Resilient society: multidisciplinary contributions from economic, law, policy, engineering, agriculture and life sciences fields

The human imprint on the environment is clearly visible under
globalization, whatever is about resources extraction, goods production, or
consumption. All these deeply impact on every environmental component, such
as forests, agricultural land resources, freshwater, and air quality, because of
the need to provide shelter, food, water, or energy to a population of more than
seven billion people. How to manage the trade-offs between immediate human
needs and to maintain the environment capacity to provide goods and services
in the long term seems to be the Earth’s epic “neverending story”. Therefore,
the book “Resilient Society” is intended as an attempt to find several answers
to the quest of how to become more resilient to environmental, social, or
economic pressure. In this context, resilience is understood as the ability to
adapt to or tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different
state. The volume articulates within a multidisciplinary approach the study of
resilience and vulnerability of socio-ecological systems in an effort to disclose
the conditions that lead to changes in environmental and resource regimes.
This first volume entitled “Resilent Society” of the series “Environment
and Human Action” gathers contributions presented at the “International
Conference Environmental Legislation, Safety Engineering and Disaster
Management” (ELSEDIMA), held on May 26-28, 2016, in Cluj-Napoca
(Romania), as well as other papers. This editorial activity aims at contributing
to the enlargement of multidisciplinary knowledge and collaborations among
researchers working in different fields that can contribute to increasing
resilience of socio-ecological systems. The book covers diverse but partially
overlapping research areas across natural sciences, social sciences, and
engineering, thus capturing insights from economic, law, policy, engineering,
agricultural, and life sciences areas. Such knowledge enables to gain a holistic
view on the environmental and social challenges that shall constitute a common
ground for stakeholders and policy-makers.
The editors have confidence that this volume dedicated to resilience will
serve as a roadmap for future research and as a catalyst for dialog within
scientific community about how to address the environmental interrogations
where human actions play a crucial role in shaping the environment.