ABSTRACT
The continued invocation of sustainability in international talks, development goals, and other policy discussions ignores the emerging realities of the Anthropocene –unprecedented and irreversible rates of human-induced biodiversity loss, exponential increases in per-capita resource consumption, and global climate change. The concept of sustainability dates back to early United Nations conferences in the 1970s and has become increasingly difficult to disentangle from sustainable development, although the two concepts are not necessarily the same. One of sustainability’s major contributions to environmental governance was its emphasis on both intra- and intergenerational equity. Resilience can be characterized in three ways. They are: the amount of change the system can undergo and still retain the same controls on function and structure; the degree to which the system is capable of self-organization; and the ability to build and increase the capacity for learning and adaptation. Resilience thinking is at a critical stage, in terms of both its theoretical development and its practical application.
