Download or read book Decoupled Social Ecological Systems written by Margaret Mwangi, PH D and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In "Decoupled Social-Ecological Systems: Eroded Sustainability in Africa, Drought Vulnerability of Kenya's Maasai," Dr. Margaret Mwangi explores drought impacts and responses in strongly coupled social-ecological systems across Africa. The book highlights the three extant schools of thought vis-à-vis understanding and managing the phenomenon called drought. Drought vulnerability of the Maasai is revealed as primarily occasioned by persistent decoupling of their strongly coupled social-ecological livelihood production systems. The explication presented in this book reveals drought vulnerability and erosion of sustainability of Maasai-pastoralism, and indeed similar strongly social-ecological systems across Africa, is contextual, variable, and linkable to that decoupling: current drought event serves to unveil existing, even constructed, vulnerabilities. Apropos this last point, Maasais have had to constantly negotiate the ever-evolving cross-scale social, political, and economic terrains: which negotiation influences the way these pastoralists experience drought. Thus it should be clear: unless there is a change in policies and practices, with focus on adaptive interventions, there is a risk in Maasai's livelihoods in the future of shifts in climate and/or socioeconomic landscapes. The adoption of integrated management of drought, simultaneously as multidimensional phenomenon and as a hazard-risk-as understood from the detailed third school of thought vis-à-vis understanding and managing drought-, as recommended in this book, avails plausible informed cross-scale participatory and adaptive interventions. Suffice that, integrated efforts toward multidimensional drought-hazard/risk interventions are more apt to enhance drought-resilience, and plausibly disrupt the generation of drought-disasters.

Download or read book Decoupled Social Ecological Systems Eroded Sustainability in Africa written by Margaret Mwangi, and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In "Decoupled Social-Ecological Systems: Eroded Sustainability in Africa, Drought Vulnerability of Kenya's Maasai," Dr. Margaret Mwangi explores drought impacts and responses in coupled social-ecological systems across Africa. The book highlights the three extant schools of thought vis-à-vis understanding and managing the phenomenon called drought. Drought vulnerability of the Maasai is revealed as primarily occasioned by persistent decoupling of their strongly coupled social-ecological livelihood production systems. Drought vulnerability and erosion of sustainability of Maasai-pastoralism, and indeed similar livelihoods, is contextual, variable, and linkable to that decoupling: current drought event serves to unveil existing, even constructed, vulnerabilities. Maasais have had to constantly negotiate the ever-evolving cross-scale social, political, and economic terrains: which negotiation influences the way these pastoralists experience drought. Unless there is a change in policies and practices, with focus on adaptive interventions, there is a risk in Maasai's livelihoods in the future of shifts in climate and/or socioeconomic landscapes. Thus it should be clear: the adoption of integrated management of drought, simultaneously as multidimensional phenomenon and as a hazard-risk--as understood from the detailed third school of thought vis-à-vis understanding and managing drought--, avails plausible informed cross-scale participatory and adaptive interventions. Integrated efforts toward multidimensional drought-hazard/risk interventions are more apt to enhance drought-resilience, and plausibly disrupt the generation of drought-disasters.

Download or read book Social Ecology State of the Art and Future Prospects written by Johanna Kramm and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2018-07-06 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Social Ecology. State of the Art and Future Prospects" that was published in Sustainability

Download or read book Methodological Advances for Understanding Social Connectivity and Environmental Implications in Multi use Landscapes written by Matthew Clark and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Integrated social-ecological systems research is challenging; complicated feedback and interactions across scales in multi-use landscapes are difficult to decouple. Novel methods and innovative data sources are needed to advance social-ecological systems research. In this thesis, we use network science as a means of explicitly assessing feedback between social and ecological systems, and internet search data to better predict visitation in protected areas. This thesis seeks to provide empirical examples of emerging social-ecological systems science methods as a precedent for resource managers on-the-ground, as well as extending the line of scientific inquiry on the subject In the first chapter of this thesis, we used an online survey to gather information on the collaborative network and current projects of 169 wetland management organizations in the state of Montana. We used this information along with geographic analyses to delineate the flow of information between managers and ecological connectivity of projects, characterizing the social-ecological network of wetlands and wetland management within the state. We demonstrate that just 2 key organizations facilitate landscape scale information sharing, while most stakeholders collaborate on the basis of project difficulty and proximity For the second part of this thesis, we apply novel data to a classic natural resource management problem. In recent years, visitation to U.S. National Parks has been increasing, with the majority of this increase occurring in a subset of parks. Improved visitation forecasting would allow park managers to more proactively plan for such increases and subsequent visitor-related challenges. In this study, we leverage internet search data that is freely available through Google Trends to create a forecasting model. We compare this Google Trends model to a traditional autoregressive forecasting model. Overall, our Google Trends model accurately predicted 97% of the total visitation variation to all parks one year in advance from 2013-2017 and outperformed the autoregressive model by all metrics. While our Google Trends model performs better overall, this was not the case for each park unit individually; the accuracy of this model varied significantly from park to park. This project applies a contemporary social science data set to a traditional natural resource management problem, demonstrating the potential for social-ecological systems research to provide real-world solutions in mult-iuse landscapes. Both chapters of this thesis explicitly address feedbacks between social and ecological systems, a key advance for social-ecological systems science."--Boise State University ScholarWorks.

Download or read book Theorizing the Social Structural Foundations of Adaptation and Transformation in Social Ecological Systems written by Michele Barnes and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social networks are frequently cited as vital for facilitating successful adaptation and transformation in linked social-ecological systems to overcome pressing resource management challenges. Yet confusion remains over the precise nature of adaptation versus transformation, and the specific social network structures that facilitate these processes. Here we adopt a network perspective to theorize a continuum of structural capacities in social-ecological systems that set the stage for effective adaptation and transformation. We begin by drawing on the resilience literature and the multilayered action situation to link processes of change in social-ecological systems to decision making across multiple layers of rules underpinning societal organization. We then present a framework that hypotheses seven specific social-ecological network configurations that lay the structural foundation necessary for facilitating adaptation and transformation, given the type and magnitude of human action required. A key contribution of the framework is explicit consideration of how social networks relate to ecological structures and the particular environmental problem at hand. Of the seven configurations identified, three are linked to capacities conducive for adaptation and three to transformation, while one is hypothesized to be important for facilitating both processes. We discuss how our theoretical framework can be applied in practice by highlighting existing empirical examples from related environmental governance contexts. Further extension of our hypotheses, particularly as more data become available, can ultimately help guide the design of institutional arrangements more effective at dealing with change.

Download or read book Harnessing the Collective Intelligence of Stakeholders to Understand Social ecological Systems written by Payam Aminpour Mohammadabadi and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collective Intelligence (CI) is an amplified, meta-intelligence that emerges when a distributed collective of individuals aggregate their inputs in order to solve a problem, often with the help of communication or knowledge pooling. Importantly, CI outcomes (e.g., solutions, decisions, judgments, wisdom and knowledge) are generally more problem-adequate and therefore seem more "intelligent" than the contribution of any solitary member. CI in human societies can therefore solve key and pressing problems that no individual can resolve alone. Importantly, with recent advances in digital technologies, we now have more potential to harness the full power of human collectives to better address fast-evolving, complex problems facing human societies, many of which are complex issues that are resulted from the interactions between humans and natural ecosystems. Problems like anthropogenic environmental changes, biodiversity loss, and overconsumption of natural resources, which often take place in so called social-ecological systems (SESs), requires adequate knowledge and complete understandings about complex relationships between intertwined social and environmental dimensions. Such understanding is difficult to achieve in many contexts due to data scarcity and knowledge limitations. This dissertation explores the potentials of using CI approaches to leverage the local knowledge of environmental and natural resources stakeholders to better understand SESs, develop adequate knowledge of complex human-environment interactions, and inform sustainability decisions.First, this dissertation synthetizes key insights from biological, cognitive, behavioral, and management sciences literature to develop a framework that guides the design and generation of CI in human groups. This framework organizes fundamental design elements of CI and thus can help researchers, communities, and policymakers, especially in data-poor situations, design crowd-based approaches to aggregating knowledge of local people and stakeholders in order to achieve accurate and reliable understandings of complex human-environment interactions. Additionally, this dissertation empirically tests CI approaches using three real-world fisheries case studies. The first empirical study uses an example of inland freshwater pike fisheries to explore how CI of local stakeholders can be harnessed through aggregation of their mental models about human-environment interactions. This study shows that the aggregated model can provide scientifically sound insights about how the ecosystem and humans are coupled, and how their interactions are influenced by various management strategies. The second empirical study uses an example of striped bass fisheries in Massachusetts, to explore the impact of knowledge diversity on the CI of local stakeholders while pooling their local knowledge about the complex human-environment interactions. The final study uses an example of U.S. Atlantic coasts to scale up these CI approaches by crowdsourcing inputs from a very large population of local fishing communities to predict people's perception of, and behavioral responses to climate change impacts on ocean fisheries across a large social and ecological gradient. This study demonstrates perfect match among stakeholder-driven perceptions, their mental models' predictions of behavioral changes, and empirical patterns of climate change disturbances.In conclusion, this work demonstrates that CI approaches to utilizing stakeholders' local knowledge for understanding the complexity of SESs have considerable implications for dealing with scientific and management uncertainties, while many untapped potentials still remain.

Download or read book Where We Used to Plough written by Christiane Naumann and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2017 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a historically and ethnographically informed case study of environmental governance, institutional and land-use change, and livelihood strategies in a former homeland in the South African Free State province. Based on rich archival material, the author reconstructs how the state invented a degradation narrative and used it as legitimation for the regulation of human-environment relations during the twentieth century. In addition, the study investigates how people today make a living in a post-agrarian society characterized by low agricultural production, diversification of non-farm incomes, and declining population numbers, declining population numbers. Author Christiane Naumann is a lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne.

Download or read book Ecological Limits of Development written by Kaitlin Kish and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Embracing the reality of biophysical limits to growth, this volume uses the technical tools from ecological economics to re-cast the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as Ecological Livelihood Goals - policy agendas and trajectories that seek to reconcile the social and spatial mobility and liberty of individuals, with both material security and ecological integrity. Since the 1970s, mainstream approaches to sustainable development have sought to reconcile ecological constraints with modernization through much vaunted and seldom demonstrated strategies of 'decoupling' and 'dematerialization.' In this context, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have become the orchestrating drivers of sustainability governance. However, biophysical limits are not so easily side-stepped. Building on an ecological-economic critique of mainstream economics, and a historical-sociological understanding of state-formation, this book explores the implications of ecological limits for modern progressive politics. Each chapter outlines leverage points for municipal engagement in local and regional contexts. Systems theory and community development perspectives are used to explore under-appreciated avenues for the kind of social and cultural change that would be necessary for any accommodation between modernity and ecological limits. Drawing on ideas from H.T Odum, Herman Daly, Zigmunt Bauman, and many others, this book provides guiding research for a convergence between North and South that is bottom up, household-centred, and predicated on a re-emerging domain of Livelihood. In each chapter, the authors provide recommendations for reconfiguring the UN's SDGs as Ecological Livelihood Goals - a framework for sustainable development in an era of limits. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecological economics, socio-ecological systems, political economy, international and community development, global governance, and sustainable development"--

Download or read book A Critical Systems Approach to Socio Ecological Systems written by Daniel Dennis Patrick McCarthy and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation builds on work that has applied complex systems thinking to socio-ecological systems as well as on research that explores critical and reflective approaches to planning. A broad, interdisciplinary literature review was undertaken to explore the implications of complex and critical systems thinking and critical social epistemology for environmental management, planning and policy research, governance and social learning. Building on the insights from this review, one of the key contributions of this research is a conceptual framework that explicitly integrates knowledge and learning into an understanding of socio-ecological systems. It is argued that in the highly complex and uncertain realm of environmental policy, planning and governance, we should begin to discuss such systems as socio-ecological-epistemological (SEE) systems. This research addresses the complexity, uncertainty, high decision stakes, power relations and plurality of knowledges involved in the process of social learning in environmental planning and governance. The SEE systems conceptual framework for research and intervention was developed in the form of descriptive (Co-Evolution, Reflexive Uncertainty, Cross-scalar Considerations) and prescriptive (Critical Awareness, Pluralism, Power) principles. Based upon these principles, a critical systems-based approach to planning and policy research was developed and applied to two case studies of innovative, integrated environmental planning and governance: the Oak Ridges Moraine and the Long Point World Biosphere Reserve. A conceptual model for describing and refining the contributions of environmental movement organizations to social learning in the context of environmental governance emerged. The model describes the requirements of social learning as defined along three axes: typology of knowledge; levels of critical reflection; and, a scale axis from individual agent to larger social structures (institutions). Through this work, it is evident that insights from complex and critical systems understanding have influenced thinking in environmental management, planning, governance and social learning. Through the exploratory application of the SEE systems approach to complex environmental planning and governance systems, the SEE systems principles appear to resonate strongly with the experience of environmental movement organizations. In particular, three key findings emerged from the two exploratory, empirical case studies. First, interviewees and workshop attendees in both case study contexts described the importance of various types of knowledge, especially scientific, local technical and governance knowledge in initiating policy change. Second, research participants stressed the importance of understanding the cross-scalar dynamics that affect their ability to influence policy as well as the need to develop policy and governance structures appropriate to the scale of the issue of interest. And finally, the need for individual as well as organizational critical reflection upon policy tools and implementation, policy goals as well as the power differentials embodied in certain policy and governance structures was also highlighted in the qualitative, empirical data generated through interviews and workshops. This research reaffirms the importance of the collaboration and the collective contribution of academic researchers, civil servants and volunteer members of environmental movement organizations to fostering social learning for sustainability in the context of complex SEE systems.

Download or read book Hybrid Solutions for the Modelling of Complex Environmental Systems written by Christian E. Vincenot and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2017-01-11 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Systems studied in environmental science, due to their structure and the heterogeneity of the entities composing them, often exhibit complex dynamics that can only be captured by hybrid modeling approaches. While several concurrent definitions of “hybrid modeling” can be found in the literature, it is defined here broadly as the approach consisting in coupling existing modelling paradigms to achieve a more accurate or efficient representation of systems. The need for hybrid models generally arises from the necessity to overcome the limitation of a single modeling technique in terms of structural flexibility, capabilities, or computational efficiency. This book brings together experts in the field of hybrid modelling to demonstrate how this approach can address the challenge of representing the complexity of natural systems. Chapters cover applied examples as well as modeling methodology.

Download or read book Issues in Ecological Research and Application 2013 Edition written by and published by ScholarlyEditions. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 1122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Issues in Ecological Research and Application: 2013 Edition is a ScholarlyEditions™ book that delivers timely, authoritative, and comprehensive information about Molecular Ecology. The editors have built Issues in Ecological Research and Application: 2013 Edition on the vast information databases of ScholarlyNews.™ You can expect the information about Molecular Ecology in this book to be deeper than what you can access anywhere else, as well as consistently reliable, authoritative, informed, and relevant. The content of Issues in Ecological Research and Application: 2013 Edition has been produced by the world’s leading scientists, engineers, analysts, research institutions, and companies. All of the content is from peer-reviewed sources, and all of it is written, assembled, and edited by the editors at ScholarlyEditions™ and available exclusively from us. You now have a source you can cite with authority, confidence, and credibility. More information is available at http://www.ScholarlyEditions.com/.

Download or read book Rangeland Systems written by David D. Briske and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-12 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license. This book provides an unprecedented synthesis of the current status of scientific and management knowledge regarding global rangelands and the major challenges that confront them. It has been organized around three major themes. The first summarizes the conceptual advances that have occurred in the rangeland profession. The second addresses the implications of these conceptual advances to management and policy. The third assesses several major challenges confronting global rangelands in the 21st century. This book will compliment applied range management textbooks by describing the conceptual foundation on which the rangeland profession is based. It has been written to be accessible to a broad audience, including ecosystem managers, educators, students and policy makers. The content is founded on the collective experience, knowledge and commitment of 80 authors who have worked in rangelands throughout the world. Their collective contributions indicate that a more comprehensive framework is necessary to address the complex challenges confronting global rangelands. Rangelands represent adaptive social-ecological systems, in which societal values, organizations and capacities are of equal importance to, and interact with, those of ecological processes. A more comprehensive framework for rangeland systems may enable management agencies, and educational, research and policy making organizations to more effectively assess complex problems and develop appropriate solutions.

Download or read book Adaptive Management of Social Ecological Systems written by Craig R. Allen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-04-25 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adaptive management is an approach to managing social-ecological systems that fosters learning about the systems being managed and remains at the forefront of environmental management nearly 40 years after its original conception. Adaptive management persists because it allows action despite uncertainty, and uncertainty is reduced when learning occurs during the management process. Often termed “learning by doing”, the allure of this management approach has entrenched the concept widely in agency direction and statutory mandates across the globe. This exceptional volume is a collection of essays on the past, present and future of adaptive management written by prominent authors with long experience in developing, implementing, and assessing adaptive management. Moving forward, the book provides policymakers, managers and scientists a powerful tool for managing for resilience in the face of uncertainty.

Download or read book Navigating Social Ecological Systems written by Fikret Berkes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-24 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the effort towards sustainability, it has become increasingly important to develop conceptual frames to understand the dynamics of social and ecological systems. Drawing on complex systems theory, this book investigates how human societies deal with change in linked social-ecological systems, and build capacity to adapt to change. The concept of resilience is central in this context. Resilient social-ecological systems have the potential to sustain development by responding to and shaping change in a manner that does not lead to loss of future options. Resilient systems also provide capacity for renewal and innovation in the face of rapid transformation and crisis. The term navigating in the title is meant to capture this dynamic process. Case studies and examples from several geographic areas, cultures and resource types are included, merging forefront research from natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities into a common framework for new insights on sustainability.

Download or read book Social Ecological Transformation written by Karl Bruckmeier and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-03 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advances a social-ecological theory to reconnect nature and society through sustainable transformation of interacting social and ecological systems. Social ecology develops as an interdisciplinary science by using knowledge from the social sciences, especially sociology and economics, and from natural-scientific ecology. Knowledge integration across the boundaries of social and natural sciences is not widespread, blocked by the specialisation of theories and their competing forms of explanation and interpretation. Chapters in this book describe a new social-ecological theory that connects concepts and theories from both sides to create a new interdisciplinary theory. Inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge synthesis creates possibilities to analyse global environmental problems more systematically by integrating specialized research on environmental problems. The author uses social-ecological theory to analyse and explain problems and processes of global change in modern society such as climate change and adaptation to it, ecosystem change, and transformation of the industrial energy regime , finally offering pathways of transformation to a future sustainable society.

Download or read book Measuring Sustainability and Decoupling written by Nordic Council of Ministers and published by Nordic Council of Ministers. This book was released on 2006 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is growing interest among policymakers for the prospects of decoupling economic growth from environmental degradation, in order to achieve improved environmental quality without compromising economic growth. However, whilst decoupling indicators give a reasonably good measure for potential or progress towards sustainability, decoupling is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for sustainability. Decoupling indicators, unlike many other statistical efforts related to the environment, are not meant to summarise the general state of the environment, but rather to measure countries' progress towards mitigating or alleviating particular environmental pressures from relevant driving forces.

Download or read book Rural Land Change and the Capacity for Ecosystem Conservation and Sustainable Production in North America written by Alisa W. Coffin and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: