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A RESILIENCE APPROACH TO RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND GOVERNANCE. Brian Walker. Why is it, that despite the best of intentions.…. Western Australian wheatbelt. rangelands in Australia. alternate states in N. Hemisphere lakes.
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A RESILIENCE APPROACH TO RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND GOVERNANCE Brian Walker
Proposition 1 – there are two paradigms for managing natural resource systems: • MSY (maximum sustainable yield, in one form or another) • - Resilience management and governance
Problem assumptions with MSY • extreme events can be ignored • problems from different sectors don’t interact (but partial solutions don’t work) • change will be incremental and linear (in fact, it’s mostly lurching and non-linear) • keeping the system in some optimal state will deliver maximum benefits. (There is no sustainable “optimal” state of an ecosystem, a social system, or the world. It is an unattainable goal.)
Key assumptions underlying Resilience Management and Governance: - SESs have non-linear dynamics and can exist in alternate stability domains (regimes) - They go through different phases of organisation and behaviour
Proposition 2- Sustainable use and development rests on three capacities of social-ecological systems: - resilience - adaptability - transformability
Resilience “The capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and re-organise so as to retain essentially the same function, structure and feedbacks – to have the same identity” (remain in the same system regime)
Adaptability The capacity of actors in the system (people, in SESs) to manage resilience : (i) change the positions of thresholds between alternate regimes (ii) control the trajectory of the system – avoid crossing a threshold (or engineer such a crossing)
Transformability The capacity to become a fundamentally different system when ecological, social and/or economic conditions make the existing system untenable.
resilience places an emphasis on thresholds between alternate regimes of a system
∆Pw = 0 (courtesy Steve Carpenter)
The net effect of increasing level of grazing on rangeland composition Feedback change: effect of grass biomass (grazing effects) on the intensity of fire
Feedback changes involved in regime shifts controlling variableassociated feedback changes Rainfall – evapotranspiration; leaching; water table level Temperature – soil moisture (E/T); germination (microclimate); symbiosis (coral bleaching) Nutrients – O2 in water (decomposition); competition (plant species) Acidification - calcification (diatoms) Vegetation - water interception (cloud forests); infiltration rates; water tables; nutrients (legumes); soil temp (insulation) Landscape cover - immigration/emigration rates; reproduction; survival Herbivory - regeneration; competition; fire (fuel) Harvesting - recruitment (depensation); E/T (forests) Frequency - seed bank viability; regeneration time (fires, fallows) Predation - recovery (depensation); herbivore behaviour (spiders, wolves) The economy - income:cost ratios; debt:income ratios (markets) Social preference - subsidies / taxes (through change in government)
Feedback changes involved in regime shifts controlling variableassociated feedback changes Rainfall – evapotranspiration; leaching; water table level Temperature – soil moisture (E/T); germination (microclimate); symbiosis (coral bleaching) Nutrients – O2 in water (decomposition); competition (plant species) Acidification - calcification (diatoms) Vegetation - water interception (cloud forests); infiltration rates; water tables; nutrients (legumes); soil temp (insulation) Landscape cover - immigration/emigration rates; reproduction; survival Herbivory - regeneration; competition; fire (fuel) Harvesting - recruitment (depensation); E/T (forests) Frequency - seed bank viability; regeneration time (fires, fallows) Predation - recovery (depensation); herbivore behaviour(spiders,wolves) The economy - income:cost ratios; debt:income ratios (markets) Social preference - subsidies / taxes (through change in government)
What determines resilience? • Diversity • Modularity (connectedness) • Tightness of feedbacks • Openness – immigration, inflows, outflows • Reserves and other reservoirs (seedbanks, nutrient pools, memory) • Overlapping institutions • Polycentric governance
Rangeland in eastern Australia - lightly grazed photo by Jill Landsberg
abundance of grass species in lightly grazed rangeland Relative abundance (%)
Plant attributes determining ecosystem production (available data) • height • mature plant biomass • specific leaf area • longevity • leaf litter quality
Heavily grazed site, close to water - 4 of the dominant species gone - 3 replaced by functional analogues Without the response diversity (the existence of the functional analogues), a regime shift would occur – different controls and processes
- Ecosystem performance is promoted by high functional diversity (complementarity) • Resilience is promoted by high response diversity (in rainforests, coral reefs, lakes, rangelands) • ( cf Elmqvist etal; Response diversity, ecosystem change and resilience. Frontiers in Ecology and Environment)
SYSTEM “REGIMES” VS OPTIMAL STATES ) ( Supply of ecosystem services as a function of ecosystem state B - lake services (fish, recreation) as a function of phosphate in mud A - rangeland services (wool production from grazing) as a function of shrubs Vc - critical threshold demarcating a shift from one attractor to another.
N Goulburn Broken Catchment – Victoria, Australia
% veg cleared in lower catchment Simulated clearing history equilibrium water table stable at surface equilibrium water table stable & at surface equilibrium water table stable & below surface % veg cleared in upper catchment
SYSTEM “REGIMES” VS OPTIMAL STATES ) ( Supply of ecosystem services as a function of ecosystem state B - lake services (fish, recreation) as a function of phosphate in mud A - rangeland services (wool production from grazing) as a function of shrubs Vc - critical threshold demarcating a shift from one attractor to another.
N Goulburn Broken Catchment - Victoria
Can revegetation happen fast enough to avoid equilibrium? Is it worth trying? Should they transform to some other kind of SES, to a different way of making a living?
Sacred forest approx. 150 ha surrounded by agricultural land (mainly beans and some maize)
Multiple, interacting thresholds (Causse Mejan in France, a catchment in SE Australia, southern Madagascar, Western Australia wheatbelt) Kinzig et al (2006, in press) Special Issue of Ecology & Society
the “HOT” model (J. Doyle, SFI) general vs. specified resilience resilience of what, to what?
There is a cost to resilience short term cost of foregone extra ‘yield’ vs. cost of being in an alternate regime (cost x prob. of a regime shift) cost of maintaining resilience (relatively easy to estimate) vs. cost of not maintaining it (difficult to estimate)
Managing resilience - what determines Adaptability? – social capacity (capital) leadership trust • - human capital (skills, education, health) • - financial resources • natural capital • ongoing learning • ?
What determines Transformability? still learning – but seem to be three classes: - preparedness to change (understanding, ‘mental models’, vested interests in not changing) - capacity to change (leadership, knowledge, capitals, higher level support) - options for change (diversity, knowledge of thresholds, experiments, markets,)
Managing resilience, and/or achieving a transformation, requires knowing where, how and when to intervene Where - knowledge of potential and actual regime shifts in the system How - knowledge of the resilience and transformability attributes When - dictated by i) external events (crises and windows of opportunity) and ii) the phases of the system’s dynamics at various scales
K: conservation things change slowly; resources ‘locked up’ r: growth / exploitation resources readily available K r Ω a a: re-organization/renewal system boundaries tenuous; innovations are possible W: release things change very rapidly; ‘locked up’ resources suddenly released
K r Ω a