planet's natural capital. Financial
mechanisms were created to allow
and sophisticated fi nancial castles in the air
propelled the economy to new insupportable
heights. Wealth today was created at the
expense of tomorrow, and we have now
received the bill for this in the form of an
imminent global economic recession. And
there is another bill in the post: the planet will
demand payment for our unsustainable use of
ecosystem functions and services, and we are
already seeing indications of the costs. The
abrupt and unexpected collapse of the
Arctic summer ice in 2007 and 2008 is ana-
logous to the tipping point that led to the
fi nancial crisis, and is at least as alarming and
costly for humanity in the long run. The sad
fact is that we are taking out sub-prime loans
from the Planet, and this cannot last forever.
There is one fundamental difference between
the Arctic and Wall Street, though: it doesn't
matter how much money we throw at the
Arctic, we still don't know how to refreeze it.
and this requires a deep understanding of
how complex social and environmental
systems interact from local to global levels.
Furthermore, it requires the ability to inno-
vate and create new approaches to business,
us to recognise that environmental issues
are, in fact, inseparable from questions of
development.
and solutions for the social-ecological chal-
lenges that face humanity and, by doing so,
support transitions toward sustainable deve-
lopment. As an independent international
research organisation, our work the efforts
of 180 staff in seven research centres around
the world is devoted to turning this mandate
into tangible achievements through research,
capacity building, communication, and by
bridging science and policy.
in real-world issues. This work gives SEI a
coherent and distinctive profi le one that
builds on the vision of SEI's founding director
Gordon Goodman, who sadly passed away
in 2008. Gordon not only successfully estab-
lished SEI as an internationally recognised
research organisation, he was also deeply
involved in setting up the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change. Furthermore, he
pioneered the crucial understanding that
environment and development issues are
tightly intertwined, particularly for poor com-
munities in the world. Gordon's infl uence cer-
tainly lives on within SEI, and we are now
change gradually, and also that sustainable develop-
ment could be achieved through steady, incremental
progress. However, recent evidence points to the
contrary that social and ecological systems are
characterised by long phases of minor change followed
by sudden, non-linear upheavals. We saw this play out
in the fi nancial crisis that hit the world in 2008. A long
period of unsustainable and cumulative fi nancial
behaviour eroded resilience to the point where a
small trigger the collapse of a couple of banks
pushed the whole fi nancial sector over a dramatic
threshold.