How can we identify and manage looming thresholds in social-ecological systems arising from resilience – development trade-offs, especially those across scales?

Rising human numbers and increasing use of natural resources are lowering resilience in most regions of the world. Some of the changes will result in irreversible, or very hard to reverse, regime shifts in the coupled social-ecological systems concerned. They are already happening (salinized agricultural regions, desertified rangelands, collapsed fisheries, degraded ex-forest areas, etc.). We need to know how to identify such threshold effects before they happen, and how to manage them.

Comments are closed.