The new book "Principles of Ecosystem Stewardship: Resilience-Based Natural Resource Management in a Changing World", is the first comprehensive textbook with a resilience focus for natural resource management, resource conservation and ecosystem based-management, as well as other related or more specialized courses of e.g. social-ecological systems and management of ecosystem services. A new framework for resource management
Edited by centre science director Carl Folke together with F. Stuart Chapin III and Gary P. Kofinas, the book links recent advances in the theory of resilience, sustainability, and vulnerability with practical issues of resource management, including ecosystem services, from a diverse set of social-ecological systems.
The book argues that in order to achieve desirable outcomes for humanity, such as those of the UN Millennium Development Goals on poverty, food security, and environmental sustainability, new integrated and adaptive approaches to social and economic development is urgently required.
- The purpose of this textbook is to provide a new framework for resource management - a framework based on the necessity of managing resources and ecosystem services as part of interdependent social-ecological in a complex world of directional change and uncertainty, Carl Folke says.
New approaches required
Together with his co-authors, he argues that most textbooks on natural resource and ecosystem management are dominated by a steady-state view that interprets change as gradual and incremental and disregards interactions of social-ecological systems across scales.
- Management implementation of steady-state theory and policies tends to invest in controlling a few selected ecosystem processes, at the expense of long-term social-ecological resilience - i.e., the capacity of the system to cope with surprise and abrupt changes and continue to develop and even transform to more desired conditions, he says.
