ABSTRACT
Resilience is the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop. Earth System Science has recently picked up many of the themes in the earlier discussions of James Lovelock’s Gaia theory. John Agnew’s succinct summary of geopolitical reasoning suggests: the world is actively ‘spatialized,’ divided up, labeled, sorted out into a hierarchy of places of greater or lesser ‘importance’ by political geographers, other academics and political leaders. At the global scale the key institution using the concept of resilience is the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Its researchers have been central to the discussion of earth system boundaries, coupled social and natural systems, food production, sustainability and complex systems analysis. Sustainability is defined in the Stockholm framework as living within earth system boundaries, a series of threshold conditions within which earth system science suggests civilisation can thrive.
