Week 4: Social Ecological Systems Pt. 1 - Post 1

Social Ecological System Pt. 1 - Notes 

Lecture 1- Social-ecological systems

Carl Folke/ professor at Stockholm Resilience Center

what is the social-ecological systems approach? To us it's a concept where people are looked as being part of the planet we're living on. That may seem extremely self-evident, but it's not always clear when you look at the relations between people and nature.

And at the same time, as we are shaping the planet, we are also fundamentally dependent on the capacity of this little round ball that we're living on to supply us with the basics of food, water, and a lot of ecosystem services, like recycling of basic nutrients and minerals salts that our body needs, or other types of services like regulating the climate.

-marine systems, forests, rain forests

So ecosystems supply an enormous amount of services that people depend upon. And I'd like to use the idea of ecosystem services to illustrate social-ecological systems.

-Madagascar landscapes example/ story

So some key things to think about in relation to that story is that ecosystem services are not just generated by the ecological system or the ecosystem, but by a social-ecological system

-Lobster story – monoculture: the cultivation of a single crop in a given area. Monocultures are susceptible to shocks and crisis like diseases

So the lesson here is that if you create simplified ecosystems for production of a commodity that has a high market value right now, you create vulnerable systems sensitive to these types of shocks.

Resilience is the capacity to be able to deal with change, to live a change and to make use of change, not only incremental and sudden change, but also shocks and crisis, to turn crisis into opportunities basically

transformation; how we can transform societies into new development paths in line with the way the planet operates for human well-being, and for a good life for people on Earth.

We have studied several places on the planet with these type of interactions, and we find that they often go through a cycle of three phases. Where they first start to build resilience they know that they're on a path that's not sustainable, they try to build resilience to get out of the path, but they can't do it because they're locked by other laws, or social norms, or government policies, or business activities. But then suddenly there's a window of opportunity where the forces aligns, and they can shift over the whole governance structure into a new pathway. And that requires skillful leadership and other actors, and then they can after that start to build resilience of the new path they're on to be able to continue on that path and live a change.

+why we need to think about people and nature as totally intertwined, and especially in the Anthropocene.

+So any discipline where any knowledge system or any understanding that can contribute to dealing with these problems of sustainability are part of sustainability science

Lecture 2- Feedbacks, Interactions and regime shifts

Professor Gary Peterson

feedbacks, interactions, and regime shifts in social-ecological systems. And this is basically the idea of how ecosystems, or social-ecological systems, can go from being organized in one way to being organized in a very different way.

Regime shifts/Tipping points/ alternate ecological states/ or critical transitions

Ecosystem Services – go through changes

Well, there are two reasons why it's useful. One is that a lot of ways people think about the world are based on sort of gradual or linear change, when that isn't always true, how things happen. So, it's at least sometimes useful to think well, what happens when we have changes that are abrupt and persistent? The other one is that these types of changes often have much bigger impacts on people. If a fishery, so say like the Newfoundland cod fishery, ends up closing as the Newfoundland fishery's been closed for 20 years, this has huge impacts on both individual fishermen, but also the ability of towns to survive. So, these impacts can have very big consequences. Also when these occur they're not easy to reverse. So once you've gone over these thresholds it's much harder to come back; both in terms of the amount of effort, and in terms of costs in human resources and money.

- shifts aren’t linear- most of them we do not know when to expect them

-not all big changes that you see in nature are regime shifts. For example, stuff can change around a lot, but if it returns to where it was before it's not really regime shifts.

Sometimes regime shifts in studied systems are clear through time stay photos. Often though regime shifts are ambiguous, and we really aren’t clear if they have happened or not.

Key features of regime shifts versus other types of ecological change are substantial change in ecosystem services, that persist over human time scales, and that alternative regimes are potentially maintained by alternative feedback processes. Changes in species or types of species in a system, as well as human altering of ecological processes can occur without implying a regime shift.

-But one of the key things of regime shifts is that they're maintained by feedbacks.

So this is saying you can think about how regime shifts occur in two ways. One is where you have shocks, which cause the feedback process to be overwhelmed, and a system to shift from one state to another. For example, a big pulse of nutrients coming into a lake can cause a lake to shift from being clear water to being turbid water. The other less obvious one is changes in the feedback processes themselves that can reduce the resilience, or the ability to persist in one of the states. So this could be, for example, changes in the fish community of a lake could reduce the ability of the lake to cope with nutrient inputs. So all these kind of inputs that formerly wouldn't cause a shift in a lake start to be able to cause a shift in a lake, and maybe unexpectedly you get a big shift which you can't go back to because the feedback processes have changed.

Well, there's basically three different ways you can kind of think about managing regime shifts, and this goes with thinking about the shocks and slow variables. The first one is to try and think well what are all these perturbations that are affecting a system and how can you reduce the ability, the exposure of the system to these perturbations? For example, reducing fishing can enhance the ability of coral reefs to persist, or reducing land processes that are putting nutrients into a coral reef can decrease these shocks. Similarly you can think about maintaining the feedback loops, or enhancing the feedback loops, that are managing these sort of slow variables that increase the resilience of a system to regime shifts by, for example, ensuring there's a diverse set of fish, there's lots of different types of coral structure. But finally, and especially something that's really key to think about in the Anthropocene, as we're changing processes all around the world, is: well, what are the possibilities of novel regimes, as new species enter a system, new types of human activities? What are novel types of regimes that we either want to really avoid, or we'd like to restore systems to? So it's sort of three different

Key strategies for managing regime shifts: build resilience – reduce shock – global change – design novel regimes

Lecture 3- Ecological Surprises

Professor Gary Peterson

An ecological surprise is distinct from a regime shift. Regime shifts can be surprising but not all ecological surprises qualify as regime shifts.

Ecological surprise- examples from the 21^st Century

Use of pesticides: So one’s the use of pesticides to control pests and pathogens worked, but very quickly nature evolved resistance to these in many, many cases. And one of the most famous ones is DDT where malarial mosquitoes rapidly evolved resistance to DDT, making it less effective.

toxins being biomagnified in food chains: One of the classic examples of this is mercury being biomagnified. As people released mercury to the environment thinking it was inert, that it wouldn’t go up in the food chain, but unknown bacteria living in the bottom of the sea turned this into forms of mercury that are organic and could be accumulated. And so you ended up with people being contaminated by stuff that no one expected.

Another type of example is how agriculture, which has been hugely beneficial to the people, also by changing the disease ecology of local places has led to the emergence of new diseases: One of the classic examples of this is how irrigation led to the rise of River Blindness in West Africa, by providing habitat for, one of the animals that transmits this disease.

the simplification of ecosystems, particularly by removing top predators from land and from oceans, has destabilized these ecosystems, causing them to become more variable, and have more ecological regime shifts.

Social Ecological Surprises: this new and relatively recent increase it seems in coupling and turbulence in world oil and food markets. After almost three decades of relative stability in global food prices, we’ve had since 2008 both a lot of variation, and it seems an increased connection between oil and food prices. And this, of course, had big consequences, both in terms of what people have to spend on food and oil, but also some people argue has contributed to things like the Arab Spring, where there’s big changes in what people could afford in their daily life leading to social unrest.

And I think this is somewhere where you can kind of think about how these sort of social-ecological regime shifts connect to global surprise. And I think one way of thinking about this is to think about regime shifts in agriculture.

these types of ecological surprise can occur within a field, or within a whole continent. So the surprise can occur at different levels, but what we really have is in the Anthropocene we’re changing these things at many different places simultaneously. So, we’re also producing multiple types of regime shifts in many different places, and connecting them together in new ways.

Exp. Mexico Dead zone -Mississippi river- from Midwest farms and over nutrients

Novel social-ecological connections will introduce new interactions among people and ecosystems, some of which can be expected to produce ecological surprises. It is important to pay attention to these novel connections and interactions as they are, on balance, more likely to lead to more ecological surprises.

+So there can be an interaction between local scale regime shift and a more continental scale regime shift.

Conclusion: So I think, just to wrap up, there’s lots of examples of ecological surprise. That by looking at them from different angles we can get some understanding of what, surprises we know can happen? What are some of the drivers that can cause things that we could expect to happen? But also what are some of the variables that if they change, like nutrients or climate or moisture flow, that [we] could expect to transmit surprises around the world?