The speed and uncertainty of environmental change in the Anthropocene challenge the capacity of coevolving social–ecological–technological systems (SETs) to adapt or transform to these changes. Formal government and legal structures further constrain the adaptive capacity of our SETs. However, new, self-organized forms of adaptive governance are emerging at multiple scales in natural resource-based SETs. Adaptive governance involves the private and public sectors as well as formal and informal institutions, self-organized to fill governance gaps in the traditional roles of states. While new governance forms are emerging, they are not yet doing so rapidly enough to match the pace of environmental change. Furthermore, they do not yet possess the legitimacy or capacity needed to address disparities between the winners and losers from change. These emergent forms of adaptive governance appear to be particularly effective in managing complexity. We explore governance and SETs as coevolving complex systems, focusing on legal systems to understand the potential pathways and obstacles to equitable adaptation. We explore how governments may facilitate the emergence of adaptive governance and promote legitimacy in both the process of governance despite the involvement of nonstate actors, and its adherence to democratic values of equity and justice. To manage the contextual nature of the results of change in complex systems, we propose the establishment of long-term study initiatives for the coproduction of knowledge, to accelerate learning and synergize interactions between science and governance and to foster public science and epistemic communities dedicated to navigating transitions to more just, sustainable, and resilient futures.
Despite the growing focus on understanding how to build resilience, the interaction between resilience and equity, particularly in the context of power asymmetries like those in communities reliant on resource-based industries, or resource-based communities, is not well understood. Here we present a stylized dynamical systems model of asymmetric resource access and control in resource-based communities that links industrial resource degradation, community well-being, and migration in response to economic and resource conditions. The model reveals a mechanism of collapse due to these dynamics in which over-extraction and resource degradation trigger irreversible population decline. Regulating resource extraction can increase resilience (in the sense of persistence) while also shifting the sustainable equilibrium and the implications for equity. Resilience does not guarantee equity at equilibrium, and this misalignment is more pronounced in the transient interactions between short term equity and long term resilience. The misalignment between resilience and equity demonstrates how equity considerations change the policy design process in important ways.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1716130
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10212724
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Communications Earth & Environment
- Volume:
- 2
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2662-4435
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Aim Quantifying abundance distributions is critical for understanding both how communities assemble, and how community structure varies through time and space, yet estimating abundances requires considerable investment in fieldwork. Community‐level population genetic data potentially offer a powerful way to indirectly infer richness, abundance and the history of accumulation of biodiversity within a community. Here we introduce a joint model linking neutral community assembly and comparative phylogeography to generate both community‐level richness, abundance and genetic variation under a neutral model, capturing both equilibrium and non‐equilibrium dynamics.
Location Global.
Methods Our model combines a forward‐time individual‐based community assembly process with a rescaled backward‐time neutral coalescent model of multi‐taxa population genetics. We explore general dynamics of genetic and abundance‐based summary statistics and use approximate Bayesian computation (
ABC ) to estimate parameters underlying the model of island community assembly. Finally, we demonstrate two applications of the model using community‐scale mtDNA sequence data and densely sampled abundances of an arachnid community on La Réunion. First, we use genetic data alone to estimate a summary of the abundance distribution, ground‐truthing this against the observed abundances. Then, we jointly use the observed genetic data and abundances to estimate the proximity of the community to equilibrium.Results Simulation experiments of our
ABC procedure demonstrate that coupling abundance with genetic data leads to improved accuracy and precision of model parameter estimates compared with using abundance‐only data. We further demonstrate reasonable precision and accuracy in estimating a metric underlying the shape of the abundance distribution, temporal progress towards local equilibrium and several key parameters of the community assembly process. For the insular arachnid assemblage, we find the joint distribution of genetic diversity and abundance approaches equilibrium expectations, and that the Shannon entropy of the observed abundances can be estimated using genetic data alone.Main conclusions The framework that we present unifies neutral community assembly and comparative phylogeography to characterize the community‐level distribution of both abundance and genetic variation through time, providing a resource that should greatly enhance understanding of both the processes structuring ecological communities and the associated aggregate demographic histories.
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Aims In this article, we focus on mixed cash‐subsistence economies and the social networks that underlie them in Alaska. The patterns of food production, labor exchange, and food sharing in subsistence‐oriented communities throughout Alaska are driven by the productivity of keystone households who regularly harvest and share resources within and between communities.
Materials & Methods Building on previous research suggesting the critical importance of these networks to community resilience, we use network analysis to investigate whether patterns in resource transfers between households are associated with subsistence harvest diversity—the diversity of species harvested by a household unit. We use exponential random graph models to describe the structure of a sharing network from Aniak, Alaska, and model the links between harvest productivity, harvest diversity, and household position in this network.
Results Our results indicate that both productivity and diversity are positively associated with network connections, and that productivity alone provides an incomplete model of network structure.
Discussion We suggest that subsistence harvest diversity may play a unique role in supporting adaptive capacity and resilience by maintaining the productivity of keystone households despite changing environments and sustaining social network structures that circulate resources throughout the community. Harvest diversity may also serve as a broad indicator of Indigenous ecological knowledge and a tangible representation of cultural practices, values, and worldviews that underlie subsistence in Alaska.
Conclusion Greater attention to harvest diversity is important for understanding how subsistence networks adapt to environmental change and uncertainty linked to social and ecological dynamics of anthropogenic climate change.
