Ecosystem Services, Complexity and People

Potential effects of climate change include impacts on ecosystems that support human populations. The interaction of land-cover change with climatic shifts will inevitably drive ecosystem change. Without appropriate adaptation strategies, such change may result in reduced biological diversity and/or productivity. This, in turn, may compromise the quality of ecosystem services that provide food, fibre, fuel, maintain air and water quality, and underpin human wellbeing via recreational, aesthetic and spiritual activities. The development of appropriate methodologies that clarify how critical relationships between people and ecosystems (socioecosystems) are structured and anticipate and accommodate change regarding stewardship and management of ecosystem services is essential (see for example, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment).

Socio-ecosystems are characterized by interactions of social and biophysical agents at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Within a context determined, for example, by ecological region, national policies and economic status, more restricted place- and community-based factors underlie the nature of the relationship between people and ecosystems. Of particular importance in the societal realm are issues of
power, decision-making, adaptation and learning, while historical legacies and non-linear dynamics affect both human and ecological systems. Such features share the property of complexity—a concept that is utilized across disciplinary traditions. Complexity provides a framework for creative thinking and can be formalized to provide quantitative descriptions of phenomena, thus providing the potential for
modelling the behaviour of socio-ecosystems. This project will bring together academics interested in the agenda described above and practitioners seeking new ways to address adaptation concerns. It will capitalize on current groundbreaking work at WUN universities to develop a toolkit for the analysis of regional issues that goes beyond anything currently available for most regional assessments or for
international assessment processes, including the IPCC and the future panel on biodiversity and ecosystem services that recently emerged from negotiations in Japan.