Ideas, Regime Shifts

Recent Resilience Papers

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Some recent papers on resilience…

1) Information network topologies for enhanced local adaptive management. by Örjan Bodin and Jon Norberg in Environmental Management 2005 35(2):175-93.

We examined the principal effects of different information network topologies for local adaptive management of natural resources. We used computerized agents with adaptive decision algorithms with the following three fundamental constraints: (1) Complete understanding of the processes maintaining the natural resource can never be achieved, (2) agents can only learn by experimentation and information sharing, and (3) memory is limited. The agents were given the task to manage a system that had two states: one that provided high utility returns (desired) and one that provided low returns (undesired). In addition, the threshold between the states was close to the optimal return of the desired state. We found that networks of low to moderate link densities significantly increased the resilience of the utility returns. Networks of high link densities contributed to highly synchronized behavior among the agents, which caused occasional large-scale ecological crises between periods of stable and high utility returns. A constructed network involving a small set of experimenting agents was capable of combining high utility returns with high resilience, conforming to theories underlying the concept of adaptive comanagement. We conclude that (1) the ability to manage for resilience (i.e., to stay clear of the threshold leading to the undesired state as well as the ability to re-enter the desired state following a collapse) resides in the network structure and (2) in a coupled social-ecological system, the system-wide state transition occurs not because the ecological system flips into the undesired state, but because managers lose their capacity to reorganize back to the desired state.

2) Eutrophication of aquatic ecosystems: Bistability and soil phosphorus by Steve Carpenter in PNAS online.

Eutrophication (the overenrichment of aquatic ecosystems with nutrients leading to algal blooms and anoxic events) is a persistent condition of surface waters and a widespread environmental problem. Some lakes have recovered after sources of nutrients were reduced. In others, recycling of phosphorus from sediments enriched by years of high nutrient inputs causes lakes to remain eutrophic even after external inputs of phosphorus are decreased. Slow flux of phosphorus from overfertilized soils may be even more important for maintaining eutrophication of lakes in agricultural regions. This type of eutrophication is not reversible unless there are substantial changes in soil management. Technologies for rapidly reducing phosphorus content of overenriched soils, or reducing erosion rates, are needed to improve water quality.

The paper shows that risks from nutrient accumulation are increasing and difficult to reverse or deal with:

Widespread eutrophication by anthropogenic nutrient inputs is a relatively recent environmental problem. Intensive fertilization of agricultural soils and associated nonpoint inputs of phosphorus increased through the middle of the 20th century. Analyses presented here show that it could take 1,000 years or more to recover from eutrophication caused by agricultural overenrichment of soils. In principle, eutrophication is reversible, but from the perspective of a human lifetime, lake eutrophication can appear to be permanent unless there are substantial changes in soil management. Technologies for rapidly reducing the phosphorus content of overenriched soils, or reducing erosion rates, could greatly accelerate improvements in water quality.

3) New paradigms for supporting the resilience of marine ecosystems by Terence Hughes, David Bellwood, Carl Folke, Robert Steneck and James Wilson in Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 2005 – 20(7) 380-386.

Box 1. Regeneration and hysteresis

What are the prospects for the recovery of damaged marine ecosystems? Marine organisms have many adaptations for coping with recurrent natural disturbances. However, chronic human impacts are analogous to press experiments, in which a manipulation is sustained. Consequently, a return to original conditions is impossible unless the major ongoing drivers (e.g. runoff of sediment, excess nutrients and fishing pressure) are reduced.

Many conservation and management practices imagine that if current stressors can be relieved, the ecosystem will automatically revert from an altered state to its original wilderness condition within a few years or decades. This approach ignores the recent emergence of a wealth of archeological and historical information about the profound changes wrought to marine ecosystems by human activities, especially harvesting. Moreover, marine ecosystems exhibit varying degrees of hysteresis; that is, their recovery follows a different trajectory from that observed during decline. Some systems have changed to the extent that they can effectively no longer converge to the original assemblage. From a complex systems perspective, they have crossed a threshold into a new state or domain of attraction that precludes return to the original state. The consequences for management are profound: it is easier to sustain a resilient ecosystem than to repair it after a phase shift has occurred.

Changes in species composition during recovery arise, in part, because of differences in life histories. For long-lived marine species (e.g. whales, turtles, dugongs, sharks and reef-building corals), recovery following controls on overfishing or pollution is necessarily slow. For example, populations of the seacow Dugong dugong have declined by 97% over the past three decades along 1000 km of coastline in tropical Queensland, Australia.

Assuming that hunting, incidental netting and habitat degradation can all be curbed, recovery of this species back to the levels of the 1970s (which were already severely depleted) will take at least 120–160 years, constrained by the limited annual growth rate of seacow populations of 2–3%. Similarly, recovery from increasingly frequent episodes of coral bleaching has favored short-lived species that can quickly recolonize after disturbances. All of the major fishing grounds worldwide have also seen a shift to weedier, fastgrowing species that are inherently less resilient and more prone to environmental fluctuations.

Alternate ecological states can be maintained by density-dependent mortality (e.g. owing to altered predator–prey ratios) or by density thresholds required for reproductive success. For example, regeneration of coral reefs can be inhibited by a surfeit of coral predators, by recruitment failure, and by blooms of toxic or structurally resilient algae that resist herbivory and smother juvenile corals. The concept of hysteresis recognizes that localized short-term reductions of human impacts will not ensure recovery to a pristine state. Similarly, the lack of recovery of collapsed fisheries a few years after fishing has eased does not prove that something else must have caused the decline.

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Scenarios, Tools

MA Desertification Synthesis

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Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (see earlier posts Biodiversity Synthesis and 1 and 2.) has released Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Desertification Synthesis which is freely downloadable from the internet (as a 3 Mb pdf).

My summary of the report is drylands cover about 40% of Earth’s land surface. These areas contain about 2 billion people (~1/3 of world), but only 8% of the world’s supply of water.

Compared to people living in other ecological regions, people living in drylands have the lowest levels of human well-being, including the lowest per capita GDP and the highest Infant Mortality Rate.

Between 1/10th and 1/5th of drylands are degraded – their croplands, pastures and woodlands have been ecologically simplified reducing their economic productivity. The primary causes are over-cultivation, over-grazing, deforestation, and poor irrigation practices

There is substantial variation in rainfall in drylands. Climate change is expected to worsen this variation. People in these regions are already vulnerability of climate variation, climate change and population growth are expected to further decrease the ability of people to maintain their well-being in the face of social and environmental change. However, there are many possible institutional, economic, and ecological responses the people, businesses, and governments can adopt to reduce this vulnerability. In particular, approaches that integrate land and water management are needed.

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Big Back Loop, Ecological Economics, Ideas

Partha Dasgupta vs. Jared Diamond

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Partha Dasgupta, a Cambridge economist, recently wrote a sympathetic yet critical book review of Jared Diamond‘s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive in the London Review of Books. In it Partha Dasgupta critiques the book for its failure to adress tradeoffs and advances the concept of inclusive wealth.

Dasgupta critiques Diamond for not being more explict about tradeoffs among ecosystem services:

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General

New Journals

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Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy is a new peer-reviewed, open access journal that provides a platform for the dissemination of new practices and for dialogue emerging out of the field of sustainability. According to the journal’s web site, “The e-Journal fills a gap in the literature by establishing a forum for cross-disciplinary discussion of empirical and social sciences, practices, and policies related to sustainability. Sustainability will facilitate communication among scientists, practitioners, and policy makers who are investigating and shaping nature-society interactions and working towards sustainable solutions.”

Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting is an official publication of the International Institute of Forecasters.
The first issue contains a special feature on judgemental adjustment of statistical forecasts. These are methods for combining soft information or mental models held by individuals with statistical or mathematical models. The issue also includes a paper by John Boylan, “Intermittent and lumpy demand: a forecasting challenge”. In business, “slow items with intermittent and lumpy demand patterns may seem unimportant, but they can make up a substantial part of an organization’s inventory”. Boylan describes several methods for determining and forecasting regularities in lumpy time series. His discussion may be of interest to researchers studying lumpy series from a wide range of systems.

General

The cost of memory

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It would be wonderful if we can remember all our experiences as individuals and communities, in order to improve our decisions in complex dynamic environments. But memory is costly, like the many years of education needed to transfer information, imperfectly, from one generation to the next. An interesting study with fruit flies show the cost of memory on the individual level:
“If you are forever forgetting people’s names or family birthdays, take heart. Forming permanent memories is so physiologically expensive it can result in early death – at least for fruit flies. When fruit flies form lasting memories, their neurons must make new proteins. Now Frederic Mery and Tadeusz Kawecki at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland have shown that this extra work takes its toll on the flies’ ability to survive. They trained one group of flies to associate a jolt with a bad-smelling mixture of two alcohols, while other flies were subjected either to jolts only or to jolts and odours, but not at the same time. When the flies were subsequently deprived of food and water, the group that had learned the link died an average of 4 hours, or 20 per cent, earlier than the others (Science, vol 308, p 1148).
The study suggests that there is a cost to memory and learning, raising the question of whether humans lost other qualities when they evolved superior intelligence. “We have such an extraordinary memory and learning capacity, we must have paid for it,” says Kawecki.”

From issue 2501 of New Scientist magazine, 28 May 2005, page 16

Design, General, Reorganization

TechnoGarden : Finland?

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The MA Scenario TechnoGarden is based on the emergence and spread of ecological property rights and technology. Pieces of this potential world are described in a Washington Post article about how the growth of green business in Finland is being stimulated EU policies.

Finnish entrepreneurs are investing in eco-friendly businesses. Their most important salesmen may not be Finnish businesspeople (for whom, many here acknowledge, salesmanship is not a natural talent), but the European Union’s regulation writers in Brussels who set the community’s ecological standards.

Proventia, for example, hopes to make millions from the new E.U. regulation requiring the original manufacturer to recapture and recycle at least 75 percent of the contents of every piece of electronics and electrical equipment sold in Europe. The new standard comes into force in August, and adapting to it will cost companies (including some U.S. corporations) huge amounts of money, according to Noponen. He hopes Proventia companies will earn a lot of that money.

Proventia Automation, another member of the group, already produces machines that can cut up television sets and computer monitors, separating leaded from unleaded glass with a laser and recycling all the glass and other valuable, reusable components. Noponen hopes the E.U.’s new standard will produce numerous new customers for this technology. This innovation not only benefits the environment by promoting recycling and sustainable practices but also offers a lucrative opportunity for businesses. With the E.U.’s new standard in place, customer interest and demand for such eco-friendly solutions are likely to grow. Noponen and the team at Proventia Automation are looking forward to engaging with prospective customers and demonstrating how their technology can help businesses meet these new standards, reduce waste, and contribute to a more sustainable future. A blog on www.clerk.chat says that customer chats and inquiries about these cutting-edge solutions are expected to rise, further driving the adoption of this eco-conscious technology.

More broadly, his firm can provide information technology and management advice to help manufacturers figure out how to meet the new rules most efficiently. Manufacturers of electronic equipment can actually make money by recycling their own creations when their useful lives are over, Noponen said.

via WorldChanging

Big Back Loop, General

Climate of Man

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Recently the New Yorker published “The Climate of Man” an excellent three-part series on climate change by Elizabeth Kolbert.

She covers ecological change, adaptation, flexible infrastructre, and global (and US) environmental politics.

Below are links and excerpts from each of the three articles. I suspect it will be a good book next year.

Part 1: Disappearing islands, thawing permafrost, melting polar ice;

By the time I got to the lookout over Sólheimajökull, it was raining. In the gloomy light, the glacier looked forlorn. Much of it was gray—covered in a film of dark grit. In its retreat, it had left behind ridged piles of silt. These were jet black and barren—not even the tough local grasses had had a chance to take root on them. I looked for the enormous boulder I had seen in the photos in Sigurdsson’s office. It was such a long way from the edge of the glacier that for a moment I wondered if perhaps it had been carried along by the current. A raw wind came up, and I started to head down. Then I thought about what Sigurdsson had told me. If I returned in another decade, the glacier would probably no longer even be visible from the ridge where I was standing. I climbed back up to take a second look

Part 2: The curse of Akkad;

“I gave a talk based on these drought indices out in California to water-resource managers,” Rind told me. “And they said, ‘Well, if that happens, forget it.’ There’s just no way they could deal with that.”

He went on, “Obviously, if you get drought indices like these, there’s no adaptation that’s possible. But let’s say it’s not that severe. What adaptation are we talking about? Adaptation in 2020? Adaptation in 2040? Adaptation in 2060? Because the way the models project this, as global warming gets going, once you’ve adapted to one decade you’re going to have to change everything the next decade.

“We may say that we’re more technologically able than earlier societies. But one thing about climate change is it’s potentially geopolitically destabilizing. And we’re not only more technologically able; we’re more technologically able destructively as well. I think it’s impossible to predict what will happen. I guess—though I won’t be around to see it—I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were destroyed.” He paused. “That’s sort of an extreme view.”

Part 3: What can be done?

“The amphibious homes all look alike. They are tall and narrow, with flat sides and curved metal roofs, so that, standing next to one another, they resemble a row of toasters. Each one is moored to a metal pole and sits on a set of hollow concrete pontoons. Assuming that all goes according to plan, when the Meuse floods the homes will bob up and then, when the water recedes, they will gently be deposited back on land. Dura Vermeer is also working to construct buoyant roads and floating greenhouses. While each of these projects represents a somewhat different engineering challenge, they have a common goal, which is to allow people to continue to inhabit areas that, periodically at least, will be inundated. The Dutch, because of their peculiar vulnerability, can’t afford to misjudge climate change, or to pretend that by denying it they can make it go away. “There is a flood market emerging,” Chris Zevenbergen, Dura Vermeer’s environmental director, told me. Half a dozen families were already occupying their amphibious homes when I visited Maasbommel. Anna van der Molen, a nurse and mother of four, gave me a tour of hers. She said that she expected that in the future people all over the world would live in floating houses, since, as she put it, “the water is coming up.”

The series ends:

“It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing”

General, Ideas

The formation of creative teams

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In a recent paper published in Science Guimerà and colleagues use network theory to investigate what makes teams sparklingly creative as compared to those less inventive. The authors use large datasets on producers of Broadway musicals and authors of scientific papers in Economics, Ecology, Social Psychology and Astronomy to document the character of successful teams. Factors that seem of importance include the fraction of veteran members of a team, as well as the extent to which veterans involve their former collaborators.

From Barabàsis analysis of the authors results:

To comprehend the structure of the collaboration map, we must understand how people form friendships and alliances. Given that in the professional world friendships are just as crucial as hard-nosed professional interests, modeling the evolution of creative teams may appear to be impossible. Guimeraà’s results indicate otherwise: They show that a simple model successfully captures many qualitative features of the network underlying the creative enterprise. In their study, they distinguish between veterans, who have participated in collaborations before, and rookies, who are about to see their names appear in print for the first time. Two parameters are key: the fraction of veteran members in a new team, and the degree to which veterans involve their former collaborators. If choosing experienced veterans is not a priority, the authors find that the network will be broken up into many small teams with little overlap between them. As the likelihood of relying on veterans increases, thanks to the extra links to earlier collaborators, the teams coalesce through a phase transition such that all players become part of a single cluster.

…

The results of the Guimerà et al. study indicate that expertise does matter: Teams publishing in highimpact journals have a high fraction of incumbents. But diversity matters too: Teams with many former collaborative links offer inferior performance. Thus, the recipe for success seems relatively simple: When forming a “dream team” make an effort to include the most experienced people, whether or not you have worked with them before. But diversity matters too: Teams with many former collaborative links offer inferior performance. Thus, the recipe for success seems relatively simple: When forming a “dream team” make an effort to include the most experienced people, whether or not you have worked with them before.

Big Back Loop, General, Scenarios

Nature uses fiction to communicate global risks of Avian flu

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The 1918 flu pandemic killed 50 million people across the globe. This weeks Nature is devoted to the potential of an avian flu pandemic and contains both news and scientific reports on the subject. To highlight and communicate the risks involved story telling is used in the form of a future weblog, written by a made up freelance journalist.

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Big Back Loop, Ideas, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

MA Biodiversity Synthesis released

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Ecosystems and Human Well-being: the Biodiversity Synthesis Report, the first cross-cutting synthesis report from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) has been released at an event at McGill University. The report can be downloaded from the MA web site for free (its 13.4Mb).

Key findings of the study are:

+ Biodiversity benefits people through more than just its contribution to material welfare and livelihoods. Biodiversity contributes to security, resiliency, social relations, health, and freedom of choices and actions.

+ Changes in biodiversity due to human activities were more rapid in the past 50 years than at any time in human history, and the drivers of change that cause biodiversity loss and lead to changes in ecosystem services are either steady, show no evidence of declining over time, or are increasing in intensity. Under the four plausible future scenarios developed by the MA, these rates of change in biodiversity are projected to continue, or to accelerate.

+ Many people have benefited over the last century from the conversion of natural ecosystems to human-dominated ecosystems and from the exploitation of biodiversity. At the same time, however, these gains have been achieved at growing costs in the form of losses in biodiversity, degradation of many ecosystem services, and the exacerbation of poverty for some groups of people.

+ The most important direct drivers of biodiversity loss and ecosystem service changes are habitat change (such as land use changes, physical modification of rivers or water withdrawal from rivers, loss of coral reefs, and damage to sea floors due to trawling), climate change, invasive alien species, overexploitation, and pollution.

+ Improved valuation techniques and information on ecosystem services demonstrates that although many individuals benefit from biodiversity loss and ecosystem change, the costs borne by society of such changes are often higher. Even in instances where knowledge of benefits and costs is incomplete, the use of the precautionary approach may be warranted when the costs associated with ecosystem changes may be high or the changes irreversible.

+ To achieve greater progress toward biodiversity conservation to improve human well-being and reduce poverty, it will be necessary to strengthen response options that are designed with the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosystem services as the primary goal. These responses will not be sufficient, however, unless the indirect and direct drivers of change are addressed and the enabling conditions for implementation of the full suite of responses are established.

+ An unprecedented effort would be needed to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss at all levels.

+ Short-term goals and targets are not sufficient for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosystems. Given the characteristic response times for political, socioeconomic, and ecological systems, longer-term goals and targets (such as for 2050) are needed to guide policy and actions.

+ Improved capability to predict the consequences of changes in drivers for biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and ecosystem services, together with improved measures of biodiversity, would aid decision-making at all levels.

+ Science can help ensure that decisions are made with the best available information, but ultimately the future of biodiversity will be determined by society.