Abstract
Using an eight-dimensional indicator index, we evaluate the trajectories of resilience of 160 countries over 20 years. Our highly-granular analysis of the current state of the world shows what must happen to control climate change and switch from quantitative to qualitative growth. Assessing the resilience of a country is a complex task prone to opacity and subjectivity. The challenge is to strike a balance between the Earth's biophysical limits and socioeconomic models designed to ignore them. Here we propose a resilience index composed of eight indicators of socioeconomic status (GDP and HDI), natural resources and population (arable land and water resources per capita), energy (supply and renewables), and environmental impacts (greenhouse gas emissions and material footprint). We show that the socioeconomic indicators have improved, while natural resources have been depleting and environmental impacts worsening. We need to reduce the current material footprint 1.5-fold. Average CO2 emissions per capita must drop by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, population growth and political instability seem to undermine resilience score of a country.
•Evaluation of global resilience in a qualitative and quantitative way•Identification of profiles of the most and least resilient countries•Assessment of how the inevitable biases depend on the approaches to evaluating resilience•Analysis of the 20-year global trends for selected indicators and of paths towards sustainable development