Synchronous failure: the emerging causal architecture of global crisis

Homer‐Dixon, Thomas; Walker, Brian; Biggs, Reinette; Crépin, Anne‐Sophie; Folke, Carl; Lambin, Éric F.; Peterson, Garry D.; Rockström, Johan; Scheffer, Marten; Steffen, Will; Troell, Max

doi:10.5751/es-07681-200306

Cited by 183 publications

(130 citation statements)

References 99 publications

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“…Rather, the social and ecological are intertwined, and in fact coevolving, shaping and being shaped by one another (Norgaard 1994, Berkes and. They interplay in complex ways with relations, interactions, and feedbacks that emerge across temporal and spatial levels and scales, often with unexpected outcomes and surprises , Homer-Dixon et al 2015. As stated by Levin et al (2013) macroscopic properties emerge from local actions that feed back and influence individuals' options and behaviors, but typically only do so diffusely and over much longer time scales.…”

Section: Intertwined Social-ecological Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social-ecological resilience and biosphere-based sustainability science

Folke¹,

Biggs²,

Norström³

et al. 2016

E&S

Self Cite

811

585

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ABSTRACT. Humanity has emerged as a major force in the operation of the biosphere. The focus is shifting from the environment as externality to the biosphere as precondition for social justice, economic development, and sustainability. In this article, we exemplify the intertwined nature of social-ecological systems and emphasize that they operate within, and as embedded parts of the biosphere and as such coevolve with and depend on it. We regard social-ecological systems as complex adaptive systems and use a social-ecological resilience approach as a lens to address and understand their dynamics. We raise the challenge of stewardship of development in concert with the biosphere for people in diverse contexts and places as critical for long-term sustainability and dignity in human relations. Biosphere stewardship is essential, in the globalized world of interactions with the Earth system, to sustain and enhance our lifesupporting environment for human well-being and future human development on Earth, hence, the need to reconnect development to the biosphere foundation and the need for a biosphere-based sustainability science.

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Section: Intertwined Social-ecological Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social-ecological resilience and biosphere-based sustainability science

Folke¹,

Biggs²,

Norström³

et al. 2016

E&S

Self Cite

811

585

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“…It implies that studies and action of the local should not only focus on endogenous relations, but also account for and prepare for living and collaborating with influences from other levels, be it political decisions, economic drivers, transnational companies, migration policies, altered rainfall patterns, or climate change (e.g., Walker et al 2009b, Rockström et al 2014a). Some of those may be slow creeping influences, others abrupt and surprising (e.g., Hansen et al 2012, Homer-Dixon et al 2015. It is a truly intertwined social-ecological planet we are living on.…”

Section: Resilience and The Anthropocenementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The cross-scale challenges are a reflection of decadal to centurial accumulation of human influences on air and oceans and transformations of landscapes causing sudden changes in fast environmental variables and affecting the health of people, the vitality of societies, and the essential life-support functions of the biosphere (e.g., Clark andMunn 1986, Gunderson et al 1995). Indeed, the complex interplay of human actions shaping biosphere capacity has placed humanity in a novel situation of interactions of social-ecological systems across scales that are expressed in new, intertwined, and often turbulent and surprising ways (e.g., Walker et al 2009b, Biggs et al 2011, Homer-Dixon et al 2015 affecting people and places in disparate ways. The situation presents major challenges but also opportunities for adaptation and transformation (e.g., Adger et al 2011, Biermann et al 2012, Galaz et al 2012a,b, Hill and Engle 2013.…”

Section: Expect the Unexpectedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The scale of human actions and the speed, spread, and connectivity of globalization create new complex dynamics across levels and domains that play out in new ways (e.g., Young et al 2006, Walker et al 2009b, Biggs et al 2011, Homer-Dixon et al 2015. Interconnections of humans in a globalized society can propagate and cascade across countries and regions (e.g., Adger et al 2009, Liu et al 2013, Eriksson et al 2015, shaping landscapes, seascapes, the well-being of people and social-ecological systems worldwide (e.g., Holling 1995, Hughes et al 2003, Fairhead et al 2012, Galaz 2014, Lazarus 2014.…”

Section: Resilience and The Anthropocenementioning

confidence: 99%

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Resilience (Republished)

Folke¹

2016

E&S

Self Cite

668

393

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ABSTRACT.Resilience thinking in relation to the environment has emerged as a lens of inquiry that serves a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. Resilience is about cultivating the capacity to sustain development in the face of expected and surprising change and diverse pathways of development and potential thresholds between them. The evolution of resilience thinking is coupled to socialecological systems and a truly intertwined human-environment planet. Resilience as persistence, adaptability, and transformability of complex adaptive social-ecological systems is the focus, clarifying the dynamic and forward-looking nature of the concept. Resilience thinking emphasizes that social-ecological systems, from the individual, to community, to society as a whole, are embedded in the biosphere. The biosphere connection is an essential observation if sustainability is to be taken seriously. In the continuous advancement of resilience thinking there are efforts aimed at capturing resilience of social-ecological systems and finding ways for people and institutions to govern social-ecological dynamics for improved human well-being, at the local, across levels and scales, to the global. Consequently, in resilience thinking, development issues for human well-being, for people and planet, are framed in a context of understanding and governing complex social-ecological dynamics for sustainability as part of a dynamic biosphere.This invited article is a republication of Folke, C. 2016. "Resilience" of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science

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“…Both the imagination of environmental and social change require causality beliefs, (scientific) knowledge and a set of assumptions about the world (a mental model of change). Further, this kind of dynamic, long-term thinking has to pay attention to the multiple interactions (feedbacks) between environmental and social systems -a core insight of the global environmental change and resilience literature (Folke, 2006;Homer-Dixon et al, 2015;Smith and Stirling, 2010).…”

Section: Cognitive-individual Imaginationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imaginary politics: Climate change and making the future

Milkoreit

2017

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

110

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Climate change places major transformational demands on modern societies. Transformations require the capacity to collectively envision and meaningfully debate realistic and desirable futures. Without such a collective imagination capacity and active deliberation processes, societies lack both the motivation for change and guidance for decision-making in a certain direction of change. Recent arguments that science fiction can play a role in societal transformation processes is not yet supported by theory or empirical evidence. Advancing the argument that fiction can support sustainability transformations, this paper makes four contributions. First, building on the imaginary concept, I introduce and define the idea of socio-climatic imaginaries. Second, I develop a theory of imagination as linked cognitive-social processes that enable the creation of collectively shared visions of future states of the world. This theory addresses the dynamics that bridge imagination processes in the individual mind and collective imagining that informs social and political decision-making. Third, emphasizing the political nature of creating and contesting imaginaries in a society, I introduce the role of power and agency in this theory of collective imagination. I argue that both ideational and structural power concepts are relevant for understanding the potential societal influence of climate fiction. Finally, the paper illuminates these different forms of transformational power and agency with two brief case studies: two climate fiction novels. I contrast a dystopian and utopian science fiction novel -Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife (2015) and Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Earth (2015). The two books are very similar in their power/agency profile, but the comparison provides initial insights into the different roles of optimistic and pessimistic future visions.

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Synchronous failure: the emerging causal architecture of global crisis

Cited by 183 publications

References 99 publications

Social-ecological resilience and biosphere-based sustainability science

Social-ecological resilience and biosphere-based sustainability science

Resilience (Republished)

Imaginary politics: Climate change and making the future

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