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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.

Aquaculture is the fastest growing food sector and continues to expand alongside terrestrial crop and livestock production. Using portfolio theory as a conceptual framework, we explore how current interconnections between the aquaculture, crop, livestock, and fisheries sectors act as an impediment to, or an opportunity for, enhanced resilience in the global food system given increased resource scarcity and climate change. Aquaculture can potentially enhance resilience through improved resource use efficiencies and increased diversification of farmed species, locales of production, and feeding strategies. However, aquaculture’s reliance on terrestrial crops and wild fish for feeds, its dependence on freshwater and land for culture sites, and its broad array of environmental impacts diminishes its ability to add resilience. Feeds for livestock and farmed fish that are fed rely largely on the same crops, although the fraction destined for aquaculture is presently small (∼4%). As demand for high-value fed aquaculture products grows, competition for these crops will also rise, as will the demand for wild fish as feed inputs. Many of these crops and forage fish are also consumed directly by humans and provide essential nutrition for low-income households. Their rising use in aquafeeds has the potential to increase price levels and volatility, worsening food insecurity among the most vulnerable populations. Although the diversification of global food production systems that includes aquaculture offers promise for enhanced resilience, such promise will not be realized if government policies fail to provide adequate incentives for resource efficiency, equity, and environmental protection.

Different uses of the terms \"drivers,\" \"variables,\" and \"shocks\" cause confusion in the literature and in discussions on the dynamics of ecosystems and social–ecological systems. Three main sources of confusion are unclear definition of the system, unclear definition of the role of people, and confusion between variables and drivers. As a contribution to resolving some of the confusion, we offer one interpretation of how the terms might be used.

Sustainability within planetary boundaries requires concerted action by individuals, governments, civil society and private actors. For the private sector, there is concern that the power exercised by transnational corporations generates, and is even central to, global environmental change. Here, we ask under which conditions transnational corporations could either hinder or promote a global shift towards sustainability. We show that a handful of transnational corporations have become a major force shaping the global intertwined system of people and planet. Transnational corporations in agriculture, forestry, seafood, cement, minerals and fossil energy cause environmental impacts and possess the ability to influence critical functions of the biosphere. We review evidence of current practices and identify six observed features of change towards ‘corporate biosphere stewardship’, with significant potential for upscaling. Actions by transnational corporations, if combined with effective public policies and improved governmental regulations, could substantially accelerate sustainability efforts. Transnational corporations control large proportions of the industries and commodities that directly and indirectly impact the environment. Here, the authors discuss the problems, but also potential benefits, of such consolidation for sustainability.

Climate change and its interactions with complex socioeconomic dynamics dictate the need for decision makers to move from incremental adaptation toward transformation as societies try to cope with unprecedented and uncertain change. Developing pathways toward transformation is especially difficult in regions with multiple contested resource uses and rights, with diverse decision makers and rules, and where high uncertainty is generated by differences in stakeholders’ values, understanding of climate change, and ways of adapting. Such a region is the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia, from which we provide insights for developing a process to address these constraints. We present criteria for sequencing actions along adaptation pathways: feasibility of the action within the current decision context, its facilitation of other actions, its role in averting exceedance of a critical threshold, its robustness and resilience under diverse and unexpected shocks, its effect on future options, its lead time, and its effects on equity and social cohesion. These criteria could potentially enable development of multiple stakeholder-specific adaptation pathways through a regional collective action process. The actual implementation of these multiple adaptation pathways will be highly uncertain and politically difficult because of fixity of resource-use rights, unequal distribution of power, value conflicts, and the likely redistribution of benefits and costs. We propose that the approach we outline for building resilient pathways to transformation is a flexible and credible way of negotiating these challenges.

Scenarios of changes in biodiversity for the year 2100 can now be developed based on scenarios of changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, climate, vegetation, and land use and the known sensitivity of biodiversity to these changes. This study identified a ranking of the importance of drivers of change, a ranking of the biomes with respect to expected changes, and the major sources of uncertainties. For terrestrial ecosystems, land-use change probably will have the largest effect, followed by climate change, nitrogen deposition, biotic exchange, and elevated carbon dioxide concentration. For freshwater ecosystems, biotic exchange is much more important. Mediterranean climate and grassland ecosystems likely will experience the greatest proportional change in biodiversity because of the substantial influence of all drivers of biodiversity change. Northern temperate ecosystems are estimated to experience the least biodiversity change because major land-use change has already occurred. Plausible changes in biodiversity in other biomes depend on interactions among the causes of biodiversity change. These interactions represent one of the largest uncertainties in projections of future biodiversity change.

Early efforts in wildlife management focused on reducing population variability and maximizing yields of selected species. Later, Aldo Leopold proposed the concept of habitat management as superior to population management, and more recently, ecosystem management, whereby ecological processes are conserved or mimicked, has come into favour. Managing for resilience builds upon these roots, and focuses on maintaining key processes and relationships in social-ecological systems so that they are robust to a great variety of external or internal perturbations at a range of ecological and social scales. Managing for resilience focuses on system-level characteristics and processes, and the endurance of system properties in the face of social or ecological surprise. Managing for resilience consists of actively maintaining a diversity of functions and homeostatic feedbacks, steering systems away from thresholds of potential concern, increasing the ability of the system to maintain structuring processes and feedbacks under a wide range of conditions, and increasing the capacity of a system to cope with change through learning and adaptation. The critical aspect of managing for resilience, and therefore ecosystem management, is undertaking adaptive management to reduce uncertainty and actively managing to avoid thresholds in situations where maintaining resilience is desired. Managing adaptively for resilience is the approach best suited for coping with external shocks and surprises given the non-linear complex dynamics arising from linked social-ecological systems.

Changes in the abundance of species-especially those that influence water and nutrient dynamics, trophic interactions, or disturbance regime-affect the structure and functioning of ecosystems. Diversity is also functionally important, both because it increases the probability of including species that have strong ecosystem effects and because it can increase the efficiency of resource use. Differences in environmental sensitivity among functionally similar species give stability to ecosystem processes, whereas differences in sensitivity among functionally different species make ecosystems more vulnerable to change. Current global environmental changes that affect species composition and diversity are therefore profoundly altering the functioning of the biosphere.

We present a resilience-based approach for assessing sustainability in a sub-catchment of the Murray-Darling Basin in southeast Australia. We define the regional system and identify the main issues, drivers, and potential shocks, then assess both specified and general resilience. The current state of the system is a consequence of changes in resource use. We identify ten known or possible biophysical, economic, and social thresholds operating at different scales, with possible knock-on effects between them. Crossing those thresholds may result in irreversible changes in goods and services generated by the region. Changes in resilience, in general, reflect a pattern of past losses with some signs of recent improvements. Interventions in the system for managing resilience are constrained by current governance, and attention needs to be paid to the roles and capacities of the various institutions. An overview of the current state of the system and likely future trends suggests that transformational change in the region be seriously considered.

This paper addresses the problem of which biota to choose to best satisfy the conservation goals for a particular region in the face of inadequate resources. Biodiversity is taken to be the integration of biological variability across all scales, from the genetic, through species and ecosystems, to landscapes. Conserving biodiversity is a daunting task, and the paper asserts that focusing on species is not the best approach. The best way to minimize species loss is to maintain the integrity of ecosystem function. The important questions therefore concern the kinds of biodiversity that are significant to ecosystem functioning. To best focus our efforts we need to establish how much (or how little) redundancy there is in the biological composition of ecosystems. An approach is suggested, based on the use of functional groups of organisms defined according to ecosystem processes. Functional groups with little or no redundancy warrant priority conservation effort. Complementary species-based approaches for maximizing the inclusion of biodiversity within a set of conservation areas are compared to the functional-group approach.