Integrating Research Tools to Support the Management of Social-Ecological Systems Under Climate Change

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Developing resource management strategies in the face of climate change is complicated by the considerable uncertainty associated with projections of climate and its impacts and by the complex interactions between social and ecological variables. The broad, interconnected nature of this challenge has resulted in calls for analytical frameworks that integrate research tools and can support natural resource management decision making in the face of uncertainty and complex interactions. We respond to this call by first reviewing three methods that have proven useful for climate change research, but whose application and development have been largely isolated: species distribution modeling, scenario planning, and simulation modeling. Species distribution models provide datadriven estimates of the future distributions of species of interest, but they face several limitations and their output alone is not sufficient to guide complex decisions for how best to manage resources given social and economic considerations along with dynamic and uncertain future conditions. Researchers and managers are increasingly exploring potential futures of social-ecological systems through scenario planning, but this process often lacks quantitative response modeling and validation procedures. Simulation models are well placed to provide added rigor to scenario planning because of their ability to reproduce complex system dynamics, but the scenarios and management options explored in simulations are often not developed by stakeholders, and there is not a clear consensus on how to include climate model outputs. We see these strengths and weaknesses as complementarities and offer an analytical framework for integrating these three tools. We then describe the ways in which this framework can help shift climate change research from useful to usable.

A distribution analysis of the central Maya lowlands ecoinformation network: its rises, falls, and changes

“…When placed within a temporal framework, changes to these symbols and to Maya centers may be encompassed in a concern for path dependent decision making . The IHOPE-Maya research design closely parallels the "integrated research tools" design proposed by Miller and Morisette (2014) for making "actionable social science intelligence" of global change information for future decisionmaking proposes through the use of distribution analyses, simulations, and well-defined scenarios. Heckbert et al's (2016) work noted previously represents a simulation approach to ancient Maya development.…”

“…Maya elites fared variably in the adaptive success of their decisions. When these decisions are studied relative to other variables in the system, they have the ability to offer actionable social science guidance that may be of use to modern policy makers as suggested by Miller and Morisette (2014).…”

“…There has been a long-standing discussion of culture in this sense dating back to the "invisible hand" proposals of Adam Smith (1759Smith ( , 1776 beginning in the late 1700s and later including Durkheim (1893Durkheim ( /1960Durkheim ( , 1897Durkheim ( /1951 and Kroeber (1917), among others. Redfield and Villa Rojas (1934) discussed it locally in the context of their Chan Kom studies, and the concept is naturally used in the recent complex systems modeling literature (e.g., Holland 1998, Mitchell 2011, Miller and Morisette 2014. In the cases of ancient Maya states, culture is particularly important because it, rather than an institutional state, was the framework in which decisions were made.…”

The impact of personal beliefs on climate change: the “battle of perspectives” revisited

“…Agent-based models may help to close this gap and support the analysis of effects of bounded rationality and behavioral adaptation on the climate system and the world economy. The paper thus follows calls for more agent-based models and for the importance of acknowledging evolutionary processes in the climate change discussion (Patt and Siebenhüner 2005;Van den Bergh 2007;Balbi and Giupponi 2010;Gsottbauer and van den Bergh 2013;Miller and Morisette 2014).…”

“…In a literature review on agent-based modelling of socio-ecosystems in the field of climate change, Balbi and Giupponi (2010) found no model other than Janssen and de Vries (1998), combining an evolutionary agent perspective with a world climate system in order to analyze the link between climate change and boundedly rational adaptive agents. Miller and Morisette (2014) also only name two papers except Janssen and de Vries (1998) tackling climate change with a focus on adaptive decision making (i.e. Ziervogel et al 2005 andAurbacher et al 2013 which have been mentioned above as focusing on land use).…”