How can we turn the challenge of extreme events into an opportunity for social learning in a sustainability perspective? This is one of the most urgent challenges faced by today’s world society as well as its scientific community. The global financial crisis of 2007 and the climate conference in Paris in 2015 illustrate how important the challenge has become in very different fields. At the same time advances in the understanding of disaster risks in socio-ecological systems enable the scientific community to provide methods and tools to face this challenge.
In this workshop, we specifically addressed the following questions:
- How can the insights about how small socio-ecological systems (SES) successfully deal with disaster risks through self-organization be broadened into related insights about large systems up to the global society of the 21st century?
- How can the difference between shocks that destabilize an SES without pushing it out of its current basin of attraction and shocks that lead to different possible basins be understood, and how can this understanding be translated into management and governance practice?
- How can the answers to questions 1 and 2 help to embed the model of absolute individual rationality that has driven partially successful, but unsustainable scientific, technological and economic developments into more diverse forms of rationality adequate for a global sustainability transition?
Five main themes of the workshop: 1) uncertainties of natural climate systems; 2) integrated risk and green growth, 3) regional and global challenges, like polar area, desertification and one belt one road strategy, 4) urbanization and urban system risks, and 5) sustainability and complex system.
