strategies. The abatement cost results were compared with clean-up benefits on a basin-wide scale, in order to explore the potential for international agreements among the countries which border the Baltic. Most countries would seem to gain net economic benefits from the simulated 50% nitrogen and phosphorus reduction policy.

We, as a society, find ourselves confronted with a spectrum of potentially catastrophic and irreversible environmental problems, for which conventional approaches will not suffice in providing solutions. These problems are characterized, above all, by their unpredictability. This means that surprise is to be expected, and that sudden qualitative shifts in dynamics present serious problems for management. In general, it is difficult to detect strong signals of change early enough to motivate effective solutions, or even to develop scientific consensus on a time scale rapid enough to allow effective solution. Furthermore, such signals, even when detected, are likely to be displaced in space or sector from the source, so that the motivation for action is small. Conventional market mechanisms thus will be inadequate to address these challenges.

It is well known that urban allotment gardens provide important ecosystem services. Their potential to act as sources of local resilience during times of crisis is less appreciated, despite the role they have played as areas of food security during times of crisis in history. Their ability to provide such relief, however, requires that the skills and knowledge needed for effective gardening can be transmitted over time and across social groups. In short, some portion of urban society must remember how to grow food. This chapter proposes that collectively managed gardens function as ‘pockets’ of social-ecological memory in urban landscapes by storing the knowledge and experience required to grow food. Allotment gardeners operate as ‘communities of practice’ with ecosystem stewardship reflecting long-term, dynamic interactions between community members and gardening sites. Social-ecological memories about food production and past crises are retained and transmitted through habits, traditions, informal institutions, artifacts and the physical structure of the gardens themselves. Allotment gardens thus serve as incubators of social-ecological knowledge with experiences that can be accessed and transferred to other land uses in times of crisis, contributing to urban resilience. Conversely, failure to protect these pockets of social-ecological memory could result in a collective ‘forgetting’ of important social-ecological knowledge and reduce social-ecological resilience.

This paper considers the significance of biological diversity in relation to large-scale processes in complex and dynamic ecological-economic systems. It focuses on functional diversity, and its relation to production and maintenance of ecological services that underpin human societies. Within functional groups of organisms two important cat- egories of species are identified: keystone process species and those essential for ecosystem resilience. The latter group represents "natural insurance capital." In addition to basic research on the interplay among biological diversity, functional performance, and resilience in complex self-organizing systems, we suggest that a functional approach has two main implications for a strategy for biodiversity conservation: (1) Biodiversity conservation to assure the resilience of ecosystems is required for all systems, no matter how heavily impacted they are. It should not be limited to protected areas. (2) The social, cultural, and economic driving forces in society that cause biodiversity loss need to be addressed directly. Specifically, (a) differences between the value of biological diversity to the private indi- vidual and its fundamental value to society as a whole need to be removed; (b) social and economic policies that encourage biodiversity loss should be reformed, especially where there is a risk of irreversible damage to ecosystems and diversity; and (c) institutions that are adaptive and work in synergy with ecosystem processes and functions are critical and should be created at all levels.

The notion of 'planetary boundaries' is rapidly diffusing into a range of policy arenas and has clearly stimulated a discussion on the need to reform international environmental governance. This article summarizes the special section "Global Environmental Governance and Planetary Boundaries". The articles in this section highlight several dimensions for the governance of 'planetary boundaries' and offer a rich picture of the Earth system governance challenges ahead. In essence, these involve exploring issues such as institutional interactions, policy integration, network governance and polycentric coordination in settings where biophysical complexity and non-linear shifts are the rule, rather than the exception. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.