Commentary: Resilience and Social-Ecological Systems: A Handful of Frontiers

Fifteen years have passed since the publication in Global Environmental Change of the article Resilience: the emergence of a perspective of social-ecological systems analyses (Folke 2006). Resilience of social-ecological systems, now widely spread, is found in many academic fields, contributing exciting work and novel insights. Social-ecological resilience thinking has become part of practice, policy, and business, ranging from poverty alleviation to political frameworks and business strategies to anticipate, and build capacities for responding to change and crisis, not only to survive, but also to evolve and transform towards sustainable futures. Here, we provide a snapshot of a handful of ongoing frontiers in social-ecological resilience thinking, to give a flavour of this dynamic, vibrant, reflexive, diverse, and evolving research field. The speed and scale of global connectivity – underpinned by drivers such as human migration, trade, transport, technology, and consumption – is at unprecedented levels. Actions taken in seemingly independent places affect social-ecological systems in unexpected ways, with surprising mixes of immediate consequences as well as cascading and distant effects (Folke et al. 2021). Place-based studies are increasingly accounting for the persistent and pervasive influences from multiple global drivers, recognising that long-distance social-ecological interactions shape relations and resilience building practice in local places (Martín-López et al., 2019, Sellberg et al., 2021).