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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Journal Article
    Resilience Management in Social-Ecological Systems: A Working Hypothesis for a Participatory Approach
    (2002) Walker, Brian H.; Carpenter, Stephen; Anderies, John M.; Abel, Nick; Cumming, Graeme S.; Janssen, Marco A.; Lebel, Louis; Norberg, Jon; Peterson, Garry D.; Pritchard, Rusty
    "Approaches to natural resource management are often based on a presumed ability to predict probabilistic responses to management and external drivers such as climate. They also tend to assume that the manager is outside the system being managed. However, where the objectives include long-term sustainability, linked social-ecological systems (SESs) behave as complex adaptive systems, with the managers as integral components of the system. Moreover, uncertainties are large and it may be difficult to reduce them as fast as the system changes. Sustainability involves maintaining the functionality of a system when it is perturbed, or maintaining the elements needed to renew or reorganize if a large perturbation radically alters structure and function. The ability to do this is termed 'resilience.' This paper presents an evolving approach to analyzing resilience in SESs, as a basis for managing resilience. We propose a framework with four steps, involving close involvement of SES stakeholders. It begins with a stakeholder-led development of a conceptual model of the system, including its historical profile (how it got to be what it is) and preliminary assessments of the drivers of the supply of key ecosystem goods and services. Step 2 deals with identifying the range of unpredictable and uncontrollable drivers, stakeholder visions for the future, and contrasting possible future policies, weaving these three factors into a limited set of future scenarios. Step 3 uses the outputs from steps 1 and 2 to explore the SES for resilience in an iterative way. It generally includes the development of simple models of the system's dynamics for exploring attributes that affect resilience. Step 4 is a stakeholder evaluation of the process and outcomes in terms of policy and management implications. This approach to resilience analysis is illustrated using two stylized examples."
  • Journal Article
    Uncertainty, Climate Change, and Adaptive Management
    (1997) Peterson, Garry D.; De Leo, Giulio Alessandro; Hellmann, Jessica J.; Janssen, Marco A.; Kinzig, Ann P.; Malcolm, Jay R.; O'Brien, Karen; Pope, Shealagh E.; Rothman, Dale S.; Shevliakova, Elena; Tinch, Robert
    "Humanity's transformation of the Earth has increased the concentration of greenhouse gases, thereby altering Earth's climate. The drivers and the potential consequences of climate change are interwoven with a huge variety of biogeophysical and human-caused processes that complicate the analysis of policies designed to mitigate and adapt to climate change. In this paper, we explore how adaptive management can be used to grapple with the regional and global scientific, economic, and political uncertainties of climate change."
  • Journal Article
    Ecology, Ethics, and Advocacy
    (1997) Peterson, Garry D.; Pope, Shealagh E.; De Leo, Giulio Alessandro; Janssen, Marco A.; Malcolm, Jay R.; Parody, Jennifer M.; Hood, Greg; North, Malcolm
    "Anthropogenic global change is radically altering climate, mineral cycles, land cover, and biotic communities (Turner et al. 1993, Vitousek 1994). These changes ensure that everywhere on Earth is affected by human actions. In some areas, such as the center of large cities, human transformation is near absolute, whereas in other places, such as remote parks, human influence is felt chiefly through the alteration of global cycles. However, no place is free from multiple, confounded human impacts. Consequently, ecological studies, whether they attend to or not, are partially studying the impact of anthropogenic change. "Ecologists cannot ignore these changes. First, ignoring these changes will produce flawed science; if ecologists ignore anthropogenic influences, they will probably attribute change to the wrong processes. Second, and perhaps more important, if ecologists want to guide or 'engineer' the human transformation of the earth to reduce unintended consequences, they need to understand how ecosystems organize and function in response to a huge variety of anthropogenic alterations. "Engineering ecological systems is dangerous. Nature is neither predictable nor inert; rather it is evolutionary and self-modifying. History, evolution, and variation are all central to ecology, but foreign to the 'memory-less,' repeatable, and variation-minimizing methods of traditional engineering. "Ecologists cannot hide behind 'pure' science and divorce themselves from the dangerous application of ecology. Whether ecologists like it or not, managers, policy makers, and the general public use ecological theory, or at least their understanding of ecological theory, to make decisions. To promote 'reflective' management and sound science, ecologists need to study, criticize, and inform the human transformation of nature."