What factors determine the resilience of the full set of interacting ecosystem services that support human well-being and allow for adaptation to a changing environment?

This question requires interdisciplinary research among physical, biological and social sciences. It raises significant conceptual or theoretical issues, as well as significant needs for empirical research at global and regional scales. The question quickly gives rise to a host of important more specialized questions. Answers to this family of questions are relevant for applied questions of sustainability science.

Definitions: (1) Resilience is the capacity of a system to persist within thresholds or “guardrails”, adapt to changing circumstances, or transform to something new when the current mode of operation is unsustainable. (2) Ecosystem services are benefits that people receive from nature, such as provision of food and water, regulation of water flows and quality, and cultural values. They can be analyzed at the global scale or for specific landscapes and seascapes.

Challenges: A key challenge is that changes in ecosystem services generally have strong correlations. That is, changes that cause increases in one group of ecosystem services often cause decreases in another group of ecosystem services. These tradeoffs among bundles of ecosystem services are not well understood. In management, they lead to unintended adverse consequences. These consequences often take systems across thresholds, degrade resilience, and impair the capacity of the system to respond adaptively to future environmental changes. Thus understanding the tradeoffs has fundamental importance for sustainable management.

Obstacles: In order to address this question, new frameworks for interdisciplinary collaboration are needed. Also there are significant needs for conceptual development, theoretical research, monitoring at global and regional scales, and empirical research at global and regional scales.

2 comments

1. Kalense says:

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   I think that underlying this question is a good one, but I wish it were formultated differently.

   As it is, it simply does not fit with my observations of how ecosystems behave under stress. I cannot remember ever seen any evidence of thresholds (and certainly none for “guardrails”), and I honestly believe these concepts to be comforting, misleading, and dangerous.

   Ecosystems are stable in the sense that when under pressure they stay sufficiently within our definitions (e.g. “semi-arid savannah dominated by perennial grasses”) for us not to have to redefine them. But the pressure causes change, and in the end, we find we have to change our description (”…annual grasses”) not because there has been an abrupt change, but because our human-defined line in the sand has been crossed as the system slowly moves along its trajectory – possibly one arm of an invisible hysterisis loop – towards something else (”arid dunefields”).

   The resilience, it seems to me, more often lies in the elasticity and breadth of our definitions than in the ecosystems themselves.
2. sue.mainka@iucn.org says:

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   I agree this is a critical question and it also gets to the issue of how biodiversity components contribute to delivery of services – something that has yet to be clearly articulated. By measuring species or genes or ecosystems, do we have a proxy for services or vice versa?