The end of sustainability

Environmental legal scholar Professor Robin Craig argues that the doctrine of sustainability in managing our natural resources fails to take into account an emerging age of ecological uncertainty.

Instead, notions of sustainability and sustainable development need to make way for approaches based on resilience thinking, which attempts to factor in and adapt to coming large-scale social and ecological shifts brought about by climate change.

“Resilience thinking opens the door to acknowledging that variability can be much more extreme than you think, and that transformation is in fact part of what ecosystems do,” says Professor Craig.

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