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Sustainability Science

Managing Risk and Resilience for Sustainable Development

  • 2nd Edition - November 7, 2023
  • Latest edition
  • Author: Per Becker
  • Language: English

Sustainability is increasingly important across functional sectors and scientific disciplines. Policy-makers, practitioners, and academics continue to wrestle with the co… Read more

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Description

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).

Key features

  • Introduces a new agenda for sustainable development that reflects current thinking in sustainability science
  • Draws lessons from the entire history of humankind to help us understand our present and inform decisions for our future
  • Operationalises key concepts to provide a clear link between theory to practice
  • Combines a stern message about staggering sustainability challenges with advice for practical action and calls for hope
  • Includes new chapters on complexity–what it is, how it manifests, and its consequences–on resistance to knowledge and change–focusing on the drivers behind the phenomena and how to overcome them–and more

Readership

Professionals in a wide range of sectors involved in advancing the safety and sustainability of society, such as risk managers, environmental scientists, societal planners, hydrologists, geoscientists, engineers, public health professionals, social workers, and others working for public, private or civil society organisations as policy-makers or practitioners. It is also written for students at the graduate level focusing on risk, resilience and the sustainable development of society

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

Product details

  • Edition: 2
  • Latest edition
  • Published: November 9, 2023
  • Language: English

About the author

PB

Per Becker

Per Becker is a Professor of Risk and Sustainability at Lund University (Sweden), Research Professor of Climate, Environment and 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.
Affiliations and expertise
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

View book on ScienceDirect

Read Sustainability Science on ScienceDirect