Category — Social-Ecological Systems

Article by Joshua E. Brown, University of Vermont, USA.

The most obvious fact about ecological economics is that, well, ecology comes before economics.

“For example,” says Joshua Farley, an economist at the University of Vermont, “without healthy ecosystems to regulate climate and rainfall and provide habitat for pollinators, agriculture would collapse.” Which makes it tough to sell cars.

Put another way, “we need economic production to survive, but we also need healthy ecosystems and the service they provide,” he says. No bees, no food, no trip to the grocery store. [Read more →]

A group of academics has attempted to estimate limits for biophysical processes to avoid catastrophic environmental changes. Jonhan Rockstrom and colleagues proposes the concept of “planetary boundaries”, a framework for quantifying safe thresholds for long-term human development. In a article published in the journal Nature, they suggest boundaries for nine indicators of stress to the Earth system: climate change, stratospheric ozone, land use change, freshwater use, biological diversity, ocean acidification, nitrogen and phosphorus inputs to the biosphere and oceans, aerosol loading and chemical pollution. [Read more →]

Let’s Try Something Different

by Victor Galaz

What is adaptiveness and innovation in earth system governance? How do we define it, and why does it matter? The Stockholm Resilience launched a web-log designed exclusively to the Earth System Governance community and conference participants of the 2009 Amsterdam Conference.

http://adaptiveness.wordpress.com/

The blog includes interviews with prominent scholars in the field of earth system science and governance. They will all elaborate different aspects of adaptiveness and innovation in an era of global environmental change. [Read more →]

An updated framework for analysing complex systems has been presented by Prof Elinor Ostrom.

Source: ASUNews

Common framework would aid cumulation of isolated knowledge

The often-used one-size-fits-all approach to policies aimed at achieving sustainable social-ecological systems needs to be updated with a diagnostic tool to help scholars from multiple disciplines better frame the question and think through the variables, asserts social scientist and political economist Elinor Ostrom.

“Scholars have tended to develop simple theoretical models to analyze aspects of resource problems and to prescribe universal solutions,” Ostrom writes in a Perspective article appearing in the July 24 Science special section on complexity. [Read more →]