Event Information
On monday 10th of november an EEU seminar will be held by Anne-Sophie Crépin and she will be presenting a paper on the topic of: Economic management of cascading regime shifts in ecosystems. Anne-Sophie is primarily the Deputy Director at the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics and also a Principal Researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Anne-Sophie focuses on how human economic behaviour and incentives interact with ecosystem dynamics and thresholds, and how we can design better policies and management strategies to avoid abrupt system failures and support long-term wellbeing.
Abstract: Connections between ecosystems can contribute to the spread of regime shifts to other ecosystems, potentially creating cascading effects. Regime shifts are large, abrupt, and persistent changes in ecosystems' structure and functions. They can occur in many types of ecosystems and substantially influence services that these ecosystems supply and on which people's welfare depends. Hence the need to scrutinize these cascading dynamics and their bearing on ecosystem outcomes and welfare targets. Here, we explore the impacts of such connections on the interplay between people's welfare and the ecosystems they use. To overcome limited data availability, we build a modeling framework that represents changes over time in connected ecosystems that can exhibit regime shifts. We focus on ecosystem services such as pollution absorption or resource production. This approach enables a wide range of modeling experiments by varying functions and parameters that characterize the dynamics within and between ecosystems, as well as socioeconomic parameters such as prices and discount rate. We use this framework to investigate ecosystem and welfare impacts of these connections. We identify clear mechanisms, through which connectivity can either trigger or prevent a regime shift in a specific ecosystem. We also identify the ecological and socio-economic characteristics that drive the outcome in either direction depending on whether the ecosystems are optimally managed or not managed at all. Finally, we present more detailed results for special cases of connected lakes when the connections between ecosystems are small.