Sustainability is increasingly important across functional sectors and scientific disciplines. Policy-makers, 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, Second Edition, contributes to filling that gap and is completely revised with several new chapters. It asserts that all efforts for the sustainability of humankind are undermined by the four fundamental challenges of complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and dynamic change. While there are no silver bullets, this book contends that we need systems approaches, risk approaches, participatory approaches, and resilience approaches to address each of them and endeavours to provide such. With that in mind, this book describes the state of the world (Part I), proposes a way to approach the world (Part II), and suggests how to set out to change the world (Part III).
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Table of Contents
1. Introducing the book PART I: THE STATE OF THE WORLD 2. Our Past Defining Our Present 3. Our growing awareness of sustainability challenges 4. Our boundaries for sustainability 5. Our Disturbances, Disruptions and Disasters 6. Our dynamic risk landscape PART II: APPROACHING THE WORLD 7. Conceptual Frames for Risk, Resilience and Sustainable Development 8. Resilience-From Panacean to Pragmatic 9. Grasping complexity 10. Governing and governmentalisation 11. The World as Human-Environment Systems PART III: CHANGING THE WORLD 12. Science and Change 13. Understanding Resistance to Knowledge and Change 14. Capacity Development for Resilience 15. Social Change for a Resilient Society 16. On a bumpy road from Industria to Sustainia? (PART IV) 17. Concluding Remarks
Authors
Per Becker Division of Risk Management and Societal Safety, Lund University, Sweden; Climate, Environment, and Sustainability, NORCE Norwegian Research Centre, Norway; and Unit for Environmental Sciences and Management, North-West University, South Africa. Per Becker is a Professor of Risk and Sustainability at Lund University (Sweden), Research Professor of Climate, Environmentand Sustainability at NORCE (Norway), and Extraordinary Professor of Environmental Sciences and Management at
North-West University (South Africa). He has an interdisciplinary background with a PhD in Sociology and another PhD in
Engineering and has combined academia with a professional career for international organisations and public authorities.
His research group has had a significant impact on policy and practice concerning issues of risk and sustainability, perhaps
most notably, as a leading scientific provider of knowledge cited in global UN policies concerning capacity development
and as a trusted partner to a range of local authorities, governmental agencies, and international organisations.
