Climate Sense

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bserving

, P

redicting

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OnditiOns

of climate change, and of reducing greenhouse gas

emissions.

While the details are still debatable, the

main thrust of the report is clear and compelling

– the expected benefits of tackling climate change

surpass the expected costs. The question is no longer

whether we can afford to act, but whether we can

afford not to. And yet, with less than six months to

go to Copenhagen and little communal action, most

countries are hesitant to move forward.

Lance Gunderson and C.S. Holling condensed the

major obstacles to sustainability into the lack of three

basic categories: understanding of the dynamics of

complex systems; willingness to implement; and capac-

ity to perform the actions and changes needed.

The

pursuit of services linking climate information with

management and adaptation towards sustainability pose

new challenges to the ways we define problems, identify

solutions and implement actions.

Resilience thinking

C. S. Holling and his colleagues offer a new paradigm, the

idea of resilience as a potential organizing concept and

scoping device for understanding andmanaging our social-

ecological systems.

They define resilience as the amount of

change a system can undergo before it crosses a threshold

and flips to an alternate stability regime of that system. In

resilience thinking, three main concepts need to be recog-

nized. Firstly, complex adaptive systems are self-organizing.

Secondly, these systems are non-linear in their trajectories of

change, which leads to their potential for alternative stability

regimes. Third, and finally, such systems go through adap-

tive cycles that describe a repeated process of four phases:

rapid growth (r), conservation (K), release (Ω), and reor-

ganization and renewal (

During the r phase resources are readily available

and species or actors exploit niches and opportunities.

During the K phase, resources become increasingly

locked up and the system becomes less flexible and

responsive to disturbance. When the Ω phase is reached

disturbance causes a chaotic unravelling and release

of resources. In

phase, system boundaries become

tenuous. New species, actors, and ideas can take hold,

and generally lead into another r phase. Taken as a

whole, the r to K transition is referred to as a fore (or

development) loop, whereas the Ω to

transition is

referred to as a back loop. Most systems move through

this sequence of phases, but other transitions are

possible. The back loop, characterized by uncertainty,

novelty, and experimentation, is the transition time of

greatest potential for the initiation of either creative or

destructive change in the system.

Resilience thinking captures the dynamic nature of

the world. It recognizes the dangers of optimizing for

particular states or products of a system, and explains

why current approaches to managing resources are

failing. It focuses on how the system changes and copes

with disturbances, not only anticipating and respond-

ing but also creating and shaping them. Successful

management and adaptation for social-ecological

These definitions make clear that sustainability is not an end

product but a dynamic process that requires adaptive capacity

for social and ecological systems to deal with change. Here, a

dynamic process features the relationships between the motion

(towards sustainability) and properties of a complex system,

(social and ecological systems) and the forces (climate vari-

ability and change) acting on it. When considering the earth

climate system, a complex social-ecological system, it is impor-

tant to consider it as a whole. This ‘human-in-ecosystems’ (not

human-and-ecosystems) perspective is a way to think about the

relationship between nature and society and all the interfaces

between the two.

Worldview and global trajectory

Worldview is a term taken from the German weltanschauung,

meaning ‘look onto the world’. It refers to the framework through

which an individual interprets the world and interacts in it. It is

communal in scope and structure, and provides a view by which

the world can be ordered and illumined. A diversity of worldviews

linked to cultural diversity and evolution provides social-ecological

systems with the ability to persist in the face of change. Such social

and ecological memory bridges the values and truths of a society

and the social-ecological environment. In opposition, modern belief

systems and institutional frameworks seem to create homogenized

and optimized social-ecological systems. Such systems lack diversity

and the capacity to adapt to change and crisis, thereby creating their

own vulnerability.

The consideration of worldviews naturally leads us to another

important question of global trajectory, namely, whether

humanity at the global scale is currently on a sustainable or

unsustainable path. As was pointed out by the global think

tank ‘the Club of Rome’ almost four decades ago, the current

global trajectory is unsustainable for both ecological and social

systems.

More recently, the Stern Review of the Economics of

Climate Change provided rigorous analysis of the costs and risks

A simple representation and variants of the adaptive cycle

Source: Adapted from Walker and Salt (2006)