scholarly journals How Robust is Your System Resilience?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehran Homayounfar ◽  
Rachata Muneepeerakul ◽  
John M. Anderies
Keyword(s):  
Coupled System ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Ecological Systems ◽  
Internal Stresses ◽  
Public Infrastructure ◽  
Social Ecological Systems ◽  
Qualitative Approaches ◽  
Social Ecological ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Long Run

Abstract. Robustness and resilience are concepts in systems thinking that have grown in importance and popularity. For many complex social-ecological systems, however, robustness and resilience are difficult to quantify and the connections and trade-offs between them difficult to study. Most studies have either focused on qualitative approaches to discuss their connections or considered only one of them under particular classes of disturbances. In this study, we present an analytical framework to address the linkage between robustness and resilience more systematically. Our analysis is based on a stylized dynamical model that operationalizes a widely used conceptual framework for social-ecological systems. The model enables us to rigorously delineate the boundaries of conditions under which the coupled system can be sustained in a long run, define robustness and resilience related to these boundaries, and consequently investigate their connections. The results reveal the tradeoffs between robustness and resilience. They also show how the nature of such tradeoffs varies with the choices of certain policies (e.g., taxation and investment in public infrastructure), internal stresses and external disturbances.

scholarly journals Linking resilience and robustness and uncovering their trade-offs in coupled infrastructure systems

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 1159-1168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehran Homayounfar ◽  
Rachata Muneepeerakul ◽  
John M. Anderies ◽  
Chitsomanus P. Muneepeerakul
Keyword(s):  
Coupled System ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Ecological Systems ◽  
Internal Stresses ◽  
Public Infrastructure ◽  
Social Ecological Systems ◽  
Qualitative Approaches ◽  
Social Ecological ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Long Run

Abstract. Robustness and resilience are concepts in systems thinking that have grown in importance and popularity. For many complex social-ecological systems, however, robustness and resilience are difficult to quantify and the connections and trade-offs between them difficult to study. Most studies have either focused on qualitative approaches to discuss their connections or considered only one of them under particular classes of disturbances. In this study, we present an analytical framework to address the linkage between robustness and resilience more systematically. Our analysis is based on a stylized dynamical model that operationalizes a widely used conceptual framework for social-ecological systems. The model enables us to rigorously delineate the boundaries of conditions under which the coupled system can be sustained in a long run, define robustness and resilience related to these boundaries, and consequently investigate their connections. The results reveal the trade-offs between robustness and resilience. They also show how the nature of such trade-offs varies with the choice of certain policies (e.g., taxation and investment in public infrastructure), internal stresses, and uncertainty in social-ecological settings.

scholarly journals Cross-Scale Value Trade-Offs in Managing Social-Ecological Systems: The Politics of Scale in Ruaha National Park, Tanzania

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Asim Zia ◽  
Paul Hirsch ◽  
Alexander Songorwa ◽  
David R. Mutekanga ◽  
Sheila O'Connor ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
National Park ◽  
Ecological Systems ◽  
Politics Of Scale ◽  
Social Ecological Systems ◽  
Social Ecological ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Ruaha National Park

scholarly journals Importance and Utilization of Theory-Based Evaluations in the Context of Sustainable Development and Social-Ecological Systems

2022 ◽  
pp. 223-235
Author(s):  
Takaaki Miyaguchi
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Critical Realism ◽  
Evaluation Criteria ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Ecological Systems ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Natural Systems ◽  
Social Ecological Systems ◽  
Social Ecological ◽  
Development Evaluation

AbstractNumerous challenges confront the task of evaluating sustainable development—its complex nature, complementary evaluation criteria, and the difficulty of evaluation at the nexus of human and natural systems. Theory-based evaluation, drawn from critical realism, is well suited to this task. When constructing a program theory/theory of change for evaluating sustainable development, concepts of socioecological systems and coupled human and natural systems are useful. The chapter discusses four modes of inference and the application of different theory-based evaluation approaches. It introduces the CHANS (coupled human and natural systems) framework, a holistic, analytical framework that is useful in evaluating such complex, social-ecological systems and resonates with the challenging elements of sustainable development evaluation.

scholarly journals Monitoring social–ecological networks for biodiversity and ecosystem services in human-dominated landscapes

FACETS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 1670-1692
Author(s):  
Carina Rauen Firkowski ◽  
Amanda M. Schwantes ◽  
Marie-Josée Fortin ◽  
Andrew Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Ecosystem Service ◽  
Ecological Systems ◽  
Maple Syrup ◽  
Spatial And Temporal Scales ◽  
Causal Understanding ◽  
Social Ecological Systems ◽  
Social Ecological ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Analytical Tools

The demand the human population is placing on the environment has triggered accelerated rates of biodiversity change and created trade-offs among the ecosystem services we depend upon. Decisions designed to reverse these trends require the best possible information obtained by monitoring ecological and social dimensions of change. Here, we conceptualize a network framework to monitor change in social–ecological systems. We contextualize our framework within Ostrom’s social–ecological system framework and use it to discuss the challenges of monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem services across spatial and temporal scales. We propose that spatially explicit multilayer and multiscale monitoring can help estimate the range of variability seen in social–ecological systems with varying levels of human modification across the landscape. We illustrate our framework using a conceptual case study on the ecosystem service of maple syrup production. We argue for the use of analytical tools capable of integrating qualitative and quantitative knowledge of social–ecological systems to provide a causal understanding of change across a network. Altogether, our conceptual framework provides a foundation for establishing monitoring systems. Operationalizing our framework will allow for the detection of ecosystem service change and assessment of its drivers across several scales, informing the long-term sustainability of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

scholarly journals Heuristics for the sustainable harvest of wildlife in stochastic social-ecological systems

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (11) ◽  
pp. e0260159
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Law ◽  
John D. C. Linnell ◽  
Bram van Moorter ◽  
Erlend B. Nilsen
Keyword(s):  
Climatic Variability ◽  
Optimal Solution ◽  
Ecological Systems ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Social Ecological Systems ◽  
Social Ecological ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Optimal Harvest ◽  
Wildlife Harvest

Sustainable wildlife harvest is challenging due to the complexity of uncertain social-ecological systems, and diverse stakeholder perspectives of sustainability. In these systems, semi-complex stochastic simulation models can provide heuristics that bridge the gap between highly simplified theoretical models and highly context-specific case-studies. Such heuristics allow for more nuanced recommendations in low-knowledge contexts, and an improved understanding of model sensitivity and transferability to novel contexts. We develop semi-complex Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) models capturing dynamics and variability in ecological processes, monitoring, decision-making, and harvest implementation, under a diverse range of contexts. Results reveal the fundamental challenges of achieving sustainability in wildlife harvest. Environmental contexts were important in determining optimal harvest parameters, but overall, evaluation contexts more strongly influenced perceived outcomes, optimal harvest parameters and optimal harvest strategies. Importantly, simple composite metrics popular in the theoretical literature (e.g. focusing on maximizing yield and population persistence only) often diverged from more holistic composite metrics that include a wider range of population and harvest objectives, and better reflect the trade-offs in real world applied contexts. While adaptive harvest strategies were most frequently preferred, particularly for more complex environmental contexts (e.g. high uncertainty or variability), our simulations map out cases where these heuristics may not hold. Despite not always being the optimal solution, overall adaptive harvest strategies resulted in the least value forgone, and are likely to give the best outcomes under future climatic variability and uncertainty. This demonstrates the potential value of heuristics for guiding applied management.

scholarly journals Knowledge Structures and Components of Rural Resilience in the 2010s: Conceptual Development and Implications

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (22) ◽  
pp. 9769
Author(s):  
GoWoon Kim ◽  
Wanmo Kang ◽  
Junga Lee
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Systematic Review ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Ecological Systems ◽  
Assessment Tools ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Social Ecological Systems ◽  
Social Ecological

Resilience is being widely adopted as a comprehensive analytical framework for understanding sustainability dynamics, despite the conceptual challenges in developing proxies and indicators for researchers and policy makers. In our study, we observed how the concept of resilience undergoes continued extension within the rural resilience literature. We comprehensively reviewed rural resilience literature using keyword co-occurrence network (KCN) analysis and a systematic review of shortlisted papers. We conducted the KCN analysis for 1186 papers to characterize the state of the rural resilience literature, and systematically reviewed 36 shortlisted papers to further examine how rural resilience analysis and its assessment tools are helping understand the complexity and interdependence of rural social-ecological systems, over three three-year periods from 2010 to 2018. The results show that the knowledge structure built by the high frequency of co-occurrence keywords remains similar over the three-year periods, including climate change, resilience, vulnerability, adaptation, and management, whereas the components of knowledge have greatly expanded, indicating an increased understanding of rural system dynamics. Through the systematic review, we found that developing resilience assessment tools is often designed as a process to strengthen adaptive capacity at the household or community level in response to global processes of climate change and economic globalization. Furthermore, community resilience is found to be an interesting knowledge component that has characterized rural resilience literature in the 2010s. Based on our study, we summarized conceptual characteristics of rural resilience and discussed the challenges and implications for researchers and policy makers.

scholarly journals Operationalizing the social-ecological systems framework to assess sustainability

2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (19) ◽  
pp. 5979-5984 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather M. Leslie ◽  
Xavier Basurto ◽  
Mateja Nenadovic ◽  
Leila Sievanen ◽  
Kyle C. Cavanaugh ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Coupled System ◽  
Ecological Systems ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
Social Ecological Systems ◽  
Social Ecological ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Aspects

Environmental governance is more effective when the scales of ecological processes are well matched with the human institutions charged with managing human–environment interactions. The social-ecological systems (SESs) framework provides guidance on how to assess the social and ecological dimensions that contribute to sustainable resource use and management, but rarely if ever has been operationalized for multiple localities in a spatially explicit, quantitative manner. Here, we use the case of small-scale fisheries in Baja California Sur, Mexico, to identify distinct SES regions and test key aspects of coupled SESs theory. Regions that exhibit greater potential for social-ecological sustainability in one dimension do not necessarily exhibit it in others, highlighting the importance of integrative, coupled system analyses when implementing spatial planning and other ecosystem-based strategies.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document