System-resilience perspectives on sustainability and equity in Australia

We assume that sustainable and equitable futures require non-declining human wellbeing built upon a diverse wealth base, including natural, human, built, social and knowledge capital. We hypothesise that human wellbeing is linked to this wealth base via social-ecological interactions: systems of biophysical processes transforming and transporting material and energy, mediated by social processes. Attempts to understand complex social-ecological systems highlight the incompleteness of current knowledge and the illusiveness of comprehensive knowledge of such systems. Resilience assessments provide useful insights into system responses to shocks. We consider past and potential shocks to Australia and the characteristics of socialecological systems that provide resilience to them. We draw more general insights about resilience in Australia, including identifying signs of systemic drivers of possible futures and the requirements for adaptive and transformative capacities to create diverse options for maintaining wellbeing.