The Sustainability Transition

The Great Acceleration has emerged as a game changer with regard to environmental governance. Solving collective-action problems, addressing environmental side effects, accounting for institutional interplay, and coming to terms with multilevel governance all remain critical pieces of the puzzle in efforts to create effective environmental governance systems. But now it has become essential to integrate three additional factors into the mix in forming and implementing regimes to guide human-environment relations. One factor centers on the need to focus on the Earth System as the proper unit of analysis in crafting the terms of environmental regimes. This is the essential insight of the line of thinking we now characterize as Earth System governance. ¹ A second, equally important consideration arises from the fact that we are entering a period of increased turbulence in large socioecological systems. We must devise arrangements that can perform well in a world whose dynamics are often nonlinear, generally irreversible, and frequently abrupt. ² Under these conditions there is nothing to be gained from putting off taking steps to address large-scale environmental issues in the hope that a little extra time will allow us to avoid the need to make decisions under high levels of uncertainty. The third factor arises from the need to embed efforts to address environmental concerns within the larger discourse of sustainable development. Admittedly, sustainable development is a desired outcome that is difficult to define operationally, much less to measure in the form of an agreed-upon suite of quantifiable indicators that makes tracking progress in this realm possible. ³ Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear that residents of the developing world will not tolerate a situation in which we devote ourselves to coming to grips with problems like climate change or the loss of biological diversity at the expense of concerted efforts to improve the well-being of large numbers of people struggling to emerge from poverty and desiring to enjoy the benefits of more affluent lifestyles.