Download or read book Spatial Resilience in Social Ecological Systems written by Graeme S. Cumming and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-02-09 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spatial Resilience is a new and exciting area of interdisciplinary research. It focuses on the influence of spatial variation – including such things as spatial location, context, connectivity, and dispersal – on the resilience of complex systems, and on the roles that resilience and self-organization play in generating spatial variation. Prof. Cumming provides a readable introduction and a first comprehensive synthesis covering the core concepts and applications of spatial resilience to the study of social-ecological systems. The book follows a trajectory from concepts through models, methods, and case study analysis before revisiting the central problems in the further conceptual development of the field. In the process, the author ranges from the movements of lions in northern Zimbabwe to the urban jungles of Europe, and from the collapse of past societies to the social impacts of modern conflict. The many case studies and examples discussed in the book show how the concept of spatial resilience can generate valuable insights into the spatial dynamics of social-ecological systems and contribute to solving some of the most pressing problems of our time. Although it has been written primarily for students, this book will provide fascinating reading for interdisciplinary scientists at all career stages as well as for the interested public. "Graeme Cumming, central in the development of resilience thinking and theory, has produced a wonderful book on spatial resilience, the first ever on this topic. The book will become a shining star, a classic in the explosion of new ideas and approaches to studying and understanding social-ecological systems." Carl Folke, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden

Download or read book Principles for Building Resilience written by Reinette Biggs and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting the very latest research, this book provides an in-depth review of the role of resilience in the management of social-ecological systems and the ecosystem services they provide. Leaders in the field outline seven principles for building resilience in social-ecological systems, examining how these can be applied to advance sustainability.

Download or read book Resilience Thinking written by Brian Walker and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-06-22 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency. "Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change, and seeks to understand the qualities of a system that must be maintained or enhanced in order to achieve sustainability. It explains why greater efficiency by itself cannot solve resource problems and offers a constructive alternative that opens up options rather than closing them down. In Resilience Thinking, scientist Brian Walker and science writer David Salt present an accessible introduction to the emerging paradigm of resilience. The book arose out of appeals from colleagues in science and industry for a plainly written account of what resilience is all about and how a resilience approach differs from current practices. Rather than complicated theory, the book offers a conceptual overview along with five case studies of resilience thinking in the real world. It is an engaging and important work for anyone interested in managing risk in a complex world.

Download or read book Social Ecological Resilience and Law written by Ahjond S. Garmestani and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental law envisions ecological systems as existing in an equilibrium state, reinforcing a rigid legal framework unable to absorb rapid environmental changes and innovations in sustainability. For the past four decades, "resilience theory," which embraces uncertainty and nonlinear dynamics in complex adaptive systems, has provided a robust, invaluable foundation for sound environmental management. Reforming American law to incorporate this knowledge is the key to sustainability. This volume features top legal and resilience scholars speaking on resilience theory and its legal applications to climate change, biodiversity, national parks, and water law.

Download or read book Viability and Resilience of Complex Systems written by Guillaume Deffuant and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-08-03 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One common characteristics of a complex system is its ability to withstand major disturbances and the capacity to rebuild itself. Understanding how such systems demonstrate resilience by absorbing or recovering from major external perturbations requires both quantitative foundations and a multidisciplinary view on the topic. This book demonstrates how new methods can be used to identify the actions favouring the recovery from perturbations. Examples discussed include bacterial biofilms resisting detachment, grassland savannahs recovering from fire, the dynamics of language competition and Internet social networking sites overcoming vandalism. The reader is taken through an introduction to the idea of resilience and viability and shown the mathematical basis of the techniques used to analyse systems. The idea of individual or agent-based modelling of complex systems is introduced and related to analytically tractable approximations of such models. A set of case studies illustrates the use of the techniques in real applications, and the final section describes how one can use new and elaborate software tools for carrying out the necessary calculations. The book is intended for a general scientific audience of readers from the natural and social sciences, yet requires some mathematics to gain a full understanding of the more theoretical chapters. It is an essential point of reference for those interested in the practical application of the concepts of resilience and viability

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social Ecological Systems written by Reinette Biggs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social-Ecological Systems provides a synthetic guide to the range of methods that can be employed in social-ecological systems (SES) research. The book is primarily targeted at graduate students, lecturers and researchers working on SES, and has been written in a style that is accessible to readers entering the field from a variety of different disciplinary backgrounds. Each chapter discusses the types of SES questions to which the particular methods are suited and the potential resources and skills required for their implementation, and provides practical examples of the application of the methods. In addition, the book contains a conceptual and practical introduction to SES research, a discussion of key gaps and frontiers in SES research methods, and a glossary of key terms in SES research. Contributions from 97 different authors, situated at SES research hubs in 16 countries around the world, including South Africa, Sweden, Germany and Australia, bring a wealth of expertise and experience to this book. The first book to provide a guide and introduction specifically focused on methods for studying SES, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainability science, environmental management, global environmental change studies and environmental governance. The book will also be of interest to upper-level undergraduates and professionals working at the science–policy interface in the environmental arena.

Download or read book Principles of Ecosystem Stewardship written by F Stuart Chapin III and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-06-12 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world is undergoing unprecedented changes in many of the factors that determine its fundamental properties and their in- ence on society. These changes include climate; the chemical c- position of the atmosphere; the demands of a growing human population for food and ?ber; and the mobility of organisms, ind- trial products, cultural perspectives, and information ?ows. The magnitude and widespread nature of these changes pose serious challenges in managing the ecosystem services on which society depends. Moreover, many of these changes are strongly in?uenced by human activities, so future patterns of change will continue to be in?uenced by society’s choices and governance. The purpose of this book is to provide a new framework for n- ural resource management—a framework based on stewardship of ecosystems for human well-being in a world dominated by unc- tainty and change. The goal of ecosystem stewardship is to respond to and shape change in social-ecological systems in order to s- tain the supply and opportunities for use of ecosystem services by society. The book links recent advances in the theory of resilience, sustainability, and vulnerability with practical issues of ecosystem management and governance. The book is aimed at advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students of natural resource management as well as professional managers, community leaders, and policy makers with backgrounds in a wide array of d- ciplines, including ecology, policy studies, economics, sociology, and anthropology.

Download or read book Linking Social and Ecological Systems written by Fikret Berkes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-04-13 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is usually the case that scientists examine either ecological systems or social systems, yet the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the problems of environmental management and sustainable development is becoming increasingly obvious. Developed under the auspices of the Beijer Institute in Stockholm, this new book analyses social and ecological linkages in selected ecosystems using an international and interdisciplinary case study approach. The chapters provide detailed information on a variety of management practices for dealing with environmental change. Taken as a whole, the book will contribute to the greater understanding of essential social responses to changes in ecosystems, including the generation, accumulation and transmission of ecological knowledge, structure and dynamics of institutions, and the cultural values underlying these responses. A set of new (or rediscovered) principles for sustainable ecosystem management is also presented. Linking Social and Ecological Systems will be of value to natural and social scientists interested in sustainability.

Download or read book Practical Panarchy for Adaptive Water Governance written by Barbara Cosens and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-18 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the results of an interdisciplinary project that examined how law, policy and ecological dynamics influence the governance of regional scale water based social-ecological systems in the United States and Australia. The volume explores the obstacles and opportunities for governance that is capable of management, adaptation, and transformation in these regional social-ecological systems as they respond to accelerating environmental change. With the onset of the Anthropocene, global and regional changes in biophysical inputs to these systems will challenge their capacity to respond while maintaining functions of water supply, flood control, hydropower production, water quality, and biodiversity. Governance lies at the heart of the capacity of these systems to meet these challenges. Assessment of water basins in the United States and Australia indicates that state-centric governance of these complex and dynamic social-environmental systems is evolving to a more complex, diverse, and complex array public and private arrangements. In this process, three challenges emerge for water governance to become adaptive to environmental change. First, is the need for legal reform to remove barriers to adaptive governance by authorizing government agencies to prepare for windows of opportunity through adaptive planning, and to institutionalize the results of innovative solutions that arise once a window opens. Second, is the need for legal reform to give government agencies the authority to facilitate and participate in adaptive management and governance. This must be accompanied by parallel legal reform to assure that engagement of private and economic actors and the increase in governmental flexibility does not destabilize basin economies or come at the expense of legitimacy, accountability, equity, and justice. Third, development of means to continually assess thresholds and resilience of social-ecological systems and the adaptive capacity of their current governance to structure actions at multiple scales. The massive investment in water infrastructure on the river basins studied has improved the agricultural, urban and economic sectors, largely at the cost of other social and environmental values. Today the infrastructure is aging and in need of substantial investment for those benefits to continue and adapt to ongoing environmental changes. The renewal of institutions and heavily engineered water systems also presents the opportunity to modernize these systems to address inequity and align with the values and objectives of the 21st century. Creative approaches are needed to transform and modernize water governance that increases the capacity of these water-based social-ecological systems to innovate, adapt, and learn, will provide the tools needed to navigate an uncertain future.

Download or read book Adaptive Co Management written by Derek Armitage and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Canada and around the world, new concerns with adaptive processes, feedback learning, and flexible partnerships are reshaping environmental governance. Meanwhile, ideas about collaboration and learning are converging around the idea of adaptive co-management. This book provides a comprehensive synthesis of the core concepts, strategies, and tools in this emerging field, informed by a diverse group of researchers and practitioners with over two decades of experience. It also offers a diverse set of case studies that reveal the challenges and implications of adaptive co-management thinking.

Download or read book Adapting Institutions written by Emily Boyd and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global environmental change is occurring at a rate faster than humans have ever experienced. Climate change and the loss of ecosystem services are the two main global environmental crises facing us today. As a result, there is a need for better understanding of the specific and general resilience of networked ecosystems, cities, organisations and institutions to cope with change. In this book, an international team of experts provide cutting-edge insights into building the resilience and adaptive governance of complex social-ecological systems. Through a set of case studies, it focuses on the social science dimension of ecosystem management in the context of global change, in a move to bridge existing gaps between resilience, sustainability and social science. Using empirical examples ranging from local to global levels, views from a variety of disciplines are integrated to provide an essential resource for scholars, policy-makers and students, seeking innovative approaches to governance.

Download or read book Social Ecological Resilience to Climate Change written by Anna Franca Plastina and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-07 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume represents a timely sociolinguistic response in its provision of fresh insight into the evolution of climate change communication. Through the case study method, it investigates the representation of social-ecological resilience to climate change in the emerging discursive practice mediated online by grassroots activists. The fertile ground of resilience discourse is explored by showing its more positive outlook compared to the varieties of discourses competing in the ongoing climate debate. Significant varieties are examined to highlight their background role in the discourse formation of social-ecological resilience. The discursive-frame approach proposed here offers more than one methodological lens, allowing to capture the interrelated discursive, cognitive and social dimensions of resilience. It thereby underlines the importance of integrating different strands of critical discourse analysis with frame analysis to attend to the sociocognitive dimension of discourse which is still largely overlooked. The book is suitable for a wide readership, including scholars and neophyte readers with an interest in discourse, media and cultural studies, ecolinguistics, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. It will also appeal to social scientists with a keen interest in environmental movement studies dealing with the issue of climate change and its evolving communication.

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 Managing Socio ecological Production Landscapes and Seascapes for Sustainable Communities in Asia written by Osamu Saito and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-02-10 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book presents up-to-date analyses of community-based approaches to sustainable resource management of SEPLS (socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes) in areas where a harmonious relationship between the natural environment and the people who inhabit it is essential to ensure community and environmental well-being as well as to build resilience in the ecosystems that support this well-being. Understanding SEPLS and the forces of change that can weaken their resilience requires the integration of knowledge across a wide range of academic disciplines as well as from indigenous knowledge and experience. Moreover, given the wide variation in the socio-ecological makeup of SEPLS around the globe, as well as in their political and economic contexts, individual communities will be at the forefront of developing the measures appropriate for their unique circumstances. This in turn requires robust communication systems and broad participatory approaches. Sustainability science (SuS) research is highly integrated, participatory and solutions driven, and as such is well suited to the study of SEPLS. Through case studies, literature reviews and SuS analyses, the book explores various approaches to stakeholder participation, policy development and appropriate action for the future of SEPLS. It provides communities, researchers and decision-makers at various levels with new tools and strategies for exploring scenarios and creating future visions for sustainable societies.

Download or read book Social Ecological Resilience and Sustainability written by Shelley Ross Saxer and published by Aspen Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 723 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social-Ecological Resilience and Sustainability by Shelley Ross Saxer and Jonathan Rosenbloom is designed to help students understand and address new, changing, and complex economic, environmental, and social systems. This book introduces resilience and sustainability as analytical frameworks and illustrates how these concepts apply in various contexts: water, food, shelter/land use, energy, natural resources, pollution, disaster law, and climate change. The first two chapters (Part I) provide students with a conceptual foundation to explore the interdisciplinary nature of resilience and sustainability and the meanings of, complexities embedded in, and the overlap and differences between these frameworks. Each of the remaining eight chapters (Part II) views resilience and sustainability in a specific law and policy context. Strategically placed throughout Part II, the authors describe eight useful tools — “Strategies to Facilitate Implementation”—to help identify, assess, integrate, or utilize resilience and sustainability as analytical frameworks. Key Features: A two-part approach that first provides students with a conceptual foundation and then allows students to view resilience and sustainability in eight law and policy contexts (described above) Numerous graphics throughout to illustrate concepts, depict events described, and otherwise enliven the content Case studies that examine human decisions that led to unsustainable and non-resilient systems and societies New and innovative ways to explain complex systems and in turn rethink traditional notions of law and policy

Download or read book Complexity Theory for a Sustainable Future written by Jon Norberg and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-11 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complexity theory illuminates the many interactions between natural and social systems, providing a better understanding of the general principles that can help solve some of today's most pressing environmental issues. Complexity theory was developed from key ideas in economics, physics, biology, and the social sciences and contributes to important new concepts for approaching issues of environmental sustainability such as resilience, scaling, and networks. Complexity Theory for a Sustainable Future is a hands-on treatment of this exciting new body of work and its applications, bridging the gap between theoretical and applied perspectives in the management of complex adaptive systems. Focusing primarily on natural resource management and community-based conservation, the book features contributions by leading scholars in the field, many of whom are among the leaders of the Resilience Alliance. Theoreticians will find a valuable synthesis of new ideas on resilience, sustainability, asymmetries, information processing, scaling, and networks. Managers and policymakers will benefit from the application of these ideas to practical approaches and empirical studies linked to social-ecological systems. Chapters present new twists on such existing approaches as scenario planning, scaling analyses, and adaptive management, and the book concludes with recommendations on how to manage natural resources, how to involve stakeholders in the dynamics of a system, and how to explain the difficult topic of scale. A vital reference for an emerging discipline, this volume provides a clearer understanding of the conditions required for systems self-organization, since the capacity of any system to self-organize is crucial for its sustainability over time.

Download or read book Finding Resilience written by Brian Walker and published by CSIRO PUBLISHING. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Floods, fires, famines, epidemics and disasters of all kinds are on the increase, and as their frequency rises so does the call for greater resilience. But what does that mean? The word is used differently in psychology, ecology, economics and engineering and runs the risk of becoming meaningless jargon. This would be most unfortunate because, if we are to successfully navigate very real and dangerous global trends, it is resilience that needs to be understood and fostered. Finding Resilience is international in scope and unravels how ecosystems, societies and people cope with disturbance and adversity. An authoritative but plain English account which is based on the experiences of researchers, the fascinating stories from around the world reveal what resilience is, how it works in different kinds of systems, how it is expressed, and how it can be gained and lost.