Risk and resilience : An integrated approach for navigating a complex world

Sammanfattning: Risks are all around us, events or situations that could result in undesirable outcomes. Risk assessments are a way to understand and navigate the shocks and stressors we face and to avoid the undesirable outcomes that may come from them. We talk about risks in our everyday lives, and it is a concept that exists in many different academic disciplines. However due to its use in many academic disciplines, the concept has diverse meanings and no single way to identify and assess risks. This presents a problem for interdisciplinary sustainability science scholars who aim to see across disciplinary divides and integrate the understanding of each for a better view of sustainability problems and solutions. Resilience thinking on the other hand is well integrated with the sustainability science domain and addresses how to deal with shocks and stressors in the face of uncertainty. Although more and more research on risk is appearing in the field of sustainability science, there is a lack of integration between these concepts. In this licentiate theses I aim to bridge these gaps and to investigate the diversity of risk concepts and how they relate to social-ecological resilience. I address these gaps from a conceptual point of view, through literature review and synthesis (paper I) and by utilising both concepts to identify risks in the global food production system (paper II).