As corporations have come to recognise their role in shaping the biosphere, there has been an increase in inter-corporate cooperation, whereby corporations come together to address issues of common concern. The rationale for developing a collective approach arises from a realisation that “wicked” problems are beyond the capacity of any one organisation to tackle. At the same time, although inter-corporate collaborations exist in the practice landscape, little is known about their characteristics from an academic perspective. Moreover, these initiatives raise questions in terms of how collective performance might be communicated, thereby creating the possibility for accountability to be discharged. This paper seeks to understand how inter-corporate sustainability initiatives (hereafter ISIs) have been explored in the literature by using a systematic literature review (SLR) of 203 academic papers and explores how these aspects can be integrated to start the process of developing an understanding of potential accountability mechanisms for ISIs. The paper contributes to accounting literature by emphasising the likely relevance of different ISI configurations in designing appropriate accountability approaches. It expands existing discussions around accountability-based accounting systems and highlights the importance of considering a variety of factors, including the governance approach, nature of collaboration, and ISI mechanisms and attributes, in informing accountability measures. The SLR suggests that certain aspects, such as leadership, trust, legitimacy, and outcomes, are critical in understanding ISIs and influence our ability to imagine how accountability could be sought for collective outcomes as well as participant achievements.

Non-technical summary. Efforts toward global sustainability transformations risks being undermined by the formation of a global polycrisis, where multiple global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, geopolitical conflict, and pandemics interact to reinforce each other. Resilience scholarship has identified multiple capacities needed for adaptation and transformation of social-ecological systems. Here, we explore the leverage and vulnerability of such capacities to the global polycrisis. We find that many capacities have both and their development and expression can therefore be thought of as being in a direct coevolutionary struggle with the development of a global polycrisis.

Technical summary. Social and environmental challenges are combining to form a complex of crises with potential to delay or reset many sustainability efforts. These risks raise questions about what capacities will be needed for advancing sustainability during a time of global polycrisis. Here, we evaluate the adequacy of adaptive and transformative capacities – collectively, resilience capacities – for navigating the polycrisis. Specifically, we perform a rapid assessment of their potential for addressing the 14 recently proposed Anthropocene traps. We find that 10 of the 14 Anthropocene traps have characteristics that challenge in total 17 of 23 adaptive and transformative capacities. On the other hand, 10 of 23 capacities – with an overrepresentation of transformative capacities – have general potential to prevent formation and progress of traps. Coevolutionary struggles between the expression of a capacity and the progression of traps are widespread. Importantly, transformative and adaptive capacities complement each other in the types of Anthropocene traps they most frequently address, with transformative capacities targeting global traps and adaptive capacities the emergent structural traps related to connectivity and pace of change. We end by proposing five unifying processes that can serve as an organizing framework for consideration of other sustainability and crisis capacities.

Social media summary. Adaptive and transformative capacities complement each other in navigating a global polycrisis.

Both resilience and regeneration are relevant concepts in sustainability science. Resilience thinking has led to improved understanding of cross-scale cycles of growth and renewal, regime shifts, and planetary boundaries. Regeneration highlights the role of positive, place-based and partially self-perpetuating social-ecological dynamics and seeks to foster mutualistic relationships between human and more-than-human entities. This paper lays out similarities, differences and overlaps between work on resilience and regeneration. The concept of regeneration emerged both independently of resilience as well as playing a role within resilience scholarship. We show that the literatures on resilience and regeneration have elaborated complementary ideas and can be combined to derive guidance for improved governance of social-ecological systems. Because of its explicit and proactive future-orientation, the concept of regeneration could help boost nascent efforts to enact biosphere stewardship and develop positive visions for how to re-build a world that is dominated by regenerative rather than degenerative dynamics.

Should there be firmer restrictions on trade, with more policies aimed at protecting its environmental impacts, or would the environment benefit most from unrestricted free trade? Do importing countries have a responsibility only to their local ecosystems, or are they also responsible for environmental degradation caused by the production of traded goods in exporting countries? Trading the Environment examines both the dependence and the effects of international trade on the earth’s life support systems and looks at ways in which trading regulations could be adapted to promote ecologically sustainable economic development. It addresses the issues from a fully integrated approach, focusing on the interrelations between ecosystems, economic development and trade. The authors provide a carefully constructed ecological and economic analysis of trade and the environment, examine the existing legal and institutional frameworks and set out 16 recommendations to achieve environment beneficial trade at both national and international levels. Trading with the environment was originally commissioned by the Swedish government and is already regarded thereon essential reference. It makes an excellent introduction as well as constructive analysis, both for students and for policy-makers and professional economics and other scientists working on the issues. Published in 1995.

Natural disasters driven by climate change have increased in frequency, intensity, and scale. The consequences of these disasters include the loss of human lives, property damage, increased economic costs, and decreased ability to respond effectively to both abrupt and more gradual disasters. Government responses to such disasters are often based on a desire to rapidly recover to normal, which is understandable, but is difficult in the Anthropocene because of rapidly changing social-ecological baselines that exceed the limits of adaptation and mitigation. Here we identify pitfalls of a narrow and singular focus on resiliency. Resiliency focuses on efficient and rapid recovery, which is laudable, but assumes linear responses, absence of tipping points, a single scale of cause and effect, and an implicit assumption of stationarity. In contrast, we highlight the importance of social-ecological resilience, which includes resiliency but also accounts for multiple spatial and temporal scales, cross-scale effects, and most importantly, the possibility of alternative system configurations (or regimes) separated by tipping points. Social-ecological resilience provides a more comprehensive and realistic framing, and therefore the ability to persist with change, prepare for, and perform adaptation and transformation of social-ecological systems. Accounting for social-ecological resilience is essential for governance of coupled systems of humans and nature as we collectively face a future in the Anthropocene that will contain more surprising and unpredictable events propelled by global change including climate change.

Underpinned by systemic thinking, social-ecological systems (SES) research has emerged as a critical field for addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene, marked by a cross-scale focus, inter-and transdisciplinary approaches, and a strong emphasis on place-based work. Thanks to the efforts of many networks and institutes, the field has advanced new theoretical and methodological approaches, fostered dedicated journals, and spurred educational programs. It has also significantly influenced sustainability initiatives and policy from local to global scales, and has richly informed place-based efforts. Despite this progress, SES research faces persistent challenges, including conceptual and methodological fragmentation, difficulty in scaling localized insights to global frameworks (and vice versa), and capturing cross-scale connections and processes while retaining contextual relevance. Inclusivity also remains a critical issue, with regional, Indigenous, and local contributions often underrepresented, as there is still a reliance on short-term, inequitably distributed grant funding for much of the research in the field. This paper introduces the Society for Social-Ecological Systems (SocSES), a global platform designed to build on and connect to the rich legacy of SES networks. SocSES aims to advance and support SES–based research, practice, and action toward a just and sustainable future. We outline how SocSES will provide a home for SES institutes, networks, researchers, and practitioners working at the science-practice-policy interface to connect and amplify existing efforts through thematic streams, regional hubs, an institutional hub, an early-career professionals hub, and synthesis groups. The society will provide a stable infrastructure to foster interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration, enhance the generalizability and policy relevance of SES research, bolster education, research, and knowledge co-production, and support the next generation of SES professionals. By addressing the persistent challenges facing the field and fostering transformative spaces and communities for innovation and action, SocSES aspires to support and leverage SES knowledge as a cornerstone of global sustainability science. In line with the society’s commitment to linguistic diversity and equitable access, this abstract has been translated into 12 languages by authors of this paper and additional contributors. These translations are available in Appendix 2 and at https://socses.org/about/paper.

Climate change will worsen conditions for people in the Global South, while conditions in large parts of the North will improve. Migration seems an effective adaptation strategy. However, making that a win-win for migrants and receiving communities requires revision of the food system, rules for mobility, and strategies for social integration.

Much of the discourse around climate change and the situation of diverse human societies and cultures in the Anthropocene focuses on responding to scientific understanding of the dynamics of the biosphere by adjusting existing institutional and organizational structures. Our emerging scientific understanding of human behaviour and the mechanisms that enable groups to achieve large-scale coordination and cooperation suggests that incrementally adjusting existing institutions and organizations will not be sufficient to confront current global-scale challenges. Specifically, the transaction costs of operating institutions to induce selfish rational actors to consider social welfare in their decision-making are too high. Rather, we highlight the importance of networks of shared stories that become real—imagined orders—that create context, meaning and shared purpose for framing decisions and guiding action. We explore imagined orders that have contributed to bringing global societies to where they are and propose elements of a science-informed imagined order essential to enabling societies to flourish in the Anthropocene biosphere.

"Water is the bloodstream of the biosphere" is a wise insight coined by Professor Malin Falkenmark (Falkenmark and Biswas 1995), a world-leading international hydrologist, who passed away on 3 December 2023, at the age of 98 years (Fig. 1). Falkenmark was a scientific visionary, calling for global water stewardship as a fundamental step towards human development, even before modern thinking on sustainable development was established through the 1987 Brundtland Commission and the 1992 Agenda 21 following the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio. Her lifelong passion was to eradicate water poverty in the world, and to do this with hydrological evidence and inter-disciplinary collaboration. She co-developed the most prestigious award in water science—the Stockholm Water Prize, and received multiple awards herself, including the prestigious Volvo Environment Prize in 1998 and the Blue Planet Award in 2018.