The goal of sustainable development is to create and maintain
prosperous social, economic, and ecological systems. These systems
are intimately linked: humanity depends on services of ecosystems
for its wealth and security. Moreover, humans can transform
ecosystems into more or less desirable conditions. Humanity
receives many ecosystem services, such as clean water and
air, food production, fuel, and others. Yet human action can
render ecosystems unable to provide these services, with consequences
for human livelihoods, vulnerability, and security.
Such negative shifts represent loss of resilience.
New insights have been gained during the last 10 years about
the essential role of resilience for a prosperous development of
society (1). A growing number of case studies have revealed the
tight connection between resilience, diversity and sustainability
of social-ecological systems (2, 3). This article is a summary of
a major report prepared on behalf of the Environmental Advisory
Council to the Swedish Government, as input to the process
of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD)
in Johannesburg, South Africa in August 2002 (4). In the report,
we provide an up-to-date synthesis of case studies and recent
insights, in the context of emerging theories of complex systems
characterized by uncertainty and surprise (5–7).