Resilience: Now more than ever

This article belongs to Ambio’s 50th Anniversary Collection. Theme: Anthropocene.

Resilience is a fundamental property of a system and from a human perspective it can be either desirable or undesirable. Salinized landscapes or dictatorships can be very resilient and undesirable states. A resilient system contains, provides and nurtures the diverse social-ecological elements that are essential for reorganization, adaptation, and transformation in the face of novel, unexpected, and changing circumstances. A desirable resilient system involves adaptive management and governance with the capacity to navigate uncertainty, shocks and surprises in order to contribute to sustaining or improving human well-being, where human well-being implies a fairer and equitable world, accounting for power relations, and operating within planetary boundaries. Here, we focus on resilience as a desirable property of a system and where sustainability is the vision of societal development.