SOS 510 Perspectives on Sustainability Chuck Redman Oct. 29, 2018 Integrating or Separating Resilience Thinking and Sustainability Science SOS 510 Perspectives on Sustainability Chuck Redman Oct. 29, 2018

Adaptation Transformation Major, fundamental change Action due to recognition of secular stresses Create new order, open ended Reorder system dynamics Agency, leadership, and power enable change Incremental change Respond to shock Maintain previous order Build adaptive capacity into current system Context and emergent properties guide trajectory

What is Sustainability? What is Resilience? Resilience: The ability to maintain functions and identity in face of change Sustainability: enhance environmental integrity, human well-being, and social justice But one must ask: Of what? For whom? For how long? At what cost?

Resilience Theory Sustainability Science Approach Approach Origin in ecology, nature is optimal Change is normal, multiple stable states Experience adaptive cycle gracefully Result of change is open ended, emergent Concerned with system dynamics that enhance resilience Can be desirable or undesirable Stakeholder input may be limited Origin in social sciences, society is flawed Envision the future, act to make it happen Utilize transition management approach Desired results of change are specified in advance Focus is on interventions that lead to sustainability measures Should only be desirable Stakeholder input is essential for future scenarios

Is there a problem? When I started as a grad student we were working toward similar human/natural system integration; we have not reached our goal The big challenges of the world have been known and worked on by the best minds with huge funding, yet we still are threatened by them LTER and other SES projects don’t seem to attract meaningful interest from community decision-makers SOS (and CAP LTER) started with strong engineering, planning, architecture components. Drifted away as faculty focus on coupled socio-ecological systems as the integrating framework Hence, the development of URExSRN and SETS

Social, Ecological, Technological System

Intellectual Misalignment: Hurdle to Interdisciplinary Collaboration Each discipline is defined by its own set of rules Communication Differences (e.g., vocabulary) Objectives of research (answers we seek) What is acceptable knowledge? Disciplinary methods (i.e., what is data, what is accepted as proof, what are appropriate methods) How does the system I study work, does it have a distinctive logic?

How can we anticipate future sustainability research? Trade-offs: What trade-offs are inherent in coupled social- ecological-technological systems? What are the tools available to recognize and navigate those trade-offs? Understanding uncertainty: Which uncertainties in complex adaptive systems are reducible and which are irreducible? Will these uncertainties grow or diminish over time? Understanding innovation: How does innovation occur and spread? What technical, economic, and social conditions must be met for technologies to succeed?

Concepts to organize our thinking Knowledge networks Mental models Intervention points Triggering events Regime shifts Projections of the future Scenarios of the future

A Nobel Prize if you can solve these! How do we convert avoided future costs into current revenue streams? How do we embed flexibility and redundancy into a fully efficient system? How can long term sensibilities and values be integrated into short term management and decision making?