This is a textbook for Natural Resource Management, Resource Conservation and Ecosystem Management, as well as other related or more specialized courses. Most textbooks on natural resource and ecosystem management are dominated by a steady-state view that interprets change as gradual and incremental and disregards interactions across scales. Management implementation of steady-state theory and policies tends to invest in controlling a few selected ecosystem processes, at the expense of long-term social-ecological resilience - i.e., the capacity of the system to cope with surprise and abrupt changes. Loss of resilience makes systems more vulnerable to both expected and unforeseen changes. Achieving desirable outcomes for humanity, such as those of the UN Millennium Development Goals on poverty, food security, and environmental sustainability, will require new integrated and adaptive approaches to social and economic development, where the complex interconnectedness between humans and nature, at all scales, is considered and the existence of uncertainty and surprise accepted as the rule.The purpose of this textbook is to provide a new framework for resource management - a framework based on the necessity of managing resources in a world dominated by uncertainty and change. The book links recent advances in the theory of resilience, sustainability, and vulnerability with practical issues of resource management.

About the Author

F. Stuart Chapin, III is Professor of Ecology in the Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks. Gary P. Kofinas is Associate Professor of Resource Policy and Management in the School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences, University of Alaska Fairbanks. Carl Folke is Professor and Science Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University.

Table of Contents

1. A Framework for Understanding Change 2. MAnaging Ecosystems Sustainably 3.Human vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience 4. Dynamics of integrated social-ecological systems 5. Conservation and livelihoods: Sustaining and restoring the cultural connections to land 7. Landscape stewardship: Discovering the missing connections to sustain vulnerable systems. 8. Forest systems: Living with long-term change. 9.Drylands: Coping with uncertainty, thresholds, and changes in state 10. Lakes and rivers: Managing connections across temporal and spatial scales 11. Oceans and estuaries: Managing the commons 12. Food production systems: integrating technology sustainably 13. Urban and suburban landscapes: Manging the built environment 14. Planet Earth: Sustaining the life support systems of the planet 15. Strategies for managing uncertainty and change 16. Summary and Synthesis

Reviews

From the reviews: "Throughout the work, chapter contributors link recent advances in the theory of resilience, sustainability, and vulnerability with practical issues related to the management of social-ecological systems. ! This book introduces an intriguing new approach to the philosophy of resource management emphasizing proactive policies that shape change for sustainability, in contrast to current reactions to observed changes. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate through professional collections." (R. L. Smith, Choice, Vol. 47 (3), November, 2009)