Week 5: Social Ecological Systems Pt. 2 - Post 1

Social Ecological Systems - Notes

Lecture 1 – Teleconnections and Inconvenient Feedbacks

Professor Johan Rockstrom

We must recognize that we are entering a realm where interconnectedness translates into what we call teleconnections. Teleconnections are when changes in one part of the world cascades itself to impacts in other parts of the world.

Teleconnections: A casual connection primarily between atmospheric meteorological phenomena distant from each other in both space and time.

-One example is when rainforest is cut down, changing rainfall patterns in, for example, Latin America, which can translate and propel itself and change rainfall conditions and temperatures all the way to inner China.

That’s on the basis upon which we built our entire economy, assuming that we can predict change in the environment. And now we are in a situation where surprise is a core element of change.

Inconvenient feedbacks: These are big, major surprising events that occur based on global drivers translating themselves to unexpected outcomes.

And if you put this together, the larger scale changes in the social and environmental systems, you come to the recognition that we live in a much more complicated hyper-connected world where changes in the climate system affects ecosystems, which together influences both human health, economics, and development at large

Example: The fact that we can now see changes and democratic movements in one part of the world propelling themselves across Facebook suddenly becoming global movements in the moment of seconds. This is in truth a connected world that has become a hyperconnected world in just the past couple of decades

GOAL: Now this has been increasingly explored scientifically, recognized the interactions between the climate system, ecosystems, human health, and the economy, and also articulated as a core component of our ability to navigate the Anthropocene. But now it’s not enough to have a stable financial system, we must also have a stable climate system in order to secure health in different parts of our economy.

-Syria drought and war example

-Hurricane Sandy Example (1st Pic)

2^nd Pic- 3 Sigma Events: statistically extreme weather events that occur less than one in a thousand years.

We cannot predict where it occurs but it’s a recognition that we’re moving rapidly into a situation where interactions, feedbacks, and unprecedented inconvenient feedbacks are part of the normal, so to say, geopolitical situation that we now must face.

China depends on sustainable management of ecosystems in its neighboring countries. – Proof of the interconnectedness and teleconnections that we do depend on in terms of development.

Food system is the number one victim of change in the Anthropocene because food requires fresh water. Fresh water is the first victim of climate environmental change. And reverse, the food system is the number one driver of changes at the planetary scale, a teleconnection and an inconvenient feedback we must recognize.

Zoonotic pandemics when we get infectious diseases moving across species from bush meat to human beings, showing a very complex interaction across scale. Climate change pushes changes at local level, political decision in one part of the world changing resource access in another part of the world, which in turn forces communities to suddenly change the life support systems, which in turns puts them in a vulnerability that triggers and unexpected change, in this case zoonotic pandemics that you normally would not see.

Lecture 2 – Earth-Resilience and Cross-Scale Interactions

Professor Johan Rockstrom

So we’ve been exploring the resilience of systems, the ability of a household or an economy or a rainforest to withstand different disturbances without shifting into a different structure or function, for example, a rainforest tipping over into a savannah.

Earth resilience: is entirely dependent on the different components of the Earth system operating together and either through what we call negative feedbacks, meaning processes that dampen change, or through positive feedbacks, where processes actually accelerate change, and applying these interactions regulate the ability of the Earth system to remain either in a Holocene-like state or propel itself outside of that state.

in exploring Earth resilience we must also understand what we call cross-scale interactions, how for example a carbon sink or a methane sink in a local forest, or a wetland, or a savannah, interacts with the atmosphere or the polar regions, so from a local, to a regional, to a global scale.

The Holocene- Eden’s garden of human development (last 10,000 years)

Climate Change Background- We’ve emitted an estimated 365 billion tons of carbon from industrial emissions, and another 180 billion tons of carbon from land use change. That together ends up in an enormous 545 billion tons of carbon emitted cumulatively since the Industrial Revolution. This is relevant because carbon remains in the atmosphere for over 1000 years. So what we did 200 years back is still warming the planet. The big question is temperature has risen with almost 1° Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. Is it all of these 545 billion tons of carbon that now reside in the atmosphere causing 1° Celsius warming? The answer is no, because the astonishing reality is that over half, roughly 55%, of these emissions are actually absorbed by the living biosphere, 155 billion tons in the oceans, and another 150 billion tons are estimated to have been taken up by terrestrial ecosystems. And the net remaining amount of carbon in the atmosphere is only 240 gigatons of carbon which has contributed to the temperature rise so far. Same story goes for heat, for example. 95% of the heat caused by global warming is stored deep in the oceans.

This is the most profound proof that the Earth system, through its biogeophysical processes,is applying Earth resilience in practice, meaning that the Earth system is applying these processes to try to remain in its current stable state, the Holocene, by dampening the impacts of our disturbance, emitting of carbon dioxide in this case.

Takeaway: altogether systems that define Earth resilience. And the key insight here is the recognition that in the past we’ve been very preoccupied of managing ecosystems at the local scale. This has been important for local livelihoods and local opportunities for good living conditions. Now we must connect the local to the biome scale, and the biome to the planetary scale, and recognize that we have to become stewards of all these systems collectively because they determine the ability for any scale, from household to business to nation, to develop in the future.

Lecture 3 – Tipping Points

Professor Johan Rockstrom

Tipping point: When a system changes fundamentally its structure and function, and tips over from one stable state to another stable state. So strictly speaking the definition of a tipping point is when a system fundamentally changes structure and function and settles into a new stable state.

The underlying cause for a tipping point is changes in feedbacks. Feedbacks are the major underlying regulating process that hold a system in a particular state.

Ice Sheets Example: Now Jason Box at the Byrd Polar Research Institute concludes in calculation that just these two weeks of change in feedback corresponds to a new injection of heat of in the order of 300 exajoules of energy. Now 300 exajoules is a very difficult number, but just to give you some comparisons, the annual energy consumption in the US is in the order of 200 exajoules. The annual global energy consumption is a bit more than 600 (exajoules). So momentarily this means that Denmark bypasses China and the US as the world’s largest climate forcing nation. And this occurs when Mother Earth changes directions in the feedback, which potentially could be a tipping point.

Story: The last time we had a warm interglacial, the Eemian warm interglacial period, some 120 000 years back – Sea Level Rise Predictions with Greenland and Antarctic Ice sheets melting - So this is showing why it’s incredibly important for us now to understand the risk of tipping points in large systems that regulate the stability of the earth system.

This is data from the Amazon rainforest, showing the unprecedented droughts from 2005 and 2010, which led to a remarkable penetration of drying, even inside the rainforest. And increasing evidence indicates that these kind of shock events, of droughts related to global climate change, together with the large and vast deforestation, which open ups tracts of forest leading to more dry air penetrating the normally moist canopy, could in fact lead to abrupt behaviour, meaning that the system could tip over and, quite abruptly, shift into a savannah.

What you see here is one such effort of trying to identify the hotspot systems in the world where we could anticipate this kind of shift occurring from one stable state to another stable state if we cross a threshold, leading to a tipping point.

And what you see here is a first analysis of hotspot regions in the world where you could see a fundamental shift in freshwater supply, if continued unsustainable management is pursued. Where we see shifts in moisture feedback related to deforestation, which changes rainfall patterns, which could abruptly shift runoff flows and rivers, and thereby undermine the possibility for irrigation, and freshwater supplies to cities.

Conclusion: To navigate sustainable development in the Anthropocene, we need to understand both pressures and tipping points, and together this allows us to explore: what is a safe operating space for development?