The resilience-sustainability-quality of life nexus

Social-ecological resilience (SER), sustainability (SUS) and quality of life including wellbeing (QOL) are distinct but highly interconnected goals that are essential for human survival, development, and adaptation to environmental and socioeconomic changes. However, these goals are often addressed in silos or pairs, and a framework explicitly linking all three is currently lacking. In this paper, we present the SER-SUS-QOL nexus framework and discuss how social and ecological changes affect these goals. The main thrust of this nexus is that efforts toward SER and SUS need to be explicitly framed in terms of the ultimate goal, which has to be the QOL of the present and future generations. We contend that critically assessing the dynamic interplay between SER, SUS and QOL, as well as the factors impacting them, can help promote transformative governance and planning in the contemporary era. Understanding the multifaceted interrelationship between these goals is crucial to empower planners and decision-makers to navigate the complexities of our rapidly changing world and address the challenges brought by interrelated social and ecological changes. To deepen our understanding of this nexus, more research is needed on various issues, including, but not limited to, trade-offs and synergies, cascading effects, spatiotemporal dynamics of SER, SUS and QOL outcomes, potential inconsistencies between SER and transformative changes toward SUS, and the role of local/indigenous/traditional ecological knowledge in transformative governance and planning.

Complexity and diversity of nexuses: A review of the nexus approach in the sustainability context

Achieving global sustainability is a coupled human-environment system issue that requires resource planning and management that goes beyond siloed thinking. As such, there has been a growing interest in nexus thinking as a way to address global sustainability challenges in an integrated manner. In general, the nexus approach serves as a tool for systems integration, a platform for stakeholder engagement, and a method for exploring development pathways. This review traces the historical origin and progress of the nexus approach and examines the changes in the complexity and diversity of nexuses over time. Since its emergence in the early 1980s, the nexus approach has undergone several phases of development, resulting in more complex and diverse nexuses, whose components can be resource sectors/systems and/or specific social-ecological issues. This progress is favorable for the sustainable development agenda because the more components involved in a nexus, the greater the reality that can be potentially captured. Currently, however, there is still no consensus with regards to the key nexus components that could potentially cover all of the sustainable development goals. The development of frameworks for implementing the nexus approach and the identification of relevant indicators and target values to be used for assessing trade-offs and synergies are among the current issues with regards to the use of the nexus approach in the sustainability context.

Nexus planning as a pathway towards sustainable environmental and human health post Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of linear and monocentric approaches in addressing today's complex, cross-cutting, and interconnected challenges. Experiences from the Covid-19 have shown that focusing on one sector during a crisis only aggravates the stresses in other sectors as decision-makers often view the world from a linear perspective, with the thought that a click of a button would get the economy and society back on track. This study argues that linearity forgets the interconnectedness of systems and how their systemic properties shape their interactions, interdependencies, and interrelationships, whereas nexus planning integrates and simplifies socio-ecological systems, indicates priority areas for intervention, and reduces risk and vulnerability. The lockdowns implemented during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in job losses, company closures, and economic recessions, demonstrating that linear approaches often over-emphasise on a limited set of attributes of a system, notably efficiency, at the expense of other aspects. While linear approaches have been beneficial to some extent for long, the Covid-19 pandemic exposed how they transfer stresses to other sectors, and compromise resilience-building initiatives, allowing failure to cascade from one sector to the other. Nexus planning emphasises on cross-sectoral sustainability and enhances socio-economic resilience against future shocks.