Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

Ecosystem stewardship: sustainability strategies for a rapidly changing planet

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

That’s the title of a new article^1,2 by Terry Chapin and colleagues in a forthcoming issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Human actions are having large and accelerating effects on the climate, environment and ecosystems of the Earth, thereby degrading many ecosystem services. This unsustainable trajectory demands a dramatic change in human relationships with the environment and life-support system of the planet. Here, we address recent developments in thinking about the sustainable use of ecosystems and resources by society in the context of rapid and frequently abrupt change.

To deal with these challenges, they advocate “ecosystem stewardship,” which has three core principles.  Here are excerpts of these principles (slightly condensed/adapted by me); please check out the paper for details:

(Principle 1) Reduce vulnerability to known stresses

(A) Reduce exposure to hazards and stresses
• Minimize known stresses and avoid or minimize novel hazards and stresses
• Develop new institutions that minimize global-scale stresses
• Manage in the context of projected changes rather than in the historical range of variability

(B) Reduce social–ecological sensitivities and adapt to adverse impacts
• Sustain the capacity of ecosystems to provide multiple ecosystem services
• Sustain and enhance crucial components of well-being, particularly of vulnerable segments of society
• Plan sustainable development to address the tradeoffs among costs and benefits for ecosystems, multiple segments of today’s society and future generations

(Principle 2) Develop stewardship strategies to prepare for, and shape, uncertain change

(A) Maintain a diversity of options
• Subsidize innovations that foster socio-economic novelty and diversity
• Renew the functional diversity of degraded systems
• Prioritize conservation of biodiversity hotspots and pathways that enable species to adjust to rapid environmental change
• Sustain a diversity of cultures, languages and knowledge systems that provide multiple approaches to meeting societal goals.

(B) Enhance social learning to facilitate adaptation
• Broaden the problem definition and knowledge co-production by engaging multiple disciplinary perspectives and knowledge systems
• Use scenarios and simulations to explore consequences of alternative policy options
• Develop transparent information systems and mapping tools that contribute to developing trust among decision-makers and stakeholders, and build support for action
• Test understanding through comparative analysis, experimentation and adaptive management
• Exercise extreme caution in experiments that perturb a system larger than the jurisdiction of management

(C) Adapt governance to implement potential solutions
• Provide an environment for leadership and respect to develop
• Foster social networking that builds trust and bridges communication and accountability among existing organizations
• Enable sufficient overlap in responsibility among organizations to allow redundancy in policy implementation

(Principle 3) Transform from traps to potentially more favorable trajectories

(A) Preparing for transformation
• Engage stakeholders to identify dysfunctional states and raise awareness of problems
• Identify thresholds, plausible alternative states, pathways and triggers
• Identify the barriers to change, potential change agents and strategies to overcome barriers

(B) Navigating the transition
• Identify potential crises and use them as opportunities to initiate change
• Maintain flexible strategies and transparency
• Foster institutions that facilitate cross-scale and cross-organizational interactions and stakeholder participation

(C) Building resilience of the new regime
• Create incentives and foster values for stewardship in the new context
• Initiate and mobilize social networks of key individuals for problem solving
• Foster interactions and support of decision makers at other levels

Bottom line:  This paper provides a useful framework for the continuing conversation on sustainability.  Some of the ideas are not new, but it’s a good synthesis, and it makes progress towards the difficult task of integrating natural and social systems. I would like to see a comprehensive list of examples compiled for all of these strategies as a clearinghouse for ideas, including ideas that do (did) not work.

We are going to see a lot more on these ideas over the next decade:

• interdependence of natural and social systems
• reducing vulnerabilities (a key component of adaptation)
• fostering innovation in all sectors of society
• maintain diversity in ecological and social systems as a form of resilience (another key component of adaptation)
• being proactive to shape the trajectory of change

¹Chapin F.S. et al (in press) Ecosystem stewardship: sustainability strategies for a rapidly changing planet. Trends in Ecology and Evolution

²Bowdoin people can access the article here.

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