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Although many of today's ecological, climatic and socio-economic problems seem unprecedented, similar events have occurred in the past. As such, historic periods of climatic and economic volatility can be used as a way of developing frameworks for analyzing today's predicament. Western Europe's “middle ages” (circa 11–14th century) may be one such case. By the 12th century, medieval Europe had shifted from the subsistence agrarian economy that emerged following the collapse of the Roman Empire to one where spatially dispersed trade in agricultural commodities helped support a complex society that devoted considerable resources to cultural works. This shift was facilitated by new institutional arrangements centred on monastic orders that provided access to both new agricultural and food processing technologies as well as trade routes. These institutional arrangements contributed to population growth and land clearing. All of these factors increased the wealth of society but also concentrated this wealth in a small number of communities that were dependent on an ever-increasing and exploited hinterland for resources. Ultimately, this created a tightly coupled continent-wide subsistence system that was vulnerable to the weather, economic and disease shocks of the 14th century when Europe's population declined by perhaps 50%. In exploring this history, the goal of this paper is to draw on a diverse theoretical body of literature (that includes resiliency theory, landscape ecology, political science and ecological economics) to develop a series of hypotheses about how large-scale complex civilizations can become vulnerable to climate change. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper reviews definitions and uses of the Driving Forces–Pressures–State–Impacts–Responses (DPSIR) framework and argues that it is a relevant tool for structuring communication between scientists and end-users of environmental information, while it is inappropriate as an analytical tool. An apparently deterministic ‘causal’ description of environmental issues inevitably downplays the uncertainty and multiple dimensions of causality inherent in complex environmental and socio-economic systems. Consequently, the paper complements and reframes ‘DPSIR’ using a complex system methodology based on the distinction between four ‘spheres’ of sustainability (environmental, economic, social and political) and the analysis of their functioning and relationships. The pair-wise interface aspects are characterised through investigation of the ‘demands’ and ‘supply’ of each sphere relative to the others. Within the resulting conceptual framework, each of the five D, P, S, I and R concepts are specified, for application in integrative analysis of relationships between policy, society, economy and biodiversity in one of the world's largest European integrated research projects on biodiversity (ALARM). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]