Sustainability Science

Managing Risk and Resilience for Sustainable Development

Per Becker

• Publisher: Elsevier
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780444627292
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

A new, holistic transdisciplinary endeavour born in the 21st century, Sustainability Science: Managing Risk and Resilience for Sustainable Development aims to provide conceptual and practical approaches to sustainable development that help us to grasp and address uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity and dynamic change. Four aspects that permeate our contemporary world and undermine much of our traditional ways of thinking and doing. The concepts of risk and resilience are central in this endeavour to explain, understand and improve core challenges of humankind. Sustainability and sustainable development are increasingly important guiding principles across administrative levels, functional sectors and scientific disciplines. Policymakers, practitioners and academics continue to wrestle with the complexity of risk, resilience and sustainability, but because of the necessary transdisciplinary focus, it is difficult to find authoritative content in a single source. Sustainability Science: Managing Risk and Resilience for Sustainable Development presents the state of the world in relation to major sustainability challenges and their symptomatic effects, such as climate change, environmental degradation, poverty, disease and disasters. It then continues by elaborating on ways to approach and change our world to make it a safer and more sustainable place for current and future generations. The natural, applied and social sciences are woven together throughout the book to provide a more inclusive understanding of relevant processes, changes, trends and events. - Shows how disturbances, disruptions and disasters have always been intrinsic byproducts of the same human-environment systems that supply us with opportunities, as well as what implications that has for policy and practice towards sustainable development today - Introduces a new approach for grasping and addressing issues of risk and resilience in relation to sustainable development that is firmly rooted in a comprehensive philosophical and theoretical foundation and clearly linking the conceptual with the practical - Presents a holistic agenda for change that includes a more explicit role of science, reinforced focus on capacity development and the overall necessity of fundamental social change - Features more than 150 figures, full-color photographs, diagrams, and illustrations to highlight major themes and aid in the retention of key concepts

Chapter 1

Introducing the Book

Abstract

Our world is in a precarious state and we must grasp and address a range of sustainability challenges and their symptomatic events. This chapter presents the overall purpose of the book, which is to present a coherent framework for explaining, understanding and improving issues of sustainability in our uncertain, complex, ambiguous and dynamic world. I, then demarcate its focus to mainly be concerned with on the notion of sustainability in the sense of protecting what human beings value, now and in the future, and not to the same extent on the notion of sustainability in the sense of management of our vital resources. Finally, the chapter presents the structure of the book, with its 3 parts and 11 chapters.

Keywords

Development; Globalization; Population; Resilience; Risk; Sustainability Science; Transdisciplinary

Introduction

The world population has been estimated to have increased almost six times (Maddison, 2001: 28), the global economy around 50 times (Maddison, 2001) and the global CO₂ emissions about 500 times (Bodenet et al., 2011) from the industrial revolution to the end of our last century. This development continues to place increasing strains on the world’s natural resources and environment (Fan & Qi, 2010; Gadda & Gasparatos, 2009; Grimble et al., 2002; Kalas, 2000; Komatsuzaki & Ohta, 2007; Syvitski, 2008), while vast inequalities persist and even deepen both between and within states (Bywaters, 2009; Gorringe et al., 2009; O’Brien et al., 2009; Rist, 2006: 18). Although the last century saw a global increase in life expectancy (Riley, 2001) and a decrease in child mortality (Ahmad et al., 2000: 1175) and adult illiteracy (Parris & Kates, 2003: 8070–8071), economic development was highly unequal rendering the same wealth in the final decade of the century to the richest 1% in the world as to the poorest 57% (Milanovic, 2002: 50). In order to reduce poverty while striving toward a more viable use of natural resources, it is vital to make future development more sustainable.

Regardless of whether one focuses on economic growth or on more human-centered parameters, most uses of the concept of development have one thing in common. They project some sort of scenario into the future, in which the variables of interest develop over time along a preferred expected course. This scenario is in modern society not believed to be predestined or predetermined in any way, but is dependent on a wide range of human activity, environmental processes, etc. The complexity and dynamic character of the world is, instead, continuously creating a multitude of possible futures (Japp & Kusche, 2008: 80), causing uncertainty as to what real development will materialize (Figure 1.1).

Being unable to see into the future, as well as being largely incapable of predicting it (Simon, 1990: 7–8; Taleb, 2008), modern individuals, organizations and societies resort to the notion of risk in order to make sense of their uncertain world (Zinn, 2008: 3–10). Risk is a contested concept, but to be able to talk about risk at all entails some kind of idea of uncertain futures as well as of their potential impacts on what human beings value (Renn, 1998: 51). This use of risk also entails that risk must be defined in relation to some preferred expected outcome (Kaplan & Garrick, 1981; Kaplan, 1997; Kaplan et al., 2001; Luhmann, 1995: 307–310; Zinn, 2008: 4). If risk is related to potential deviations from a preferred expected future, we must endeavor to reduce such risk to safeguard our development objectives.

FIGURE 1.1 What world do we want?

There are many courses of events and their underlying processes that may negatively impact development, in either the short or the long term. Abrupt changes in political leadership, global financial crises, algal bloom, epidemic outbreak, droughts, cyclones and outbreaks of communal violence are just a few examples of initiating events that may set off destructive courses of events. Behind these often dramatic courses of events lay processes of change which are less sensational, but may have far-reaching indirect impacts, such as environmental degradation (Geist & Lambin, 2004; Lewis, 2006; Pimentel, 2006), demographic and socio-economic processes (Satterthwaite et al., 2009: 11–19; Wisner et al., 2004: 62–74), globalization (Beck, 1999; Murad & Mazumder, 2009; Yusuf, 2003), changing antagonistic threats (Kaldor, 1999; Kegley, 2003) and the increasing complexity of modern society (Perrow, 1999; 2008). In addition, we have the mounting threats of climate change, not only potentially increasing the frequency and intensity of destructive extreme weather events (Elsner et al., 2008; Gravelle & Mimura, 2008; Kasei et al., 2010; Nordhaus, 2006; von Storch & Woth, 2008; Syvitski, 2008; Webster et al., 2005), but also changing everyday life for vast numbers of people.

These courses of events and their underlying processes rarely exist in isolation, neither from each other nor from the development activities and processes that they impact. It is thus not only vital to ensure that development gains are durable in the face of destructive courses of events and their underlying processes, but also that the means to reach the development gains do not augment, or create new risks that hinder development for future generations (WCED, 1987: 43) (Figure 1.2).

FIGURE 1.2 We are keeping us dry for now, but what about later? Source: Photobank Gallery/Shutterstock.com.

Purpose of the Book

As I attempt to show in this book, the increasing complexity and dynamic character of our world demand conceptual and practical approaches to sustainable development that help us to grasp and manage uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity and dynamic change. I argue that risk is a key concept in this context, as thinking about sustainability requires us to think ahead into an uncertain future. I also reassert that the concept of resilience is central, and take it further by providing a conceptual framework of resilience that also gives practical guidance for analyzing and developing the resilience of societies, communities, organizations, etc. This book is therefore necessarily transdisciplinary, drawing upon contributions from a wide range of disciplines (e.g. anthropology, archaeology, design, engineering, geography, public administration, sociology, etc.) and integrating them under the promising premise of Sustainability Science. The premise of bringing together “scholarship and practice, global and local perspectives from north and south, and disciplines across” all sciences (Clark & Dickson, 2003: 8060) to address the core challenges of humankind (Clark & Dickson, 2003; Kates et al., 2001; Olsson & Jerneck, 2010).

Sustainability Science asserts that to facilitate the much needed shift toward sustainable development, we must be able to span the range of spatial and temporal scales of various phenomena, manage complexity, and recognize a wide range of perspectives as usable knowledge from both society and science (Kates et al., 2001: 641). This is a formidable task, but I intend to contribute by presenting one approach to risk, resilience and sustainability that is designed to tackle it, leaving you to judge if this approach is useful for your purposes or not.

The book is both descriptive, in the sense of describing how the world is, and prescriptive, in the sense of prescribing what it ought to be and what we ought to do to get there. However, I attempt to maintain scientific rigor in both, showing how traditional science and design science can complement each other, when our needs for explanation and understanding of various phenomena shift to needs for solving real world problems. In other words, shifting from being mainly concerned with the pursuit of knowledge (Checkland, 1999: 50; Ravetz, 1996; Weber, 1949) to focusing on designing artifacts for satisfying predefined purposes (Cook & Ferris, 2007: 173; Poser, 1998: 85–87; Simon, 1996: 4–5, 114).

In short, the purpose of the book is to present a coherent framework for grasping and addressing issues of sustainability in our increasingly complex and dynamic world.

Demarcation of the Book

Sustainable development is both conceptually and practically a broad and multifaceted issue (Kates et al., 2001; WCED, 1987). It is an issue of paramount importance for the continued existence of the world, as we know it. At its core lies the idea that in planning for the future, we must think about what to do and not to do today, in order to bring about that future (Simon, 1990: 11). The main part of sustainability must in other words be forward-looking, althou...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introducing the Book
• Part I. The State of the World
• Part II. Approaching the World
• Part III. Changing the World
• References
• Index