When we're living on a planet with fixed limits, where people are everywhere shaping ecosystems all over the planet, we have to consider how to distribute benefits fairly. Socio- ecological systems are complex and connected across levels: from the local to the global, and in time, from past to the future (Lenton et al 2008). We are now living in this interconnected planet where social-ecological systems are everywhere. There are no ecosystems, there are no social systems – it’s only social-ecological systems (Rockstrom 2009). These kinds of teleconnections must be understood because they can themselves trigger surprise, leading to inconvenient feedbacks that then implicate the possibilities for sustainable development. This is one of the challenges of trying to control nature with technology. It’s different from past understandings of development, where we’ve tried to map out resources, tried to predict and assume that things change linearly and incrementally. That’s on the basis upon which we built our entire economy, assuming that we can predict change in the environment.

Today we are in a situation where surprise is a core element of change. On top of that lies an element of complexity. Not only is climate, ecosystems, health, and development interacting with each other in the hyper-connected world, not only do we have teleconnections, but what can occur when a series of global drivers – for example climate change and financial change across an interconnected global financial system – cause an impact which is totally unexpected, often in a very different part of the world than the very source of the problems? Such inconvenient feedbacks are big, major, surprising events that occur based on global drivers translating themselves to unexpected outcomes (Rocha, Biggs, and Peterson 2014).

These examples of social hyper-connectivity are increasingly well understood. They must be layered together with the recognition that we have exactly the same rising hyper-connectivity, even interdependence, given the teleconnections we see when it comes to changes in the environmental system. Together, the larger scale changes in the social and environmental systems illuminates how we all must live in a much more complicated, hyper-connected world where changes in the climate system effects ecosystems, which together influences both human health, economics, and development at large. This is the new reality that we’re facing, the reality of reflexive modernity. But it’s also a world where we must now understand risk and the probability of super wicked problems where multiple feedbacks begin interacting, and avoid potentials for a complex cocktail of cascading catastrophes from quickly overwhelming humanity’s ability to adapt in-time, without unprecedented disruption to civilization for many generations to come (Galaz et al. 2011).