Gary P. Kofinas

Ecosystem Stewardship: Sustainability Strategies for a Rapidly Changing Planet

Ecosystem stewardship is an action-oriented framework intended to foster the social-ecological sustainability of a rapidly changing planet. Recent developments identify three strategies that make optimal use of current understanding in an environment of inevitable uncertainty and abrupt change: reducing the magnitude of, and exposure and sensitivity to, known stresses; focusing on proactive policies that shape change; and avoiding or escaping unsustainable social-ecological traps. As we discuss here, all social-ecological systems are vulnerable to recent and projected changes but have sources of adaptive capacity and resilience that can sustain ecosystem services and human well-being through active ecosystem stewardship.

An integrated conceptual framework for long-term social-ecological research

The global reach of human activities affects all natural ecosystems, so that the environment is best viewed as a social–ecological system. Consequently, a more integrative approach to environmental science, one that bridges the biophysical and social domains, is sorely needed. Although models and frameworks for social–ecological systems exist, few are explicitly designed to guide a long-term interdisciplinary research program. Here, we present an iterative framework, “Press–Pulse Dynamics” (PPD), that integrates the biophysical and social sciences through an understanding of how human behaviors affect “press” and “pulse” dynamics and ecosystem processes. Such dynamics and processes, in turn, influence ecosystem services –thereby altering human behaviors and initiating feedbacks that impact the original dynamics and processes. We believe that research guided by the PPD framework will lead to a more thorough understanding of social–ecological systems and generate the knowledge needed to address pervasive environmental problems.

Policy strategies to address sustainability of Alaskan boreal forests in response to a directionally changing climate.

Human activities are altering many factors that determine the fundamental properties of ecological and social systems. Is sustainability a realistic goal in a world in which many key process controls are directionally changing? To address this issue, we integrate several disparate sources of theory to address sustainability in directionally changing social–ecological systems, apply this framework to climate-warming impacts in Interior Alaska, and describe a suite of policy strategies that emerge from these analyses. Climate warming in Interior Alaska has profoundly affected factors that influence landscape processes (climate regulation and disturbance spread) and natural hazards, but has only indirectly influenced ecosystem goods such as food, water, and wood that receive most management attention. Warming has reduced cultural services provided by ecosystems, leading to some of the few institutional responses that directly address the causes of climate warming, e.g., indigenous initiatives to the Arctic Council. Four broad policy strategies emerge: (i) enhancing human adaptability through learning and innovation in the context of changes occurring at multiple scales; (ii) increasing resilience by strengthening negative (stabilizing) feedbacks that buffer the system from change and increasing options for adaptation through biological, cultural, and economic diversity; (iii) reducing vulnerability by strengthening institutions that link the high-latitude impacts of climate warming to their low-latitude causes; and (iv) facilitating transformation to new, potentially more beneficial states by taking advantage of opportunities created by crisis. Each strategy provides societal benefits, and we suggest that all of them be pursued simultaneously.

A Framework for Understanding Change

The world is undergoing unprecedented changes in many of the factors that determine both its fundamental properties and their influence on society. Throughout human history, people have interacted with and shaped ecosystems for social and economic development (Turner et al. 1990, Redman 1999, Jackson 2001, Diamond 2005). During the last 50 years, however, human activities have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than at any comparable period of human history (Steffen et al. 2004, Foley et al. 2005, MEA 2005d; Plate 1).

Resilience of Alaska's Boreal Forest to Climatic Change

This paper assesses the resilience of Alaska’s boreal forest system to rapid climatic change. Recent warming is associated with reduced growth of dominant tree species, plant disease and insect outbreaks, warming and thawing of permafrost, drying of lakes, increased wildfire extent, increased postfire recruitment of deciduous trees, and reduced safety of hunters traveling on river ice. These changes have modified key structural features, feedbacks, and interactions in the boreal forest, including reduced effects of upland permafrost on regional hydrology, expansion of boreal forest into tundra, and amplification of climate warming because of reduced albedo (shorter winter season) and carbon release from wildfires. Other temperature-sensitive processes for which no trends have been detected include composition of plant and microbial communities, long-term landscape-scale change in carbon stocks, stream discharge, mammalian population dynamics, and river access and subsistence opportunities for rural indige...

Ten Heuristics for Interdisciplinary Modeling Projects

Complex environmental and ecological problems require collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts. A common approach to integrating disciplinary perspectives on these problems is to develop simulation models in which the linkages between system components are explicitly represented. There is, however, little guidance in the literature on how such models should be developed through collaborative teamwork. In this paper, we offer a set of heuristics (rules of thumb) that address a range of challenges associated with this enterprise, including the selection of team members, negotiating a consensus view of the research problem, prototyping and refining models, the role of sensitivity analysis, and the importance of team communication. These heuristics arose from a comparison of our experiences with several interdisciplinary modeling projects. We use one such experience—a project in which natural scientists, social scientists, and local residents came together to investigate the sustainability of small indigenous communities in the Arctic—to illustrate the heuristics.

Adaptive Co-management in Social-Ecological Governance

Directional changes in factors that control social-ecological systems require a flexible approach to social-ecological governance that promotes collaboration among stakeholders at various scales and facilitates social learning. Previous chapters showed that environmental and social changes are rapidly degrading many ecosystem services on which human livelihoods depend. However, simply knowing that degradation is occurring seldom leads to solutions. People have tremendous capacity to modify their environment by changing the rules that shape human behavior, yet much of the conventional thinking on resource management offers limited insights into how to steward sustainability in conditions of rapid change. Consequently, there is a critical need to understand the role of people and their social institutions as mechanisms for negotiating social-ecological change. Designing and implementing appropriate resource management in conditions of change requires an understanding of both the processes by which groups make decisions and the mechanisms by which these decision-making processes adjust to change. It also requires moving beyond notions of resource management as control of resources and people, toward an approach of adaptive social-ecological governance.

Modeling sustainability of Arctic communities: an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers and local knowledge holders.

How will climate change affect the sustainability of Arctic villages over the next 40 years? This question motivated a collaboration of 23 researchers and four Arctic communities (Old Crow, Yukon Territory, Canada; Aklavik, Northwest Territories, Canada; Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, Canada; and Arctic Village, Alaska, USA) in or near the range of the Porcupine Caribou Herd. We drew on existing research and local knowledge to examine potential effects of climate change, petroleum development, tourism, and government spending cutbacks on the sustainability of four Arctic villages. We used data across eight disciplines to develop an Arctic Community Synthesis Model and a Web-based, interactive Possible Futures Model. Results suggested that climate warming will increase vegetation biomass within the herd’s summer range. However, despite forage increasing, the herd was projected as likely to decline with a warming climate because of increased insect harassment in the summer and potentially greater winter snow depths. There was a strong negative correlation between hypothetical, development-induced displacement of cows and calves from utilized calving grounds and calf survival during June. The results suggested that climate warming coupled with petroleum development would cause a decline in caribou harvest by local communities. Because the Synthesis Model inherits uncertainties associated with each component model, sensitivity analysis is required. Scientists and stakeholders agreed that (1) although simulation models are incomplete abstractions of the real world, they helped bring scientific and community knowledge together, and (2) relationships established across disciplines and between scientists and communities were a valuable outcome of the study. Additional project materials, including the Web-based Possible Futures Model, are available at http://www.taiga.net/sustain.

Directional Changes in Ecological Communities and Social‐Ecological Systems: A Framework for Prediction Based on Alaskan Examples

In this article we extend the theory of community prediction by presenting seven hypotheses for predicting community structure in a directionally changing world. The first three address well‐studied community responses to environmental and ecological change: ecological communities are most likely to exhibit threshold changes in structure when perturbations cause large changes in limiting soil or sediment resources, dominant or keystone species, or attributes of disturbance regime that influence community recruitment. Four additional hypotheses address social‐ecological interactions and apply to both ecological communities and social‐ecological systems. Human responsiveness to short‐term and local costs and benefits often leads to human actions with unintended long‐term impacts, particularly those that are far from the site of decision making or are geographically dispersed. Policies are usually based on past conditions of ecosystem services rather than expected future trends. Finally, institutions that strengthen negative feedbacks between human actions and social‐ecological consequences can reduce human impacts through more responsive (and thus more effective) management of public ecosystem services. Because of the large role that humans play in modifying ecosystems and ecosystem services, it is particularly important to test and improve social‐ecological hypotheses as a basis for shaping appropriate policies for long‐term ecosystem resilience.

Sustaining Livelihoods and Human Well-Being during Social-Ecological Change

Social processes strongly influence the dynamics of social-ecological responses to change. In Chapter 2, we described the ecological processes that govern the flow of ecosystem goods and services to society. Sustainability of these flows depends not only on ecosystems, but also on human actions that are motivated, in part, by desires and needs for these services. Many of the social and ecological slow variables that determine the long-term dynamics of social-ecological systems act primarily through their effects on human well-being (see Chapter 1).