Contemporary sustainability science and practice must embrace the complexity of social-ecological systems and capitalize on the lessons learned from the recent theoretical and applied advances made in various disciplines. This can be accomplished in particular by incorporating this extensive knowledge into management and decision making through integrative and operational frameworks. Based on contrasting but complementary case studies (coral reef fishery in Moorea, French Polynesia; artisanal benthic fishery in Chile; global food systems), and drawing from the recent development in social-ecological science, I extended the use of the social-ecological vulnerability framework by (1) mapping human-nature dependencies in the context of resource-user interactions, (2) integrating the temporal dimension, (3) accounting for multiple drivers of change and (4) their impact on diverse entities of the system considered.