Resilience is an increasingly popular concept in research and practice, but quantitative resilience analyses are often disconnected from resilience theory. For example, previous studies argue that diversity, a key attribute for building resilience, and agency, essential for understanding local adaptation and transformation, are critical to understanding resilience. Despite significant progress in integrating them into qualitative frameworks, diversity and agency are rarely incorporated into quantitative social-ecological resilience metrics. This omission is concerning, given the critical role of quantitative resilience metrics in informing resilience-oriented decision-making. This study examines how diversity and agency are represented in quantitative resilience metrics across disciplines, with the goals of (a) assessing how research on social-ecological resilience currently integrates these concepts into quantitative metrics and (b) identifying future opportunities to enhance their inclusion using insights from other fields. Using topic modelling to identify different research fields and facilitate the screening process, we performed a multidisciplinary systematic meta-review of resilience metrics. To understand what types of resilience metrics are used across disciplines and where diversity and agency are more commonly included, we identified six categories of resilience metrics, with “performance under disruption” being the most used category (35%). We found that a limited number of quantitative resilience metrics include diversity and agency, with “system structure” and “compound indicators” being the main sources of diversity and agency, respectively. We further reviewed simulation models applying resilience metrics. The prevalence of performance under disruption metrics is stronger than in reviews (67%) and a similar quantity of metrics including diversity (14%) and agency (5%) was found. Drawing on insights from multiple disciplines, we outline five potential pathways to improve the inclusion of diversity and agency in social-ecological resilience metrics: using network-based metrics, using response and pathway diversity, including diversity and agency in compound indicators, integrating quantitative methodologies outside resilience theory, and improving the application of resilience in simulation models.

This study explores social-psychological barriers that may affect resilience in the context of sustainability. These barriers can be understood as unobserved processes that reduce the capacity of a social-ecological system to recover after a perturbation or transformation. Analyzing social-psychological processes enables us to distinguish passive and active processes, at the individual and collective levels. Our work suggests that interacting social and psychological processes should be considered as dynamically evolving determinants of resilience, especially when perturbations can change the psychology of individuals, and thus the underlying dynamics of social-ecological systems. Hence, considering social-psychological barriers and the conditions under which they emerge may provide decision makers with useful insights for coping with ineluctable uncertainties that reduce systems' transformative capacity and thus their general resilience.

This paper provides a review of the economics of tipping points in natural resources and climate change economics, examining recent advances in theoretical modeling and controlled experiments. We begin with the non-convexity models as a theoretical foundation, provide a typology of the resulting deterministic tipping points, and discuss their implications for management. Then, we focus on hazard rate modeling for optimal resource management with stochastic and unknown tipping points. We discuss Bayesian learning, strategic behavior among agents, and the advancement in integrated assessment modeling with multiple and interacting tipping points. Finally, we examine the new contributions of experimental economics to understanding decision-making processes in the presence of tipping points. The paper concludes by highlighting the main advances in the literature and outlining future research directions, ultimately aiming to encourage further investigation and the development of innovative tools to address global challenges.

Combating environmental degradation requires global cooperation. We here argue that institutional designs for such efforts need to account for human behavior. The voyage of the Titanic serves as an analogous case to learn from, and we use behavioral insights to identify critical aspects of human behavior that serve as barriers or opportunities for addressing the challenges we face. We identify a set of public goods that may help us mitigate identified negative aspects of human behavior, while leveraging the positive aspects: standards and best practices, mechanisms for large-scale coordination, and curation of information to raise awareness and promote action. We use existing international organizations, providing at least one of these capacities, as cases to learn from before applying our insights to existing institutional solutions for global environmental protection. We identify institutional design features that, if adapted to better account for human behavior, could lead to more effective institutional solutions.

The Anthropocene is characterized by accelerating change and global challenges of increasing complexity. Inspired by what some have called a polycrisis, we explore whether the human trajectory of increasing complexity and influence on the Earth system could become a form of trap for humanity. Based on an adaptation of the evolutionary traps concept to a global human context, we present results from a participatory mapping. We identify 14 traps and categorize them as either global, technology or structural traps. An assessment reveals that 12 traps (86%) could be in an advanced phase of trapping with high risk of hard-to-reverse lock-ins and growing risks of negative impacts on human well-being. Ten traps (71%) currently see growing trends in their indicators. Revealing the systemic nature of the polycrisis, we assess that Anthropocene traps often interact reinforcingly (45% of pairwise interactions), and rarely in a dampening fashion (3%). We end by discussing capacities that will be important for navigating these systemic challenges in pursuit of global sustainability. Doing so, we introduce evolvability as a unifying concept for such research between the sustainability and evolutionary sciences.

Financial advisers recommend a diverse portfolio to respond to market fluctuations across sectors. Similarly, nature has evolved a diverse portfolio of species to maintain ecosystem function amid environmental fluctuations. In urban planning, public health, transport and communications, food production, and other domains, however, this feature often seems ignored. As we enter an era of unprecedented turbulence at the planetary level, we argue that ample responses to this new reality — that is, response diversity — can no longer be taken for granted and must be actively designed and managed. We describe here what response diversity is, how it is expressed and how it can be enhanced and lost.

We investigate the behavioural responses of natural common-pool resource users to three policy interventions-sanctioned quotas, information provisioning, and a combination of both. We focus on situations in which users find utility in multiple resources (pastures and wild animal stocks) that all stem from the same ecosystem with complex dynamics, and management could trigger a regime shift, drastically altering resource regrowth. We performed a framed field experiment with 384 villagers from communities managing common-pool wildlife in Zimbabwe. We find that user groups are likely to manage these natural resources more efficiently when facing a policy intervention (either a sanctioned quota, receiving information about a drastic drop in the stocks' regrowth below a threshold, or a combination of both), compared to groups facing no intervention. A sanctioned quota is likely to perform better than providing information about the existence of a threshold. However, having information about the threshold also leads to higher efficiency and fewer depletion cases, compared to a situation without any intervention. The main contribution of this study is to provide insights that can inform policymakers and development practitioners about the performance of concrete and feasible policy interventions for community wildlife conservation in Southern Africa.

We investigate the extraction plan of present-biased decision makers managing a renewable resource stock whose growth is uncertain and which could undergo a rapid and significant change when stock falls below a threshold. We show that the Markov-Nash equilibrium extraction policy is unique, time consistent, and increasing in resource stock. An increase in the threshold leads to increased resource extraction, rather than the precautionary reduction in extraction often observed with exponential discounting. An increase in the degree of present bias also leads to an increase in resource extraction. Our analysis suggests that accounting for and appropriately dealing with resource managers’ present bias may be important to understand resource use sustainability.

The increasing frequency of extreme events, exogenous and endogenous, poses challenges for our societies. The current pandemic is a case in point; but once-in-a-century weather events are also becoming more common, leading to erosion, wildfire and even volcanic events that change ecosystems and disturbance regimes, threaten the sustainability of our life-support systems, and challenge the robustness and resilience of societies. Dealing with extremes will require new approaches and large-scale collective action. Preemptive measures can increase general resilience, a first line of protection, while more specific reactive responses are developed. Preemptive measures also can minimize the negative effects of events that cannot be avoided. In this paper, we first explore approaches to prevention, mitigation and adaptation, drawing inspiration from how evolutionary challenges have made biological systems robust and resilient, and from the general theory of complex adaptive systems. We argue further that proactive steps that go beyond will be necessary to reduce unacceptable consequences.