The societies and ecosystems of the Nigerien Sahel appeared increasingly vulnerable to climatic and economic uncertainty in the late twentieth century. Severe episodes of drought and famine drove massive livestock losses and human migration and mortality. Soil erosion and tree loss reduced a woodland to a scrub steppe and fed a myth of the Sahara desert relentlessly advancing southward. Over the past two decades this myth has been shattered by the dramatic reforestation of more than 5 million hectares in the Maradi and Zinder Regions of Niger. No single actor, policy, or practice appears behind this successful regreening of the Sahel. Multiple actors, institutions and processes operated at different levels, times, and scales to initiate and sustain this reforestation trend. We used systems analysis to examine the patterns of interaction as biophysical, livelihood, and governance indicators changed relative to one another during forest decline and rebound. It appears that forest decline was reversed when critical interventions helped to shift the direction of reinforcing feedbacks, e.g., vicious cycles changed to virtuous ones. Reversals toward de-forestation or reforestation were preceded by institutional changes in governance, then livelihoods and eventually in the biophysical environment. Biophysical change sustained change in the other two domains until interventions introduced new ideas and institutions that slowed and then reversed the pattern of feedbacks. However, while society seems better at coping with economic or climatic shock or stress, the resilience of society and nature in the Maradi/Zinder region to global sources of uncertainty remains a pressing question in a society with one of the highest population growth rates on Earth

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Global sources of change offer unprecedented challenges to conventional river management strategies, which no longer appear capable of credibly addressing a trap: the failure of conventional river defense engineering to manage rising trends of disordering extreme events, including frequency and intensity of floods, droughts, and water stagnation in the Hungarian reaches of the Tisza River Basin. Extreme events punctuate trends of stagnation or decline in the ecosystems, economies, and societies of this river basin that extend back decades, and perhaps, centuries. These trends may be the long-term results of defensive strategies of the historical river management regime that reflect a paradigm dating back to the Industrial Revolution: "Protect the Landscape from the River." Since then all policies have defaulted to the imperatives of this paradigm such that it became the convention underlying the current river management regime. As an exponent of this convention the current river management regimes' methods, concepts, infrastructure, and paradigms that reinforce one another in setting the basin's development trajectory, have proven resilient to change from wars, political, and social upheaval for centuries. Failure to address the trap makes the current river management regime's resilience appear detrimental to the region's future development prospects and prompts demand for transformation to a more adaptive river management regime. Starting before transition to democracy, a shadow network has generated multiple dialogues in Hungary, informally exploring the roots of this trap as part of a search for ideas and methods to revitalize the region. We report on how international scientists joined one dialogue, applying system dynamics modeling tools to explore barriers and bridges to transformation of the current river management regime and develop the capacity for participatory science to expand the range of perspectives that inform, monitor, and revise learning, policy, and the practice of river management.

To feed a rapidly growing population of 250 million, the Indus river basin in South Asia is one of the most intensively cultivated regions on Earth, highly water stressed and lacking energy security. Yet, most studies advising sustainable development policy have lacked multi-sectoral and cross-country perspectives. Here we show how the Indus countries could lower costs for development and reduce soil pollution and water stress, by cooperating on water resources and electricity and food production. According to this analysis, Indus basin countries need to ramp up investments to 10 billion USD/year to mitigate water scarcity issues and ensure improved access to resources by 2050. These costs could shrink to 2 billion USD/year, with economic gains for all, if countries pursued more collaborative policies. Downstream regions would benefit the most, with reduced food and energy costs and better water access, while upstream regions would benefit from new energy investments. Using integrated water-energy-land analysis, this study quantifies the potential benefits for novel avenues to sustainable development arising from greater international cooperation.

Disasters pose a growing threat to sustainable development. Disaster risk management efforts have largely failed to arrest the underlying drivers of increased global risk: uncontrolled urbanization and proliferation of assets in hazardous areas. Resilience provides an opportunity to confront the social‐ecological foundations of risk and development; yet it has been vaguely conceptualized, without offering a concrete approach to operationalization. We propose a conceptualization of disaster resilience centred on well‐being: ‘The ability of a system, community or society to pursue its social, ecological and economic development objectives, while managing its disaster risk over time in a mutually reinforcing way.’ We present a conceptual framework for understanding the interconnections between disasters and development, and outline how it is being operationalized in practice.