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 →]

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 →]