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The resilience perspective, which emphasizes the integrated, systemic concept of human and nature interactions, is increasingly used as an approach for understanding the dynamic of social-ecological system. As the water resources system (WRS) is a social-ecological system, resilience thinking such as Holling's adaptive cycle has been adopted as a fundamental unit for understanding the water resources system dynamics in this paper. In the adaptive cycle of WRS, the likelihood shift among different phases largely depends on resilience value; and a quantitative method for estimating the resilience of WRS is proposed. The method is related to the degree of change and characteristics of the WRS, and has been applied to identify the phase of WRS in every city in Zhejiang province, China. The results of resilience assessment have also been discussed in terms of adaptive cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the use of Resilience Theory to provide an improved theoretical framework for the analysis of socio-ecological interactions over decadal—millennial timescales. It identifies landscape system behaviour through analysis of proxy records for land use, erosion and monsoon intensity over the past 3000 years in the Erhai lake-catchment system, Yunnan, SW China. Analysis of the records shows the possibility of alternative steady states in the landscape, as expressed by the relationship between land use and erosion. In particular, a period of agricultural expansion ~1400 cal. yr BP triggered rapid gully erosion that led to the formation of an eroded landscape state that has existed since ~800 cal. yr BP to the present day. Comparison of detrended time-series data suggests that over 3000 years erosion and land use should be considered 'slow' processes relative to the 'faster' monsoon intensity and flooding. In the past, the effects of high monsoon variance on flooding have been suppressed by paddy farming and the maintenance of terraced field systems. Mapping the Adaptive Cycle on to the millennial record of land use and erosion suggests that the modern landscape may be approaching a 'conservation' phase characterized by minimum resilience. Such 'historical profiling' of modern landscapes offers a new dimension for hypothesis testing, for the development and testing of simulation models and for the creation of appropriate management strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent COVID-19 pandemic revealed the intricate connections between human and planetary health. Air pollution cleared over the countries ordering lockdowns of nonessential businesses to flatten the curve of the pandemic. The links between pandemics and pollution are not obvious at first, yet the two phenomena have several characteristics in common. Both pandemics and pollution originate from specific locations but then spread globally, and both are human-induced rather than natural–hazard disasters. I examine narratives and practices linking COVID-19 with air pollution and climate change as the pandemic unfolds. I compare these findings with research on the Black Death plague in Europe and the air pollution in China's Haze City. Applying the analytical frameworks from these two studies, I analyze media articles and reports on COVID-19 to explore risk experience, stress behaviours, and resistant discourse during the adaptive cycles of the pandemic to gain insights into current and future changes to sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]