Social-ecological analysis of climate induced changes in biodiversity – outline of a research concept

The interactions of changes in climate and biodiversity with societal actions, structures and processes are a priority topic within the international scientific debate – and thus, a relevant subject matter for BiKF’s work. This paper outlines a concept for transdisciplinary research within BiKF. It focuses on the analysis of social-ecological systems supporting society with biodiversity driven ecosystem services. Such research is considering different issues: defining sustainable societal adaptations to climate induced biodiversity changes; permitting adequate understanding of the social-ecological reproduction of ecosystem functions, including their conservation and restoration; analysing the societal values and socio-economic utilisation of ecosystem services. Gaining knowledge in these areas provides an improved basis for decision-making in biodiversity and resource management

Socio-hydrological modelling: a review asking “why, what and how?”

Interactions between humans and the environment are occurring on a scale that has never previously been seen; the scale of human interaction with the water cycle, along with the coupling present between social and hydrological systems, means that decisions that impact water also impact people. Models are often used to assist in decision-making regarding hydrological systems, and so in order for effective decisions to be made regarding water resource management, these interactions and feedbacks should be accounted for in models used to analyse systems in which water and humans interact. This paper reviews literature surrounding aspects of socio-hydrological modelling. It begins with background information regarding the current state of socio-hydrology as a discipline, before covering reasons for modelling and potential applications. Some important concepts that underlie socio-hydrological modelling efforts are then discussed, including ways of viewing socio-hydrological systems, space and time in modelling, complexity, data and model conceptualisation. Several modelling approaches are described, the stages in their development detailed and their applicability to socio-hydrological cases discussed. Gaps in research are then highlighted to guide directions for future research. The review of literature suggests that the nature of socio-hydrological study, being interdisciplinary, focusing on complex interactions between human and natural systems, and dealing with long horizons, is such that modelling will always present a challenge; it is, however, the task of the modeller to use the wide range of tools afforded to them to overcome these challenges as much as possible. The focus in socio-hydrology is on understanding the human–water system in a holistic sense, which differs from the problem solving focus of other water management fields, and as such models in socio-hydrology should be developed with a view to gaining new insight into these dynamics. There is an essential choice that socio-hydrological modellers face in deciding between representing individual system processes or viewing the system from a more abstracted level and modelling it as such; using these different approaches has implications for model development, applicability and the insight that they are capable of giving, and so the decision regarding how to model the system requires thorough consideration of, among other things, the nature of understanding that is sought

Livelisystems: a conceptual framework integrating social, ecosystem, development and evolutionary theory

Human activity poses multiple environmental challenges for ecosystems that have intrinsic value and also support that activity. Our ability to address these challenges is constrained, inter alia, by weaknesses in cross disciplinary understandings of interactive processes of change in socio-ecological systems. This paper draws on complementary insights from social and biological sciences to propose a ‘livelisystems’ framework of multi-scale, dynamic change across social and biological systems. This describes how material, informational and relational assets, asset services and asset pathways interact in systems with embedded and emergent properties undergoing a variety of structural transformations. Related characteristics of ‘higher’ (notably human) livelisystems and change processes are identified as the greater relative importance of (a) informational, relational and extrinsic (as opposed to material and intrinsic) assets, (b) teleological (as opposed to natural) selection, and (c) innovational (as opposed to mutational) change. The framework provides valuable insights into social and environmental challenges posed by global and local change, globalization, poverty, modernization, and growth in the anthropocene. Its potential for improving inter-disciplinary and multi-scale understanding is discussed, notably by examination of human adaptation to bio-diversity and eco-system service change following the spread of Lantana camera in the Western Ghats, India

Developing a panarchy model of landscape conservation and management of alpine-mountain grassland in Northern Italy.

This paper explores methods of applying resilience theory to a case study of natural resource management and the cultural landscape of upland and alpine pasture in northern Italy. We identify that the close interaction between alpine pastures and its managers offers a strong fit with the concept of a social-ecological system that maintains the cultural landscape. We first considered a descriptive approach looking historically at socio-economic development in the study area. We explored whether this can be related to resilience phenomena such as regime shifts, thresholds and/or regime stability through adaptive processes. However, we found it difficult at this overarching level to conceptually combine natural and social capital of alpine pastures and their managers in any quantitative way. We also interpreted our data through considering economic, social and ecological information as acting within separate but interacting domains. This led us to construct conceptual models of adaptive cycles to describe the alpine mountain grassland ecosystem of our study site and to conclude that a panarchy model can offer a powerful metaphor for its ecological dynamics. This has practical implications both for the management of Natura 2000 interest and the maintenance of the cultural landscape in which this Alpine interest occurs. We suggest that Resilience theory through its dynamic approach of interacting scales of adaptive cycles offers useful insights into the resource management (of valued cultural and natural attributes) but that care is needed in distinguishing between descriptive metaphor and predictive model or "real" system.natural resource management, natural and social capital

Power and politics in research design and practice: Opening up space for social equity in interdisciplinary, multi-jurisdictional and community-based research

Working collaboratively with communities is commonly considered a cornerstone of good practice in research involving social-ecological concerns. Increasingly, funding agencies also recognise that such collaborations are most productive when community partners have some influence on the design and implementation of the projects that benefit from their participation. However, researchers engaged with this work often struggle to actively engage community members in this way and, in particular, Indigenous peoples. In this article, we argue that useful strategies for facilitating such engagement are to leave space in the research plan for questions of interest to community partners and to encourage equitable interactions between all participants through the use of forums in which power dynamics are intentionally flattened. We demonstrate the use of this technique in an interdisciplinary, multi-jurisdictional research study involving the fate and transport of toxic compounds that lead to fish consumption advisories throughout the world. In this project, the use of participatory forums resulted in community partners in Michigan’s Keweenaw Bay area of Lake Superior shaping a key aspect of the research by raising the simple but significant question: ‘When can we eat the fish?’. Their interest in this question also helped to ensure that they would remain meaningful partners throughout the duration of the project. The conclusion emphasises that further integration of Indigenous and community-based research methods has the potential to significantly enhance the process and value of university-community research engagement in the future

Entrenched time delays versus accelerating opinion dynamics: are advanced democracies inherently unstable?

Modern societies face the challenge that the time scale of opinion formation is continuously accelerating in contrast to the time scale of political decision making. With the latter remaining of the order of the election cycle we examine here the case that the political state of a society is determined by the continuously evolving values of the electorate. Given this assumption we show that the time lags inherent in the election cycle will inevitable lead to political instabilities for advanced democracies characterized both by an accelerating pace of opinion dynamics and by high sensibilities (political correctness) to deviations from mainstream values. Our result is based on the observation that dynamical systems become generically unstable whenever time delays become comparable to the time it takes to adapt to the steady state. The time needed to recover from external shocks grows in addition dramatically close to the transition. Our estimates for the order of magnitude of the involved time scales indicate that socio-political instabilities may develop once the aggregate time scale for the evolution of the political values of the electorate falls below 7-15 months.Comment: European Physical Journal B (in press

'Transformations towards sustainability':Emerging approaches, critical reflections, and a research agenda

Over the last two decades researchers have come to understand much about the global challenges confronting human society (e.g. climate change; biodiversity loss; water, energy and food insecurity; poverty and widening social inequality). However, the extent to which research and policy efforts are succeeding in steering human societies towards more sustainable and just futures is unclear. Attention is increasingly turning towards better understanding how to navigate processes of social and institutional transformation to bring about more desirable trajectories of change in various sectors of human society. A major knowledge gap concerns understanding how transformations towards sustainability are conceptualised, understood and analysed. Limited existing scholarship on this topic is fragmented, sometimes overly deterministic, and weak in its capacity to critically analyse transformation processes which are inherently political and contested. This paper aims to advance understanding of transformations towards sustainability, recognising it as both a normative and an analytical concept. We firstly review existing concepts of transformation in global environmental change literature, and the role of governance in relation to it. We then propose a framework for understanding and critically analysing transformations towards sustainability based on the existing ‘Earth System Governance’ framework (Biermann et al., 2009). We then outline a research agenda, and argue that transdisciplinary research approaches and a key role for early career researchers are vital for pursuing this agenda. Finally, we argue that critical reflexivity among global environmental change scholars, both individually and collectively, will be important for developing innovative research on transformations towards sustainability to meaningfully contribute to policy and action over time