Foresight is required to enforce sustainability under time-delayed biodiversity loss

Abstract

Natural habitat loss and fragmentation generate a time-delayed loss of species and associated ecosystem services. Since 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 in sustainability enforcement, 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 to a social norm prescribing sustainable consumption. Compliance to 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 time delays reduces the basin of attraction of the mixed equilibrium, thus resulting in abrupt regime shifts towards unsustainable pathways. Given recent evidence of large ecological relaxation rates, such results call for farsightedness and a better understanding of lag effects when studying the sustainability of coupled SESs.

Integrating evolutionary theory and social–ecological systems research to address the sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene

“…Evolutionary game theory may be valuable in understanding the dynamics of behaviour change and the factors affecting the adoption of sustainable behavioural norms. For example, a model by Lafuite et al [87] shows how time-lags between the use of extractive agricultural technologies that cause biodiversity loss and the subsequent loss of ecosystem services that might result from biodiversity can inhibit the adoption of sustainable norms, leading to a population-overshootand-collapse crisis. Furthermore, a model by Schlüter et al…”