TY - JOUR

T1 - Resilience and regeneration for a world in crisis

AU - Fischer, Jörn

AU - Farny, Steffen

AU - Pacheco-Romero, Manuel

AU - Folke, Carl

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2025.

PY - 2026/1

Y1 - 2026/1

N2 - Both resilience and regeneration are relevant concepts in sustainability science. Resilience thinking has led to improved understanding of cross-scale cycles ofgrowth and renewal, regime shifts, and planetary boundaries. Regeneration highlights the role of positive, place-based and partially self-perpetuating social-ecological dynamics and seeks to foster mutualistic relationships between human and more-than-human entities. This paper lays out similarities, differences and overlaps between work on resilience and regeneration. The concept of regeneration emerged both independently of resilience as well as playing a role within resilience scholarship. We show that the literatures on resilience and regeneration have elaborated complementary ideas and can be combined to derive guidance for improved governance of social-ecological systems. Because of its explicit and proactive future-orientation, the concept of regeneration could help boost nascent efforts to enact biosphere stewardship and develop positive visions for how to rebuild a world that is dominated by regenerative rather than degenerative dynamics.

AB - Both resilience and regeneration are relevant concepts in sustainability science. Resilience thinking has led to improved understanding of cross-scale cycles ofgrowth and renewal, regime shifts, and planetary boundaries. Regeneration highlights the role of positive, place-based and partially self-perpetuating social-ecological dynamics and seeks to foster mutualistic relationships between human and more-than-human entities. This paper lays out similarities, differences and overlaps between work on resilience and regeneration. The concept of regeneration emerged both independently of resilience as well as playing a role within resilience scholarship. We show that the literatures on resilience and regeneration have elaborated complementary ideas and can be combined to derive guidance for improved governance of social-ecological systems. Because of its explicit and proactive future-orientation, the concept of regeneration could help boost nascent efforts to enact biosphere stewardship and develop positive visions for how to rebuild a world that is dominated by regenerative rather than degenerative dynamics.

KW - Regenerative design

KW - Regenerative lens

KW - Regenerative sustainability

KW - Seeds of a good Anthropocene

KW - Transformability

KW - Transformation

KW - Biology

KW - Environmental Governance

KW - Environmental planning

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=105023190155&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s13280-025-02287-6

DO - 10.1007/s13280-025-02287-6

M3 - Journal articles

C2 - 41291163

VL - 55

SP - 24

EP - 34

JO - Ambio

JF - Ambio

SN - 1654-7209

IS - 1

ER -