Delayed behavioural shifts undermine the sustainability of social–ecological systems

Abstract

Natural habitat destruction and fragmentation generate a time-delayed loss of species and associated ecosystem services. As social-ecological systems (SESs) depend on a range of ecosystem services, lagged ecological dynamics may affect their long-term sustainability. Here, we investigate the role of consumption changes for sustainability, under a time-delayed ecological feedback on agricultural production. We use a stylized model that couples the dynamics of biodiversity, technology, human demography and compliance with a social norm prescribing sustainable consumption. Compliance with the sustainable norm reduces both the consumption footprint and the vulnerability of SESs to transient overshoot-and-collapse population crises. We show that the timing and interaction between social, demographic and ecological feedbacks govern the transient and long-term dynamics of the system. A sufficient level of social pressure (e.g. disapproval) applied on the unsustainable consumers leads to the stable coexistence of unsustainable and sustainable or mixed equilibria, where both defectors and conformers coexist. Under bistability conditions, increasing extinction debts reduces the resilience of the system, thus favouring abrupt regime shifts towards unsustainable pathways. Given recent evidence of large extinction debts, such results call for farsightedness and a better understanding of time delays when studying the sustainability of coupled SESs.

Understanding extinction debts: spatio–temporal scales, mechanisms and a roadmap for future research

“…'plants', 'bryophytes', 'mammals', 'reptiles', 'dragonflies', 'grasshoppers' in Dullinger et al 2013). Adding to this picture, extinction debts have been shown to decrease the sustainability of socio-ecological systems (Lafuite andLoreau 2017, Lafuite et al 2017), reinforcing the consensus about the importance of biodiversity in providing ecosystem functions and services that benefit humanity (Cardinale et al 2012, Hooper et al 2012). All studies are listed in Supplementary material Appendix 1 Table A1 (studies at the continental (n = 2), global (n = 4) or microcosmic (n = 1) scales were not included).…”

“…these estimates; Isbell et al 2015). Adding to this picture, extinction debts have been shown to decrease the sustainability of socio-ecological systems (Lafuite andLoreau 2017, Lafuite et al 2017), reinforcing the consensus about the importance of biodiversity in providing ecosystem functions and services that benefit humanity (Cardinale et al 2012, Hooper et al 2012.…”

An ecological theory of changing human population dynamics

“…The increases in growth have been attributed to a decline in death rates following improvements in hygiene and sanitation, enhanced nutrition, early medical care and clean water (Preston, 1980;Samir & Lutz, 2017). Lee and Tuljapurkar (2008) In two recent papers, and Lafuite, Mazancourt, and Loreau (2017) modelled the change in the human…”

On Embedding Meta-ecosystems into a Socioecological Framework: A Reply to Renaud et al.

“…We see some potential value of such a socio-ecological perspective, for example to address specific questions about dynamical feedbacks between humans and the environment (e.g., on the environmental sustainability of human practices [7]). However, it is noteworthy that humaninduced effects on meta-ecosystem dynamics are already integrated within the variation in spatial flow values considered in meta-ecosystem models (e.g., variance and mean quantity/quality of flows) [4].…”

“…1B) strongly feed back on mental models (arrow 3); in the geese example, this would happen if tundra loss is sufficiently important for public opinion to change agricultural or hunting practices towards "tundra-sustainable" ones. To analyse such scenarios, the metaecosystem framework could be embedded into a socio-ecological perspective in stylized models explicitly focusing on these feedback links (bold arrows in Fig.1B), similarly to approaches proposed in the study of biodiversity -human society interactions [7]. In such models, however, explicit consideration of meta-ecosystem dynamics is not needed, merely the effects that these meta-ecosystem dynamics produce on ecosystem properties of values for humans.…”