Jessica Blythe

Communities and change in the anthropocene: understanding social-ecological vulnerability and planning adaptations to multiple interacting exposures

Abstract The majority of vulnerability and adaptation scholarship, policies and programs focus exclusively on climate change or global environmental change. Yet, individuals, communities and sectors experience a broad array of multi-scalar and multi-temporal, social, political, economic and environmental changes to which they are vulnerable and must adapt. While extensive theoretical—and increasingly empirical—work suggests the need to explore multiple exposures, a clear conceptual framework which would facilitate analysis of vulnerability and adaptation to multiple interacting socioeconomic and biophysical changes is lacking. This review and synthesis paper aims to fill this gap through presenting a conceptual framework for integrating multiple exposures into vulnerability analysis and adaptation planning. To support applications of the framework and facilitate assessments and comparative analyses of community vulnerability, we develop a comprehensive typology of drivers and exposures experienced by coastal communities. Our results reveal essential elements of a pragmatic approach for local-scale vulnerability analysis and for planning appropriate adaptations within the context of multiple interacting exposures. We also identify methodologies for characterizing exposures and impacts, exploring interactions and identifying and prioritizing responses. This review focuses on coastal communities; however, we believe the framework, typology and approach will be useful for understanding vulnerability and planning adaptation to multiple exposures in various social-ecological contexts.

A Framework for Understanding Climate Change Impacts on Coral Reef Social-Ecological Systems

Abstract Corals and coral-associated species are highly vulnerable to the emerging effects of global climate change. The widespread degradation of coral reefs, which will be accelerated by climate change, jeopardizes the goods and services that tropical nations derive from reef ecosystems. However, climate change impacts to reef social–ecological systems can also be bi-directional. For example, some climate impacts, such as storms and sea level rise, can directly impact societies, with repercussions for how they interact with the environment. This study identifies the multiple impact pathways within coral reef social–ecological systems arising from four key climatic drivers: increased sea surface temperature, severe tropical storms, sea level rise and ocean acidification. We develop a novel framework for investigating climate change impacts in social–ecological systems, which helps to highlight the diverse impacts that must be considered in order to develop a more complete understanding of the impacts of climate change, as well as developing appropriate management actions to mitigate climate change impacts on coral reef and people.

Social-ecological analysis of integrated agriculture-aquaculture systems in Dedza, Malawi

Through the case of integrated agriculture-aquaculture in rural Malawi, this paper argues that hybrid research can reveal new interactions in social-ecological systems not evident when studies by social or natural methods independently. While recent research acknowledges the social and natural dimensions of aquaculture systems, studies often create an artificial divide by attempting to address each aspect in isolation. Social science research has overlooked the biophysical aspects of aquaculture, while scientific research has uncritically accepted orthodox explanations of environmental outcomes without addressing the social contexts of such systems. The social component of this research reveals that fish farmers in Malawi are rejecting practices which do not work in the local context (fertilization with pond mud) and adopting strategies that do work (irrigation with pond water). The physical component of this research compliments the social by elucidating that irrigation with pond water resulted in higher soil nutrient and moisture content. The paper concludes that small-scale aquaculture can make significant contributions to rural household food and income security in Africa and that hybrid research methods can improve our abilities to investigate the complex, connected nature of social-ecological systems.

Historical perspectives and recent trends in the coastal Mozambican fishery

Historical data describing changing social-ecological interactions in marine systems can help guide small-scale fisheries management efforts. Fisheries landings data are often the primary source for historical reconstructions of fisheries; however, we argue that reliance on data of a single type and/or from a single scale can lead to potentially misleading conclusions. For example, a narrow focus on aggregate landings statistics can mask processes and trends occurring at local scales, as well as the complex social changes that result from and precipitate marine ecosystem change. Moreover, in the case of many small- scale fisheries, landings statistics are often incomplete and/or inaccurate. We draw on case study research in Mozambique that combines national landings statistics and career history interviews with fish harvesters to generate a multi-scale historical reconstruction that describes social-ecological interactions within the coastal Mozambican fishery. At the national level, our analysis points toward trends of fishing intensification and decline in targeted species, and it highlights the significant impact of small-scale fisheries on marine stocks. At the local level, fishers are experiencing changes in fish abundance and distribution, as well as in their physical, social, and cultural environments, and have responded by increasing their fishing effort. We conclude with a discussion of the governance implications of our methodological approach and findings.

Redefining community based on place attachment in a connected world

Significance Effective environmental policy requires public participation in management, typically achieved through engaging community defined by residential location or resource use. However, current social and environmental change, particularly increasing connectedness, demands new approaches to community. We draw on place attachment theory to redefine community in the context of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Using a large dataset on place attachment, our analysis of local, national, and international stakeholders identified four communities differing in their attachment to the reef and spanning location and use communities. Our results suggest that place attachment can bridge geographic and social boundaries, and communities of attachment could thus be leveraged to foster transnational stewardship, which is crucial to addressing modern sustainability challenges in our globalized world. The concept of community is often used in environmental policy to foster environmental stewardship and public participation, crucial prerequisites of effective management. However, prevailing conceptualizations of community based on residential location or resource use are limited with respect to their utility as surrogates for communities of shared environment-related interests, and because of the localist perspective they entail. Thus, addressing contemporary sustainability challenges, which tend to involve transnational social and environmental interactions, urgently requires additional approaches to conceptualizing community that are compatible with current globalization. We propose a framing for redefining community based on place attachment (i.e., the bonds people form with places) in the context of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a World Heritage Area threatened by drivers requiring management and political action at scales beyond the local. Using data on place attachment from 5,403 respondents residing locally, nationally, and internationally, we identified four communities that each shared a type of attachment to the reef and that spanned conventional location and use communities. We suggest that as human–environment interactions change with increasing mobility (both corporeal and that mediated by communication and information technology), new types of people–place relations that transcend geographic and social boundaries and do not require ongoing direct experience to form are emerging. We propose that adopting a place attachment framing to community provides a means to capture the neglected nonmaterial bonds people form with the environment, and could be leveraged to foster transnational environmental stewardship, critical to advancing global sustainability in our increasingly connected world.

Vulnerability of coastal livelihoods to shrimp farming: Insights from Mozambique

AbstractMillions of people around the world depend on shrimp aquaculture for their livelihoods. Yet, the phenomenal growth of shrimp farming has often given rise to considerable environmental and social damage. This article examines the impacts of commercial, export-oriented shrimp aquaculture on local livelihood vulnerability by comparing the exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity of shrimp farm employees with non-farm employees in rural Mozambique. Exposure to stressors was similar between the two groups. Shrimp farm employees had higher assets and higher adaptive capacity than non-farm employees. However, because their income is heavily dependent on a single commodity, shrimp farm employees were highly susceptible to the boom crop nature of intensive shrimp farming. The implications for aquaculture policy and vulnerability research are discussed. The article argues that coastal vulnerability is dynamic, variable, and influenced by multiple processes operating at multiple scales.

Adaptive capacity: from assessment to action in coastal social-ecological systems

Because of the complexity and speed of environmental, climatic, and socio-political change in coastal marine social-ecological systems, there is significant academic and applied interest in assessing and fostering the adaptive capacity of coastal communities. Adaptive capacity refers to the latent ability of a system to respond proactively and positively to stressors or opportunities. A variety of qualitative, quantitative, and participatory approaches have been developed and applied to understand and assess adaptive capacity, each with different benefits, drawbacks, insights, and implications. Drawing on case studies of coastal communities from around the globe, we describe and compare 11 approaches that are often used to study adaptive capacity of social and ecological systems in the face of social, environmental, and climatic change. We synthesize lessons from a series of case studies to present important considerations to frame research and to choose an assessment approach, key challenges to analyze adaptive capacity in linked social-ecological systems, and good practices to link results to action to foster adaptive capacity. We suggest that more attention be given to integrated social-ecological assessments and that greater effort be placed on evaluation and monitoring of adaptive capacity over time and across scales. Overall, although sustainability science holds a promise of providing solutions to real world problems, we found that too few assessments seem to lead to tangible outcomes or actions to foster adaptive capacity in social-ecological systems.

Navigating the transformation to community-based resource management

Discourses of unprecedented and accelerated human impacts on the earth’s ecosystems underpin increasing scholarship on deliberate and desirable transformations towards sustainability (ISSC and UNESCO, 2013). While transformations in dynamic social-ecological systems are inherently difficult to define and identify, they broadly describe a profound change when existing systems become untenable; a change that recombines existing elements of social-ecological systems in fundamentally novel ways (Walker et al., 2004). Transformations in ecological systems can include changing stability landscapes or fundamental alterations in species composition and biomass (Biggs et al., 2009; McClanahan et al., 2011; Scheffer et al., 2012). In social systems, transformations can lead to restructuring of social institutions, changes in human agency, or new ways of making a living (Chapin et al., 2010). An emerging literature on transformational pathways aims to characterise transformative change and identify its key drivers (e.g. Biggs et al., 2010; Leach et al., 2012; Olsson et al., 2006; Westley et al., 2011). Understanding how to deliberately trigger and navigate such transformations is an important frontier of sustainability science (Brown et al., 2013). In this chapter, we use the case of community-based resource management (CBRM) in the Solomon Islands to contribute a critical social science perspective on navigating social transformations towards sustainability.