  We develop a framework within which to conceptualize World-Earth System
resilience. Our notion of World-Earth System resilience emphasizes the need to
move beyond the basin of attraction notion of resilience as we are not in a
basin we can stay in. We are on a trajectory to a new basin and we have to
avoid falling into undesirable basins. We thus focus on `pathway resilience',
i.e. the relative number of paths that allow us to move from the transitional
operating space we occupy now as we leave the Holocene basin to a safe and just
operating space in the Anthropocene. We develop a mathematical model to
formalize this conceptualization and demonstrate how interactions between earth
system resilience (biophysical processes) and world system resilience (social
processes) impact pathway resilience. Our findings show that building earth
system resilience is probably our only chance to reach a safe and just
operating space. We also illustrate the importance of world system dynamics by
showing how the notion of fairness coupled with regional inequality affects
pathway resilience.

Physics and Society