Integrating Inquiry and Practice for Rural Resilience

1. Integrating Inquiry and Practice for Rural Resilience Jan Sendzimir International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis Laxenburg, Austria

2. Wicked Problems • Can recognize it - can’t really define it • No single objective function to maximize • Many players working at different levels and using different values that are not commensurate - You can’t add them up

3. Wicked Problems • Problems that are complex all the way down. • They don’t successfully decompose at any one level into units that can be added back up to the whole picture. • Things are entangled within levels and across levels (up and down).

4. One Source of Wicked Problems • Someone decomposed them anyway - ignoring complexity within and between levels to maximize one objective function. • Prostitution Imperative for maximum productivity: everyone reduced to their maximum utility • Farmers = food producers • Non-farmers = cheap labor • Wildlife = pests or aesthetic amenities

5. Outline • Resilience Theory • Ideas relating structure and dynamics to why system persist, collapse and renew • What Makes Systems Resilient? • Adaptive Practices for Resilience • Sustainability Indicators • Adaptive Management in Minnesota and Hungary • Summary

6. System Dynamics Adaptive Cycle(after Holling 1986)return 19

7. Vegetative Scales Boreal forest is patterned across a range of scales. Larger slower structures usually constrain the behaviour of faster smaller scales. Occasionally change at a small and fast scale spreads up to a larger scale.return 1 cm 1 m 100 m 1 km 10 km 1000 km 10 000 yrs 4 region 1 000 yrs 3 forest century 2 patch stand LOG TIME - years 1 decade crown year 0 needle month -1 -2 day -3 hour -4 - 6 - 4 - 2 0 2 4 LOG SPACE- km

8. Vegetative & Atmospheric Scales 1 cm 1 m 100 m 1 km 10 km 1000 km Atmospheric processes occur faster than vegetative processes occurring at the same spatial scale. 10 000 yrs 4 region 1 000 yrs 3 forest century 2 climate change patch stand 1 decade LOG TIME - years crown El Niño year 0 needle month -1 long waves VegetativeStructures -2 day Atmospheric Processes fronts -3 thunderstorms hour -4 - 6 - 4 - 2 0 2 4 LOG SPACE- km

9. Collapse of Resilience • Surprise from Cross-scale Interactions • Occasionally Natural systems develop to a stage of “over-maturity” where elements are over-connected. • They become accidents waiting to happen. • Then collective activities of small scale processes can “cascade upward” and cause the system to flip to another system type.

10. Examples ofMultiple Stable States • Coral Reefs • coral vs. algae • Arid Landscapes • shrubland vs. grassland • Shallow Lakes • eutrophic vs. clear • North Florida Forest • longleaf pine savanna & fire vs. hardwood forest without fire

11. Surprise in Florida Bay Seagrass Clear Water Muddy Water Algae Blooms Florida Bay

12. Ecological Resilience • Measures • System integrity as the capacity to absorb disruption and remain the same kind of ecosystem. • Emerges from cross-scale interactions • Depends upon: • Control of Disturbance jump • Regulation of Renewal

13. Outline • Resilience Theory • Ideas relating structure and dynamics to why system persist, collapse and renew • What Makes Systems Resilient? • Adaptive Practices for Resilience • Sustainability Indicators • Adaptive Management in Minnesota and Hungary • Summary

14. Control of Disturbance Disturbance Frequency and Intensity Technical Restrictions Chesapeake Shellfish Fishery Herbivore grazing/browsing Fire or logging in forests Development in floodplain Local rain cycle in river basins What Promotes Resilience?

15. Control of Disturbance Capacity to Absorb Disturbance Landscape morphometry Room for the River Program - Rhine river Habitat availability Ability to migrate (connectivity of landscape) Spatial Heterogeneity (mangroves, eel grass) Processing and Cycling of Resources Cross-scale functional reinforcement Within-scale functional diversity What Promotes Resilience?

16. Cross-Scale Resilience Overlapping function within scales and functional reinforcement across scales. Use of different resources at same scale Guild A Guild B Guild C Guild D Scale (species body mass) At the same scale species from different guilds specialize in the use of different resources, but each guild can use other resources at lower efficiencies. Species in a guild utilize the same resource, but at different scales in the landscape hierarchyjump

17. Birds and Budworm predation of budworm at different aggregations Use of different resources at same scale Insectivores Granivore Carnivore Nectivore small birds large birds Scale (species body mass) As budworm populations increase and occur larger aggregation both larger birds and birds that would not normally consume budworm switch to the use of budworm. This process provides robust control of budworm populations over a wide range of budworm densities.

18. Regulation of Renewal(or Regenerative potential) jump Stored Resources Soil depth, organic content, seed bank Water (aquifer, lake, river) Nutrients in biomass What Promotes Resilience?

19. Regulation of Renewaljump Facility of Response Recolonization distance Proximity of Youth (Kobe Earthquake) Biodiversity Cross-scale functional diversity Capacity to adapt, to generate novelty, to innovate What Promotes Resilience?

20. Regulation of Renewal (or Regenerative potential) Availability of Information Viability of cultural information transfer- Cultural Capital Language (Norway surrenders to English) Customs (education, discourse) Politics and institutions Human Memory & Population Age Structure Cree People and Caribou (Birkes) What Promotes Resilience?

21. Outline • Resilience Theory • Ideas relating structure and dynamics to why system persist, collapse and renew • What Makes Systems Resilient? • Adaptive Practices for Resilience • Sustainability Indicators • Adaptive Management in Minnesota, Poland and Hungary • Summary

22. Sustainability Indicators • Allow specialists and stakeholders to visualize and describe factors crucial to quality of life in qualitative and quantitative terms. • Are the basis for profound learning when the stakeholders themselves go through a cycle of proposing indicators, measuring them and revising and improving them based on experience.

23. Portugal Days of sunshine per year. Kilometers of clean beach Are people warm and friendly when you walk the street? United States Lock doors of cars and homes? Wild salmon in our streams (Seattle)? Smell sage brush from our windows (Denver)? Will our children move away? Sustainability Indicatorsin two different nations( from Meadows et al. 1998)

24. Values at different levels in the world web ( from Daly 1972, Meadows et al. 1998) Ultimate Ends: Well-being TransformativeMedia Happiness, Harmony, Identity, Fulfillment Community, Enlightenment, Self-Respect Religion & Ethics Intermediate Ends: Human & Social Capital Consumer goods, Communication, Leisure,Health, Wealth, Knowledge, Mobility Political Economy Intermediate Means: Human & Built Capital Science & Technology Labor, Tools, Factories, Processed Raw Materials, Public and Private Infrastructure Ultimate Means: Natural Capital Biosphere, Biogeochemical cycles, Solar Energy, Biodiversity, Earth Materials

25. Mandate to Counter-pose Theory and Practice • Science can’t address problems alone • Control, replication and isolation of single causative variables are impossible in a multi-variate arena (interface of nature/society). • Problem causes and solutions are dynamic • Basic uncertainty emerging from nature is compounded by society’s attempts to learn and manage. We need adaptive means to understand and implement that flexibly integrate theory and practice.

26. Management Pathology:Today’s problem emerges from yesterday’s fix. • Administrative drive for growth narrows policy to achieve efficiency at the expense of awareness about where the system is going. • Typical history: • Broad research of overall system • Initial success in maximizing productivity by reducing system variability • All research focused on increasing efficiency • Catastrophic surprise

27. Variability Reduction Tool Nurseries, Larger Catch capacity Pesticides reduce crop yield variation due to pests CFCs sustain cool temperatures Dikes and channelization contain river level fluctuations Greater mobility decreases the heterogeneity of available skills Standardized fast food Emergent Problem Lost salmon wild stocks New species become pests or new capacities in old species Ozone hole Rising floodplain, lower capacity to absorb floods Whole world is a suburb of L.A. Lost local species, culture, vulnerable food chains (BSE) Management Pathology:Examples of Emergent Problemsfollowing initial success at reducing variability

28. Outline • Resilience Theory • Ideas relating structure and dynamics to why system persist, collapse and renew • What Makes Systems Resilient? • Adaptive Practices for Resilience • Sustainability Indicators • Adaptive Management in Minnesota and Hungary • Summary

29. Adaptive Environmental Assessment is not any one thing • It’s a set of questions, practices and theories that • Have emerged from hard won experience over thirty years. • Can be tailored to support responses to wicked problems • Understanding that evolves with the system • Policy that flexes to changes in the environment • Actions that manage and probe the system • Monitoring of actions and their effects • Linking of inquiry and practice in a functional cycle

30. Learning That Persistently Adapts • Truth is not constant - Social and natural systems continue to change • Initial responses to crises were not as important as the sustained capability to learn and respond accordingly.

31. AEA Processes Linked in a Cycle of Integrated Learning Policy as Hypothesis Management Actions as Tests Assessment Evaluation

32. Surprise in Florida Bay Seagrass Clear Water Muddy Water Algae Blooms Florida Bay

33. Florida Bay Hypotheses Rising Bay Outhouse Bay Senile Bay Topless Bay Thirsty Bay Strangled Bay

34. AEA applied in the Everglades • Wading bird populations have declined dramatically (as much as 95 percent) over the past 70 years in South Florida. • In an AEA process, convened in 1989, a number of alternative hypotheses were posed to explain these population declines .

35. Everglades Hypotheses • - Shrunken Habitat: • The conversion of portions of the Everglades by agriculture and urbanization has decreased the original area to half its size. This area has low biological productivity per unit area, so loss of productive habitat has lead to lower nesting populations. • - Decreased Flow: • The development of the Everglades involved drainage and diversion of much of the water in south Florida to the extent that much less water flows through the park. These lower water flows have caused dramatic declines in biological productivity at the estuarine fringe of mangroves, a border area that used to hold the densest nesting colonies.

36. Everglades Hypotheses • - Damped Fluctuations of Water Level: • Water levels fluctuate seasonally in South Florida, driving the ecology of the Everglades. These fluctuations provide the means of food production and delivery. Fish populations thrive and reproduce in times of flooding and are concentrated by lowering water levels to the point where wading birds can easily feed on them. Water management schedules for canals in the Everglades has changed these hydrological patterns to the point where they are not synchronized with wading bird nesting cycles. • - Distant Magnet: • The decreases in nesting populations in the Everglades are matched by increases in other parts of the Southeastern United States, Louisiana and the Carolinas for example. Population declines in the Everglades may not wholly reflect lowered ecological conditions there so much as better or improving conditions elsewhere that have drawn the populations to distant sites.

37. Everglades Hypotheses • - Mercury: • Mercury concentrations have increased in the atmosphere over this century, and many wetland soils absorb and concentrate deposition from the air. Anaerobic water conditions can mobilize this metal from the soil, and it can pass up the food chain to wading birds. Over time the latent toxic effects of mercury have decreased the nesting success of wading birds. • - Parasites: • : Increased agriculture upstream of the Everglades has released progressively larger amounts of nutrients into the surface water, and populations of parasites have thrived and increased as a result. The increased burden of parasites has diverted metabolic energy normally given to reproduction and thereby lowered the success of nesting of wading birds.

38. Adaptive Science and Practice in Minnesota Prairie Streams • Effective Collaboration • Scientists provide theory and supervise fieldwork • Farmers manage cattle according to experimental design and help monitor results • Local citizens help monitor stream conditions • Mutual Benefit • Stream conditions improve • Erosion reduced, water quality improved • Diversity of habitats and species increased • Farmers increase income and keep their farm • Local citizens learn science, ecology and farming and spread the knowledge informally • Advance ecological theory on disturbances

39. Cycles of Erosion and Grazing A. B. C.

40. Adaptive Science and Practice in a Hungarian River Basin • Ecology • Study of flipping behavior of shallow lakes builds a bio-physical model • Socio-Economics • Computer simulation links bio-physical model to economic decisions in the basin • Adaptive Integration of Ecology and Socio-Economics for both stakeholders and scientists • explore alternative futures using the model and suggest policies • Monitor policy implementation and revisit assumptions • Suggest new experiments and policies

41. Summary • No scale is more important than others. Global change doesn’t make localtransition irrelevant • Key goal: integrate inquiry and practice across all scales. • Adaptive Management is a useful framework for such integration: • To start and sustain a dialogue • To adaptively link changes in understanding with innovative action.

42. SummaryWhy is this so rare? • Practice: People are most used to giving or taking orders. • Theory: We are just beginning to understand how nature and society are structured and operate. • Integrating practice and theory into a workable whole that can adapt to changes in the world has been accomplished rarely at one scale: farming, fishing, hunting.