Conventional management of natural resources, especially that focusing on maximized or optimized ‘sustainable yield’ of a single resource (for example timber, fish or game) is increasingly unable to cope with the unprecedented upheavals of global environmental change, such as climate change, the biodiversity crisis and a growing world population. To better meet the challenges of a rapidly-changing world, innovative approaches to ecosystem management are emerging. A new paradigm, here referred to as ‘ecosystem stewardship’, concentrates on sustaining the capacity of ecosystems to provide services that benefit society, thereby linking integrity and diversity of ecosystems with adaptive capacity and societal well-being. While an extensive body of scholarly literature has developed around resilience-based ecosystem stewardship, accessible synthesized information for students and practitioners has thus far been lacking. With Principles of Ecosystem Stewardship, three leading members of the resilience school, Stuart Chapin III, Gary P. Kofinas and Carl Folke, have now aimed to fill this gap, and provide an interdisciplinary application-oriented framework based on stewardship of ecosystems for human well-being. The textbook is aimed at students, professionals and policymakers in the field of natural resources management.

Principles of Ecosystem-based Stewardship is divided into two sections. The first five chapters impart a general overview of existing theories and frameworks for the understanding and management of social-ecological change. The first chapter introduces the idea of analysing environmental problems from a social-ecological systems perspective and presents vulnerability, adaptive capacity, resilience and transformability as key terms. The following chapters further inform on concepts of ecosystem services, human well-being, social-ecological governance and transformations. In the second section, these theories and concepts are applied to a broad range of social-ecological systems, namely rural hinterlands, forests, dry lands, fresh waters, oceans, coasts, agricultural systems, urban areas and the earth as a whole. For each of these systems, key vulnerabilities, specific sources or resilience, and plausible undesirable and desirable transformations are identified. Localized case studies from all parts of the world illustrate how people and institutions adaptively manage resources and ecosystem services around the world. The book ends with several messages: recognition of the interdependencies of social-ecological systems, concentration on critical vulnerabilities, fostering of biological, cultural and institutional diversity, and harnessing opportunities for desirable transformations are key strategies for ecosystem stewardship.

As social processes are related with their physical and biological environment throughout the book, the book demands at least some pre-existing knowledge from fields as diverse as ecology, institutional economics, forestry or the political sciences from its student readers. But the effort is definitively worthwhile; the authors convincingly illustrate the many interdependencies between social and ecological problems, and demonstrate how the dynamics of systems as different as dry lands and open oceans can be analysed by a set of tools, such as the adaptive cycles, thresholds, or stabilizing or amplifying feedback loops. Although a multi-author work, the textbook is logically ordered, with each chapter building on its predecessors, without unnecessary redundancies. Review questions at the end of each chapter and a detailed glossary facilitate the learning process. The book certainly meets its aims, in that it sparks interest in ecosystem-based approaches to resource management. While the presented approaches are valuable for a broad audience, I feel that many management professionals may need more specific advice for implementing ecosystem-based stewardship on the ground. It is thus desirable that resource management agencies incorporate the thoughts of ecosystem-based stewardship and elaborate ecosystem-specific and regionalized guidelines.