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Financial advisers recommend a diverse portfolio to respond to market fluctuations across sectors. Similarly, nature has evolved a diverse portfolio of species to maintain ecosystem function amid environmental fluctuations. In urban planning, public health, transport and communications, food production, and other domains, however, this feature often seems ignored. As we enter an era of unprecedented turbulence at the planetary level, we argue that ample responses to this new reality — that is, response diversity — can no longer be taken for granted and must be actively designed and managed. We describe here what response diversity is, how it is expressed and how it can be enhanced and lost.

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M Transformation toward a sustainable future requires an earth stewardship approach to shift society from its current goal of increasing material wealth to a vision of sustaining built, natural, human, and social capital-equitably distributed across society, within and among nations. Widespread concern about earth's current trajectory and support for actions that would foster more sustainable pathways suggests potential social tipping points in public demand for an earth stewardship vision. Here, we draw on empirical studies and theory to show that movement toward a stewardship vision can be facilitated by changes in either policy incentives or social norms. Our novel contribution is to point out that both norms and incentives must change and can do so interactively. This can be facilitated through leverage points and complementarities across policy areas, based on values, system design, and agency. Potential catalysts include novel democratic institutions and engagement of non-governmental actors, such as businesses, civic leaders, and social movements as agents for redistribution of power. Because no single intervention will transform the world, a key challenge is to align actions to be synergistic, persistent, and scalable.

We investigate the extraction plan of present-biased decision makers managing a renew-able resource stock whose growth is uncertain and which could undergo a rapid and sig-nificant change when stock falls below a threshold. We show that the Markov-Nash equi-librium extraction policy is unique, time consistent, and increasing in resource stock. An increase in the threshold leads to increased resource extraction, rather than the precau-tionary reduction in extraction often observed with exponential discounting. An increase in the degree of present bias also leads to an increase in resource extraction. Our analy-sis suggests that accounting for and appropriately dealing with resource managers' present bias may be important to understand resource use sustainability.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

We investigate the behavioural responses of natural common-pool resource users to three policy interventions—sanctioned quotas, information provisioning, and a combination of both. We focus on situations in which users find utility in multiple resources (pastures and wild animal stocks) that all stem from the same ecosystem with complex dynamics, and management could trigger a regime shift, drastically altering resource regrowth. We performed a framed field experiment with 384 villagers from communities managing common-pool wildlife in Zimbabwe. We find that user groups are likely to manage these natural resources more efficiently when facing a policy intervention (either a sanctioned quota, receiving information about a drastic drop in the stocks’ regrowth below a threshold, or a combination of both), compared to groups facing no intervention. A sanctioned quota is likely to perform better than providing information about the existence of a threshold. However, having information about the threshold also leads to higher efficiency and fewer depletion cases, compared to a situation without any intervention. The main contribution of this study is to provide insights that can inform policymakers and development practitioners about the performance of concrete and feasible policy interventions for community wildlife conservation in Southern Africa. Validerad;2023;Nivå 2;2023-03-13 (joosat);Funder: Environment for Development Initiative, the Center for Collective Action Research (University of Gothenburg); Economic Research Southern Africa (ERSA); Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences); IKEA foundationLicens fulltext: CC BY License

Sustainability is often framed as achieving prosperity, equality, and environmental integrity: in other words, high living standards, evenly-distributed, and low-impact. But what if there is a trilemma that inhibits the joint achievement of these three key goals? We analyzed synergies and tradeoffs between these dimensions of sustainability by investigating historical data on per-capita gross national income, the Gini coefficient for income distribution, and per-capita ecological footprint. We found that no country in the world successfully solved this trilemma, but there are typologies of countries that can help identify common barriers, and strategies to overcome them. Countries typically reduce inequality and then increase prosperity and environmental impact. Some countries are trapped in a high inequality space, while prosperous countries have reduced inequality only at the expense of increasing environmental impact. Escaping this trilemma to achieve ambitious sustainability goals will likely require economic redistribution and more urgent collective action for planetary stewardship.

The increasing frequency of extreme events, exogenous and endogenous, poses challenges for our societies. The current pandemic is a case in point; but "once-in-a-century" weather events are also becoming more common, leading to erosion, wildfire and even volcanic events that change ecosystems and disturbance regimes, threaten the sustainability of our life-support systems, and challenge the robustness and resilience of societies. Dealing with extremes will require new approaches and large-scale collective action. Preemptive measures can increase general resilience, a first line of protection, while more specific reactive responses are developed. Preemptive measures also can minimize the negative effects of events that cannot be avoided. In this paper, we first explore approaches to prevention, mitigation and adaptation, drawing inspiration from how evolutionary challenges have made biological systems robust and resilient, and from the general theory of complex adaptive systems. We argue further that proactive steps that go beyond will be necessary to reduce unacceptable consequences.

Climate change is reshaping the comparative advantage of regions and hence driving migration flows, principally toward urban areas. Migration has multiple benefits and costs in both origin and destination regions. Coordinated policies that recognize how and why people move can reduce future costs and facilitate adaptation to climate change both within borders and internationally.

Global environmental change challenges humanity because of its broad scale, long-lasting, and potentially irreversible consequences. Key to an effective response is to use an appropriate scientific lens to peer through the mist of uncertainty that threatens timely and appropriate decisions surrounding these complex issues. Identifying such corridors of clarity could help understanding critical phenomena or causal pathways sufficiently well to justify taking policy action. To this end, we suggest four principles: Follow the strongest and most direct path between policy decisions on outcomes, focus on finding sufficient evidence for policy purpose, prioritize no-regrets policies by avoiding options with controversial, uncertain, or immeasurable benefits, aim for getting the big picture roughly right rather than focusing on details.

Human behaviour is of profound significance in shaping pathways towards sustainability. Yet, the approach to understanding human behaviour in many fields remains reliant on overly simplistic models. For a better understanding of the interface between human behaviour and sustainability, we take work in behavioural economics and cognitive psychology as a starting point, but argue for an expansion of this work by adopting a more dynamic and systemic understanding of human behaviour, that is, as part of complex adaptive systems. A complex adaptive systems approach allows us to capture behaviour as ‘enculturated’ and ‘enearthed’, co-evolving with socio–cultural and biophysical contexts. Connecting human behaviour and context through a complex adaptive systems lens is critical to inform environmental governance and management for sustainability, and ultimately to better understand the dynamics of the Anthropocene itself. To understand and address sustainability problems, a complex model of human behaviour is proposed, one that co-evolves with their context, as opposed to simpler models.

Today, more than ever, ‘Spaceship Earth’ is an apt metaphor as we chart the boundaries for a safe planet1. Social scientists both analyse why society courts disaster by approaching or even overstepping these boundaries and try to design suitable policies to avoid these perils. Because the threats of transgressing planetary boundaries are global, long-run, uncertain and interconnected, they must be analysed together to avoid conflicts and take advantage of synergies. To obtain policies that are effective at both international and local levels requires careful analysis of the underlying mechanisms across scientific disciplines and approaches, and must take politics into account. In this Perspective, we examine the complexities of designing policies that can keep Earth within the biophysical limits favourable to human life.

Ocean temperatures are rising; species are shifting poleward, and pH is falling (ocean acidification, OA). We summarise current understanding of OA in the brackish Baltic-Skagerrak System, focussing on the direct, indirect and interactive effects of OA with other anthropogenic drivers on marine biogeochemistry, organisms and ecosystems. Substantial recent advances reveal a pattern of stronger responses (positive or negative) of species than ecosystems, more positive responses at lower trophic levels and strong indirect interactions in food-webs. Common emergent themes were as follows: OA drives planktonic systems toward the microbial loop, reducing energy transfer to zooplankton and fish; and nutrient/food availability ameliorates negative impacts of OA. We identify several key areas for further research, notably the need for OA-relevant biogeochemical and ecosystem models, and understanding the ecological and evolutionary capacity of Baltic-Skagerrak ecosystems to respond to OA and other anthropogenic drivers.

Small-scale fisheries are critically important for livelihoods around the world, particularly in tropical regions. However, climate variability and anthropogenic climate change may seriously impact small-scale fisheries by altering the abundance and distribution of target species. Social relationships between fishery users, such as fish traders, can determine how each individual responds and is affected by changes in fisheries. These informal cooperative and competitive relationships provide access, support, and incentives for fishing and affect the distribution of benefits. Yet, individuals’ actions and impacts on individuals are often the primary focus of the economic analyses informing small-scale fisheries’ formal management. This focus dismisses relevant social relationships. We argue that this leads to a disconnect between reality and its model representation used in formal management, which may reduce formal fisheries management’s efficiency and efficacy and potentially trigger adverse consequences. Here, we examine this argument by comparing the predictions of a simple bioeconomic fishery model with those of a social-ecological model that incorporates the dynamics of cooperative relationships between fish traders. We illustrate model outcomes using an empirical case study in the Mexican Humboldt squid fishery. We find that (1) the social-ecological model with relationship dynamics substantially improves accuracy in predicting observed fishery variables to the simple bioeconomic model. (2) Income inequality outcomes are associated with changes in cooperative trade relationships. When environmental temperature is included in the model as a driver of species production dynamics, we find that climate-driven temperature variability drives a decline in catch that, in turn, reduce fishers’ income. We observe an offset of this loss in income by including cooperative relationships between fish traders (oligopoly) in the model. These relationships break down following species distribution changes and result in an increase in prices fishers receive. Finally, (3) our social-ecological model simulations show that the current fishery development program, which seeks to increase fishers’ income through an increase in domestic market demand, is supported by predictions from the simple bioeconomic model, may increase income inequality between fishers and traders. Our findings highlight the real and urgent need to re-think fisheries management models in the context of small-scale fisheries and climate change worldwide to encompass social relationship dynamics. Supplementary information The online version contains supplementary material available at (10.1007/s10113-021-01747-5)

Sustainably managed wild fisheries support food and nutritional security, livelihoods, and cultures (1). Harmful fisheries subsidies—government payments that incentivize overcapacity and lead to overfishing—undermine these benefits yet are increasing globally (2). World Trade Organization (WTO) members have a unique opportunity at their ministerial meeting in November to reach an agreement that eliminates harmful subsidies (3). We—a group of scientists spanning 46 countries and 6 continents—urge the WTO to make this commitment...

The increasing frequency of extreme events, exogenous and endogenous, poses challenges for our societies. The current pandemic is a case in point; but "once-in-a-century" weather events are also becoming more common, leading to erosion, wildfire and even volcanic events that change ecosystems and disturbance regimes, threaten the sustainability of our life-support systems, and challenge the robustness and resilience of societies. Dealing with extremes will require new approaches and large-scale collective action. Preemptive measures can increase general resilience, a first line of protection, while more specific reactive responses are developed. Preemptive measures also can minimize the impacts of events that cannot be avoided. In this paper, we first explore approaches to prevention, mitigation and adaptation, drawing inspiration from how evolutionary challenges have made biological systems robust and resilient, and from the general theory of complex adaptive systems. We argue further that proactive steps that go beyond will be necessary to reduce unacceptable consequences.

The identification of tipping points in the water cycle has been recently ranked Nr. 1 in the list of the top 23 unresolved problems in Hydrology by the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) and as a priority in the field of hydrology and water resources by several studies. Such daunting task is mainly attributed to the concerns that greenhouse gas emission climate change may tip the water cycle into an unfavorable new state. Up to date, tipping points occurring in complex dynamical systems have been identified across a large set of disciplines. In most proven tipping points, hydrologic variables are always taken as the control variables, as changes in water fluxes and stocks are known to act as stressors of socioecological systems, and the affected aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems as the response variables. The main objective of this study is to explore the existence of tipping points in catchment-scale freshwater availability, that is, the tipping points were the response variable is catchment water storage. We first review the existence of reported tipping points in the field of hydrology and water resources, to establish a coherent framework for the identification of hydrological tipping points. We explore their mathematical existence at the catchment scale by Linear Stability Analysis, illustrating cases with potential functions and bifurcation diagrams. We then explore any possible contribution to the existence of hydrological tipping points by adding complexity to the hydrological dynamic system through the inclusion of sociological feedbacks. We find that even with the inclusion of the moisture feedback of evapotranspiration to precipitation, constant socioecological conditions will most likely not present tipping points of water storage in the catchment. However, the inclusion of socioecological feedbacks does generate tipping points under certain assumptions, even without assuming a moisture feedback between evapotranspiration and precipitation. We hope that this study sheds some light on the existence, conditions, assumptions and characteristics of large-scale hydrological tipping points with long-term implications.

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M We consider two aspects of the human enterprise that profoundly affect the global environment: population and consumption. We show that fertility and consumption behavior harbor a class of externalities that have not been much noted in the literature. Both are driven in part by attitudes and preferences that are not egoistic but socially embedded; that is, each household's decisions are influenced by the decisions made by others. In a famous paper, Garrett Hardin [G. Hardin, Science 162, 1243-1248 (1968)] drew attention to overpopulation and concluded that the solution lay in people "abandoning the freedom to breed." That human attitudes and practices are socially embedded suggests that it is possible for people to reduce their fertility rates and consumption demands without experiencing a loss in wellbeing. We focus on fertility in sub-Saharan Africa and consumption in the rich world and argue that bottom-up social mechanisms rather than top-down government interventions are better placed to bring about those ecologically desirable changes.

Major climate and ecological changes affect the world’s oceans leading to a number of responses including increasing water temperatures, changing weather patterns, shrinking ice-sheets, temperature-driven shifts in marine species ranges, biodiversity loss and bleaching of coral reefs. In addition, ocean pH is falling, a process known as ocean acidification (OA). The root cause of OA lies in human policies and behaviours driving society’s dependence on fossil fuels, resulting in elevated CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. In this review, we detail the state of knowledge of the causes of, and potential responses to, OA with particular focus on Swedish coastal seas. We also discuss present knowledge gaps and implementation needs.

This paper provides an interpretive overview on the economics of resilience with special reference to social-ecological systems. We address the basic sciences of regime shifts and resilience in dif ...

We propose a framework to support management that builds on a social–ecological system perspective on the Arctic Ocean. We illustrate the framework’s application for two policy-relevant scenarios of climate-driven change, picturing a shift in zooplankton composition and alternatively a crab invasion. We analyse archetypical system dynamics between the socio-economic, the natural, and the governance systems in these scenarios. Our holistic approach can help managers identify looming problems arising from complex system interactions and prioritise among problems and solutions, even when available data are limited. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-017-0960-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Sustainability within planetary boundaries requires concerted action by individuals, governments, civil society and private actors. For the private sector, there is concern that the power exercised by transnational corporations generates, and is even central to, global environmental change. Here, we ask under which conditions transnational corporations could either hinder or promote a global shift towards sustainability. We show that a handful of transnational corporations have become a major force shaping the global intertwined system of people and planet. Transnational corporations in agriculture, forestry, seafood, cement, minerals and fossil energy cause environmental impacts and possess the ability to influence critical functions of the biosphere. We review evidence of current practices and identify six observed features of change towards 'corporate biosphere stewardship', with significant potential for upscaling. Actions by transnational corporations, if combined with effective public policies and improved governmental regulations, could substantially accelerate sustainability efforts.

"This paper presents a novel experimental design that allows testing how users of a common-pool resource respond to an endogenously driven drastic drop in the supply of the resource. We show that user groups will manage a resource more efficiently when confronted with such a non-concave resource growth function, compared to groups facing a logistic growth function. Even among cooperative groups there is a significant behavioral difference, although theory predicts there should not be. We argue that effectiveness of communication is endogenous to the problem; the threat of reaching a critical tipping point, beyond which the growth rate will drop drastically, triggers more effective communication within the group, enabling stronger commitment for cooperation and more knowledge sharing, which together explains the results. We argue that the insights generated by this study can be seen as one of many, but nevertheless important, contributions towards an increased understanding of the interactions between human behavior and the environment in common-pool resource systems."

This introduction to the special issue presents an overview of the wide range of results produced during the European Union project Arctic Climate Change, Economy and Society (ACCESS). This project assessed the main impacts of climate change on Arctic Ocean’s geophysical variables and how these impending changes could be expected to impact directly and indirectly on socio-economic activities like transportation, marine sea food production and resource exploitation. Related governance issues were examined. These results were used to develop several management tools that can live on beyond ACCESS. In this article, we synthesize most of the project results in the form of tentative responses to questions raised during the project. By doing so, we put the findings of the project in a broader perspective and introduce the contributions made in the different articles published in this special issue. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-017-0953-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Nine planetary boundaries have been proposed, capturing essential biophysical processes that sustain the Earth System and its biosphere in an accommodating state for humanity. Drawing on economics literature, we propose conditions under which remaining within these boundaries is in line with economic policy. We assert that pervasive uncertainties combined with impacts of trespassing planetary boundaries clearly legitimate using safe minimum standards or precautionary approaches. Moreover, information about the risk structure of these processes, including potential large-scale regime shifts, could help refine policies for how to relate to the zones of uncertainty of the boundaries. Planetary boundaries may be interpreted as "growth within limits" especially in relation to the biophysical expansion of the human dimension. Here, we picture them as warning signs creating incentives for shifting development into new directions, new pathways, where growth in human well-being is the focus rather than growth in GDP. In this sense, we reiterate the framework of ecological economics of sustainable scale (i.e., developing within planetary boundaries), efficient allocation, and fair distribution, and emphasize the need for "biosphere economics" to help navigate globalization within the capacity of the biosphere as the complex adaptive system it truly is.

Source at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-017-0954-2 We review current knowledge about climate change impacts on Arctic seafood production. Large-scale changes in the Arctic marine food web can be expected for the next 40–100 years. Possible future trajectories under climate change for Arctic capture fisheries anticipate the movement of aquatic species into new waters and changed the dynamics of existing species. Negative consequences are expected for some fish stocks but others like the Barents Sea cod (Gadus morhua) may instead increase. Arctic aquaculture that constitutes about 2% of global farming is mainly made up of Norwegian salmon (Salmo salar) farming. The sector will face many challenges in a warmer future and some of these are already a reality impacting negatively on salmon growth. Other more indirect effects from climate change are more uncertain with respect to impacts on the economic conditions of Arctic aquaculture.

Aquaculture is the fastest growing food sector and continues to expand alongside terrestrial crop and livestock production. Using portfolio theory as a conceptual framework, we explore how current interconnections between the aquaculture, crop, livestock, and fisheries sectors act as an impediment to, or an opportunity for, enhanced resilience in the global food system given increased resource scarcity and climate change. Aquaculture can potentially enhance resilience through improved resource use efficiencies and increased diversification of farmed species, locales of production, and feeding strategies. However, aquaculture’s reliance on terrestrial crops and wild fish for feeds, its dependence on freshwater and land for culture sites, and its broad array of environmental impacts diminishes its ability to add resilience. Feeds for livestock and farmed fish that are fed rely largely on the same crops, although the fraction destined for aquaculture is presently small (∼4%). As demand for high-value fed aquaculture products grows, competition for these crops will also rise, as will the demand for wild fish as feed inputs. Many of these crops and forage fish are also consumed directly by humans and provide essential nutrition for low-income households. Their rising use in aquafeeds has the potential to increase price levels and volatility, worsening food insecurity among the most vulnerable populations. Although the diversification of global food production systems that includes aquaculture offers promise for enhanced resilience, such promise will not be realized if government policies fail to provide adequate incentives for resource efficiency, equity, and environmental protection.

Research has established that mangroves can protect lives and property from storms by buffering the impacts of storm surges. However, their effects in attenuating wind velocity and providing protection from wind damage during storms are not known. This study examined whether mangroves attenuate damage from cyclonic winds and found that they provide substantial protection to properties, even relatively far away from mangroves and the coast. We devised a theoretical model of wind protection by mangroves and calibrated and applied this model using data from the 1999 cyclone in the Odisha region of India. The model predicted and quantified the actual level of damage reasonably accurately and showed that mangroves reduced wind damage to houses. The wind protection value of mangroves in reducing house damage amounted to approximately US$177 per hectare at 1999 prices. This provides additional evidence of the storm protection ecosystem services that mangroves supply in the region and an additional reason to invest in mangrove ecosystems to provide better adaptability to coastal disasters such as storms.

Regime shifts are substantial reorganizations in system structure, functions and feedbacks, which can lead to changes in the provision of ecosystem services with significant impacts on human well-being. Recent research has documented cases of regime shifts in local and regional systems and there is mounting concern about regime shifts of global significance. In this paper we discuss management of social–ecological systems in light of the potential for regime shift. Management that increases system resilience and lowers the probability of regime shifts is beneficial when regime shifts are likely to reduce human well-being. It may not always be possible to avoid harmful regime shifts, so building capacity to adapt should a regime shift occur is beneficial too. Adaptive management can help reduce uncertainty about the likelihood of regime shifts, how this likelihood can be affected by management action, and the impact of regime shifts on well-being. Linking scientific understanding with decision-making is important but distributional consequences can impede decision making and action.

"Resilience to specified kinds of disasters is an active area of research and practice. However, rare or unprecedented disturbances that are unusually intense or extensive require a more broad-spectrum type of resilience. General resilience is the capacity of social-ecological systems to adapt or transform in response to unfamiliar, unexpected and extreme shocks. Conditions that enable general resilience include diversity, modularity, openness, reserves, feedbacks, nestedness, monitoring, leadership, and trust. Processes for building general resilience are an emerging and crucially important area of research."

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the exploration of non-convex dynamics in coupled human-nature systems. We study welfare issues associated with the management of a human-nature complex adaptive system with a threshold and a stochastic driver. We exemplify with a specific system where we link changes in the number and diversity of birds to the abundance of a pest (insects) that causes damages to goods and services valuable to human beings. We present a method that simplifies the analysis and helps us discuss different management models that combine direct and indirect controls of the pest. This allows us to show that 1) the choice of control method depends in a highly non-linear way on biodiversity characteristics and 2) the socially optimal outcome may not be reachable using price instruments. Hence the price vs. quantity debate needs to be revisited using a complex adaptive system lens.

Grasslands used for domestic livestock are often the common property of several owners and are typically characterized by complex ecosystem dynamics. We account for both these aspects by modeling the problem as a differential game where each farmer maximizes profits, given the dynamics of livestock and grass interaction. We compare the first best outcome obtained when farmers cooperate with that for non-cooperative farmers. By accounting for grassland dynamics, we challenge conventional results from the common pool literature. Although we do identify situations where the standard result holds—a tragedy of the commons unless farmers cooperate—we also find examples where a tragedy is exacerbated due to ecosystem dynamics as well as cases where a non-cooperative regime under-exploits the grassland compared to the first best outcome.

Fil: Chisari, Omar Osvaldo. Universidad Argentina de la Empresa; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas; Argentina

Recent global crises reveal an emerging pattern of causation that could increasingly characterize the birth and progress of future global crises. A conceptual framework identifies this pattern’s deep causes, intermediate processes, and ultimate outcomes. The framework shows how multiple stresses can interact within a single social-ecological system to cause a shift in that system’s behavior, how simultaneous shifts of this kind in several largely discrete social-ecological systems can interact to cause a far larger intersystemic crisis, and how such a larger crisis can then rapidly propagate across multiple system boundaries to the global scale. Case studies of the 2008-2009 financial-energy and food-energy crises illustrate the framework. Suggestions are offered for future research to explore further the framework’s propositions. © 2015 by the author(s).

"Ecosystems can undergo regime shifts that potentially lead to a substantial decrease in the availability of provisioning ecosystem services. Recent research suggests that the frequency and intensity of regime shifts increase with growing anthropogenic pressure, so understanding the underlying social-ecological dynamics is crucial, particularly in contexts where livelihoods depend heavily on local ecosystem services. In such settings, ecosystem services are often derived from common-pool resources. The limited capacity to predict regime shifts is a major challenge for common-pool resource management, as well as for systematic empirical analysis of individual and group behavior, because of the need for extensive preshift and postshift data. Unsurprisingly, current knowledge is mostly based on theoretical models. We examine behavioral group responses to a latent endogenously driven regime shift in a laboratory experiment. If the group exploited the common-pool resource beyond a certain threshold level, its renewal rate dropped drastically. To determine how the risk of such a latent shift affects resource management and collective action, we compared four experimental treatments in which groups were faced with a latent shift with different probability levels (0.1, 0.5, 0.9, 1.0). Our results suggest that different probability levels do not make people more or less likely to exploit the resource beyond its critical potential threshold. However, when the likelihood of the latent shift is certain or high, people appear more prone to agree initially on a common exploitation strategy, which in turn is a predictor for averting the latent shift. Moreover, risk appears to have a positive effect on collective action, but the magnitude of this effect is influenced by how risk and probabilities are communicated and perceived."

Economists have relied on convexity assumptions for a long time but many natural resources that stem from ecosystems have non-convexities in their dynamics. This article illustrates the consequences of relaxing convexity assumptions for management and the role of fast and slow variables. The paper presents a general framework to handle systems with fast and slow variables, and illustrates the method using a model of coral reefs subject to fishing pressure. The insights obtained are used to discuss alternative management strategies.

Unprecedented global changes caused by human actions challenge society's ability to sustain the desirable features of our planet. This requires proactive management of change to foster both resilience (sustaining those attributes that are important to society in the face of change) and adaptation (developing new socioecological configurations that function effectively under new conditions). The Arctic may be one of the last remaining opportunities to plan for change in a spatially extensive region where many of the ancestral ecological and social processes and feedbacks are still intact. If the feasibility of this strategy can be demonstrated in the Arctic, our improved understanding of the dynamics of change can be applied to regions with greater human modification. Conditions may now be ideal to implement policies to manage Arctic change because recent studies provide the essential scientific understanding, appropriate international institutions are in place, and Arctic nations have the wealth to institute necessary changes, if they choose to do so.

When information about soil quality is complete, wetland creation with a take-it-or-leave-it contract, which specifies wetland size and transfer, yields higher social benefits than if a uniform contract, which offers a payment proportional to the wetland size, had been used. This result points to a paradox because uniform contracts have been used a lot in practice. This article concentrates on the presence of asymmetric information about soil quality as a possible explanation for this paradox. It shows that the choice of instrument for wetland creation has welfare implications. Different contracts typically yield quite different social welfare surpluses and distribution between interest groups. It is not obvious, which of four contracts studied dominates when a farm characteristic affecting costs is unknown to the social planner. The probability distribution of the characteristic, the size of the excess burden, the elasticity of costs and benefits to wetland size and the cost of acquiring missing information influence the outcome.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, antibiotic resistance, and other global challenges pose major collective action problems: A group benefits from a certain action, but no individual has sufficient incentive to act alone. Formal institutions, e.g., laws and treaties, have helped address issues like ozone depletion, lead pollution, and acid rain. However, formal institutions are not always able to enforce collectively desirable outcomes. In such cases, informal institutions, such as social norms, can be important. If conditions are right, policy can support social norm changes, helping address even global problems. To judge when this is realistic, and what role policy can play, we discuss three crucial questions: Is a tipping point likely to exist, such that vicious cycles of socially damaging behavior can potentially be turned into virtuous ones? Can policy create tipping points where none exist? Can policy push the system past the tipping point?

Stratospheric injection of sulphate aerosols has been advocated as an emergency geoengineering measure to tackle dangerous climate change, or as a stop-gap until atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are reduced. But it may not prove to be the game-changer that some imagine.

Systems linking people and nature, known as social-ecological systems, are increasingly understood as complex adaptive systems. Essential features of these complex adaptive systems – such as nonlinear feedbacks, strategic interactions, individual and spatial heterogeneity, and varying time scales – pose substantial challenges for modeling. However, ignoring these characteristics can distort our picture of how these systems work, causing policies to be less effective or even counterproductive. In this paper we present recent developments in modeling social-ecological systems, illustrate some of these challenges with examples related to coral reefs and grasslands, and identify the implications for economic and policy analysis.

"Different uses of the terms 'drivers,' 'variables,' and 'shocks' cause confusion in the literature and in discussions on the dynamics of ecosystems and social???ecological systems. Three main sources of confusion are unclear definition of the system, unclear definition of the role of people, and confusion between variables and drivers. As a contribution to resolving some of the confusion, we offer one interpretation of how the terms might be used."