Ecological change: cultivating resilience.

• Position: Sustainability

Each year in the past decade, approximately 200,000,000 to 300,000,000 people seriously have been affected by natural disasters or technological accidents--a staggering figure that is bound to increase in the coming decades, insists World-watch Institute, Washington, D.C., in its "State of the World: Is Sustainability Still Possible?" report, which says that it is becoming clear that a failure to make political systems pay attention to climate challenges might lead to massive population displacements.

"The repercussions from environmental degradation do not occur in a void," notes Michael Renner, contributing author and senior researcher. "They interact with a cauldron of preexisting societal pressures and problems."

Building up a globalized and industrialized market economy and growing food crops in globe-spanning monocultures may increase efficiency, but such practices also decrease resiliency. Many societies now are at risk of either short-term or permanent displacement due to environmental and nonenvironmental disasters.

"Of course, disasters of all kinds are nothing new," remarks Laurie Mazur, contributing author and nonprofit consultant, "but the current era may be one in which their frequency, scale, and impact are greater than anything our species has previously confronted."

In "State of the World," contributing authors discuss an array of strategies and case studies that offers lessons for surviving and coping with the coming calamities that may result from climate and other ecological changes.

Recipe for resilience. In order for societies truly to be resilient--able to mitigate and withstand disturbances and recover afterward--socioeconomic practices should include redundancies, so that the failure of one component does not cripple the entire system. Modularity also is critical, in that individual units retain some self-sufficiency when disconnected from the larger networks. Other characteristics of resilient systems include diversity, inclusiveness, tight feedbacks, and the...