Ann P. Kinzig

Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social–ecological Systems

The concept of resilience has evolved considerably since Holling’s (1973) seminal paper. Different interpretations of what is meant by resilience, however, cause confusion. Resilience of a system needs to be considered in terms of the attributes that govern the system’s dynamics. Three related attributes of social– ecological systems (SESs) determine their future trajectories: resilience, adaptability, and transformability. Resilience (the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks) has four components—latitude, resistance, precariousness, and panarchy—most readily portrayed using the metaphor of a stability landscape. Adaptability is the capacity of actors in the system to influence resilience (in a SES, essentially to manage it). There are four general ways in which this can be done, corresponding to the four aspects of resilience. Transformability is the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social structures make the existing system untenable. The implications of this interpretation of SES dynamics for sustainability science include changing the focus from seeking optimal states and the determinants of maximum sustainable yield (the MSY paradigm), to resilience analysis, adaptive resource management, and adaptive governance. INTRODUCTION An inherent difficulty in the application of these concepts is that, by their nature, they are rather imprecise. They fall into the same sort of category as “justice” or “wellbeing,” and it can be counterproductive to seek definitions that are too narrow. Because different groups adopt different interpretations to fit their understanding and purpose, however, there is confusion in their use. The confusion then extends to how a resilience approach (Holling 1973, Gunderson and Holling 2002) can contribute to the goals of sustainable development. In what follows, we provide an interpretation and an explanation of how these concepts are reflected in the adaptive cycles of complex, multi-scalar SESs. We need a better scientific basis for sustainable development than is generally applied (e.g., a new “sustainability science”). The “Consortium for Sustainable Development” (of the International Council for Science, the Initiative on Science and Technology for Sustainability, and the Third World Academy of Science), the US National Research Council (1999, 2002), and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2003), have all focused increasing attention on such notions as robustness, vulnerability, and risk. There is good reason for this, as it is these characteristics of social–ecological systems (SESs) that will determine their ability to adapt to and benefit from change. In particular, the stability dynamics of all linked systems of humans and nature emerge from three complementary attributes: resilience, adaptability, and transformability. The purpose of this paper is to examine these three attributes; what they mean, how they interact, and their implications for our future well-being. There is little fundamentally new theory in this paper. What is new is that it uses established theory of nonlinear stability (Levin 1999, Scheffer et al. 2001, Gunderson and Holling 2002, Berkes et al. 2003) to clarify, explain, and diagnose known examples of regional development, regional poverty, and regional CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems; University of Wisconsin-Madison; Arizona State University Ecology and Society 9(2): 5. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5 sustainability. These include, among others, the Everglades and the Wisconsin Northern Highlands Lake District in the USA, rangelands and an agricultural catchment in southeastern Australia, the semi-arid savanna in southeastern Zimbabwe, the Kristianstad “Water Kingdom” in southern Sweden, and the Mae Ping valley in northern Thailand. These regions provide examples of both successes and failures of development. Some from rich countries have generated several pulses of solutions over a span of a hundred years and have generated huge costs of recovery (the Everglades). Some from poor countries have emerged in a transformed way but then, in some cases, have been dragged back by higher-level autocratic regimes (Zimbabwe). Some began as localscale solutions and then developed as transformations across scales from local to regional (Kristianstad and northern Wisconsin). In all of them, the outcomes were determined by the interplay of their resilience, adaptability, and transformability. There is a major distinction between resilience and adaptability, on the one hand, and transformability on the other. Resilience and adaptability have to do with the dynamics of a particular system, or a closely related set of systems. Transformability refers to fundamentally altering the nature of a system. As with many terms under the resilience rubric, the dividing line between “closely related” and “fundamentally altered” can be fuzzy, and subject to interpretation. So we begin by first offering the most general, qualitative set of definitions, without reference to conceptual frameworks, that can be used to describe these terms. We then use some examples and the literature on “basins of attraction” and “stability landscapes” to further refine our definitions. Before giving the definitions, however, we need to briefly introduce the concept of adaptive cycles. Adaptive Cycles and Cross-scale Effects The dynamics of SESs can be usefully described and analyzed in terms of a cycle, known as an adaptive cycle, that passes through four phases. Two of them— a growth and exploitation phase (r) merging into a conservation phase (K)—comprise a slow, cumulative forward loop of the cycle, during which the dynamics of the system are reasonably predictable. As the K phase continues, resources become increasingly locked up and the system becomes progressively less flexible and responsive to external shocks. It is eventually, inevitably, followed by a chaotic collapse and release phase (Ω) that rapidly gives way to a phase of reorganization (α), which may be rapid or slow, and during which, innovation and new opportunities are possible. The Ω and α phases together comprise an unpredictable backloop. The α phase leads into a subsequent r phase, which may resemble the previous r phase or be significantly different. This metaphor of the adaptive cycle is based on observed system changes, and does not imply fixed, regular cycling. Systems can move back from K toward r, or from r directly into Ω, or back from α to Ω. Finally (and importantly), the cycles occur at a number of scales and SESs exist as “panarchies”— adaptive cycles interacting across multiple scales. These cross-scale effects are of great significance in the dynamics of SESs.

Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity

The most unique feature of Earth is the existence of life, and the most extraordinary feature of life is its diversity. Approximately 9 million types of plants, animals, protists and fungi inhabit the Earth. So, too, do 7 billion people. Two decades ago, at the first Earth Summit, the vast majority of the world’s nations declared that human actions were dismantling the Earth’s ecosystems, eliminating genes, species and biological traits at an alarming rate. This observation led to the question of how such loss of biological diversity will alter the functioning of ecosystems and their ability to provide society with the goods and services needed to prosper.

A Handful of Heuristics and Some Propositions for Understanding Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems

This paper is a work-in-progress account of ideas and propositions about resilience in socialecological systems. It articulates our understanding of how these complex systems change and what determines their ability to absorb disturbances in either their ecological or their social domains. We call them “propositions” because, although they are useful in helping us understand and compare different social-ecological systems, they are not sufficiently well defined to be considered formal hypotheses. These propositions were developed in two workshops, in 2003 and 2004, in which participants compared the dynamics of 15 case studies in a wide range of regions around the world. The propositions raise many questions, and we present a list of some that could help define the next phase of resilience-related research.

Plant attribute diversity, resilience, and ecosystem function : The nature and significance of dominant and minor species

ABSTRACT This study tested an hypothesis concerning patterns in species abundance in ecological communities. Why do the majority of species occur in low abundance, with just a few making up the bulk of the biomass? We propose that many of the minor species are analogues of the dominants in terms of the ecosystem functions they perform, but differ in terms of their capabilities to respond to environmental stresses and disturbance. They thereby confer resilience on the community with respect to ecosystem function. Under changing conditions, ecosystem function is maintained when dominants decline or are lost because functionally equivalent minor species are able to substitute for them. We have tested this hypothesis with respect to ecosystem functions relating to global change. In particular, we identified five plant functional attributes—height, biomass, specific leaf area, longevity, and leaf litter quality—that determine carbon and water fluxes. We assigned values for these functional attributes to each of the graminoid species in a lightly grazed site and in a heavily grazed site in an Australian rangeland. Our resilience proposition was cast in the form of three specific hypotheses in relation to expected similarities and dissimilarities between dominant and minor species, within and between sites. Functional similarity—or ecological distance—was determined as the euclidean distance between species in functional attribute space. The analyses provide evidence in support of the resilience hypothesis. Specifically, within the lightly grazed community, dominant species were functionally more dissimilar to one another, and functionally similar species more widely separated in abundance rank, than would be expected on the basis of average ecological distances in the community. Between communities, depending on the test used, two of three, or three of four minor species in the lightly grazed community that were predicted to increase in the heavily grazed community did in fact do so. Although there has been emphasis on the importance of functional diversity in supporting the flow of ecosystem goods and services, the evidence from this study indicates that functional similarity (between dominant and minor species, and among minor species) may be equally important in ensuring persistence (resilience) of ecosystem function under changing environmental conditions.

Socioeconomics drive urban plant diversity

Spatial variation in plant diversity has been attributed to heterogeneity in resource availability for many ecosystems. However, urbanization has resulted in entire landscapes that are now occupied by plant communities wholly created by humans, in which diversity may reflect social, economic, and cultural influences in addition to those recognized by traditional ecological theory. Here we use data from a probability-based survey to explore the variation in plant diversity across a large metropolitan area using spatial statistical analyses that incorporate biotic, abiotic, and human variables. Our prediction for the city was that land use, along with distance from urban center, would replace the dominantly geomorphic controls on spatial variation in plant diversity in the surrounding undeveloped Sonoran desert. However, in addition to elevation and current and former land use, family income and housing age best explained the observed variation in plant diversity across the city. We conclude that a functional relationship, which we term the “luxury effect,” may link human resource abundance (wealth) and plant diversity in urban ecosystems. This connection may be influenced by education, institutional control, and culture, and merits further study.

Resilience and Regime Shifts: Assessing Cascading Effects

Most accounts of thresholds between alternate regimes involve a single, dominant shift defined by one, often slowly changing variable in an ecosystem. This paper expands the focus to include similar dynamics in social and economic systems, in which multiple variables may act together in ways that produce interacting regime shifts in social-ecological systems. We use four different regions in the world, each of which contains multiple thresholds, to develop a proposed general model of threshold interactions in social-ecological systems. The model identifies patch-scale ecological thresholds, farm- or landscape-scale economic thresholds, and regional-scale sociocultural thresholds. Cascading thresholds, i.e., the tendency of the crossing of one threshold to induce the crossing of other thresholds, often lead to very resilient, although often less desirable, alternative states.

Global Warming and Soil Microclimate: Results from a Meadow-Warming Experiment

We used overhead infrared radiators to add a constant increment of -15 W/m2, over 2 yr, to the downward heat flux on five 30-M2 montane meadow plots in Gunnison County, Colorado, USA. Heating advanced snowmelt by -1 wk, increased summer soil temperatures by up to 3?C, and reduced summer soil moisture levels by up to 25% compared to control plots. Soil microclimate response to heating varied with season, time of day, weather conditions, and location along the microclimate and vegetation gradient within each plot, with the largest temperature increase observed in daytime and in the drier, more sparsely vegetated zone of each plot. Day-to-day variation in the daily-averaged temperature response to heating in the drier zone was negatively correlated with that in the wetter zone. Our experimental manipulation provides a novel and effective method for investigating feedback processes linking climate, soil, and vegetation.

Paying for ecosystem services - Promise and peril

Payment mechanisms designed without regard to the properties of the services they cover may be environmentally harmful. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment concluded that over the past 50 years, 60% of all ecosystem services (ES) had declined as a direct result of the growth of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, industries, and urban areas (1). This is not surprising: We get what we pay for. Markets exist for the products of agriculture, aquaculture, and forestry. But the benefits of watershed protection (2), habitat provision (3), pest and disease regulation (4), climatic regulation (5), and hazard protection (6) are largely unpriced. Because existing markets seldom reflect the full social cost of production, we have incorrect measures of the scarcity of some ES and no measures for the rest.

Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems Through Comparative Studies and Theory Development: Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue of Ecology and Society on exploring resilience in social-ecological systems draws together insights from comparisons of 15 case studies conducted during two Resilience Alliance workshops in 2003 and 2004. As such, it represents our current understanding of resilience theory and the issues encountered in our attempts to apply it.

Resilience of past landscapes: Resilience theory, society, and the Longue Durée

Resilience theory is an expanding body of ideas that attempts to provide explanations for the source and role of change in adaptive systems, particularly the kinds of change that are transforming. Scholars from various disciplines have contributed to the current state of this formulation. This article proposes that resilience theory would benefit from an increasing collaboration with archaeologists, who would provide a long-term perspective on adaptive cycles. Although archaeologists and anthropologists have written provocatively about studying the resilience of past and present societies, such an approach has not become common in these disciplines. We suggest, however, that a resilience framework offers a potential mechanism for reinvigorating the conceptual base of archaeological and anthropological disciplines. To make this case, we (1) highlight three features of resilience theory, including cross-scale interactions, information flow, and phases of the adaptive cycle; (2) examine the extent to which purely natural or social science analyses would give complementary or contradictory conclusions; and (3) discuss the implications of using a long-term integrative perspective for understanding linked social and ecological systems.