Transcript Forecasting Resilience of Social Ecological Landscapes Some Tools to Help Us Understand This Thing Called “Sustainability” Lilian Alessa, Andrew Kliskey, Mark Altaweel Resilience and Adaptive.

Forecasting Resilience of Social
Ecological Landscapes
Some Tools to Help Us Understand This Thing
Called “Sustainability”
Lilian Alessa, Andrew Kliskey, Mark Altaweel
Resilience and Adaptive Management Group, Water
and Environmental Research Center, University of
Alaska; Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity,
Arizona State University, University of Chicago,
Argonne National Lab
A Few Sustainability Myths
1. Sustainability is about the environment.
2. Consumer choices and grassroots activism
works.
3. There is no single critical piece of the
sustainability challenge.
Lemonik, 2009. Princeton, New Jersey.
Humour Me…..
• Sustainability is possibly one of the most
misunderstood words in common usage.
• Social structure, particularly agent types,
are powerful determinants of emergent SES
patterns.
• The environment has become synonymous
with “green” but we are more of a STS than
an SES (something I’d like you to jot down
for your Immersion Experience tomorrow).
Water is the Critical Piece
• Entering the “Century of Water”
• Most issues depend on water availability,
distribution and/or quality.
• Transitions from common pool resource to
trade commodity.
• Several “solutions” are not possible unless
water is factored in.
Trends in Water Resources
• Not just availability but also quality, we can only “clean” so well.
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FishR_SP
Discharge (ft3)
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Also see White, Hinzman, Alessa, JGR Biogeosciences, 2007
Dealing with Future Change Requires a
Paradigm Shift in “Science”
Growing evidence that technological interventions
alone are not effective and may drive critical
changes in water use patterns. --UN Commission on
Sustainable Development (1995).
1. Our understanding of the social dynamics in social
ecological systems is poor.
2. Our incorporation of scale is sloppy.
3. Our treatment of SES is oversimplified.
These may represent some of our greatest vulnerabilities
to effectively coping with change.
Scale
ArcticRIMS_UNH
Alessa et al. 2009. In Press, Sustainability
Screen shot of SES types paper
How Could We Possibly Fail?
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•
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Scale
Messy Social Ecological Systems
Underestimation of Social Dynamics
Hubris: we will engineer a solution or
‘sustainability as a hobby’
Technology Networks
Learning
Exposure
Perceptions,
Values
Resources
Policies
Disasters/Conflicts
Vulnerable
Desire,
Means
Resilient
Gaining an Edge:The Tools
• Social Ecological Hotspots Mapping.
• The Arctic Water Resources Vulnerability
Index (AWRVI).
• Forecasting Environmental Resilience of
Arctic Landscapes (FERAL).
MapAssessModel
Social Ecological Systems Hotspot
Mapping
• Takes social and biophysical values and
uses GIS to map the coupled social
ecological landscape.
• Gives us information about where specific
dynamics exist.
• Was highlighted as innovative science by
NSF in Spring 2008.
Screen shot of paper
Screen shot of paper
Adapting to Change: AWRVI
• The Arctic Water Resources Vulnerability Index:
AWRVI (“Ar-Vee”).
• Tool to assess status of water resources at the
watershed scale.
• Unifies western and traditional knowledge systems.
• Can be used to determine resilience and best
strategies for development.
First and only of its kind for high latitudes and
local scales.
Environmental Vulnerability Indices
• EVI: United Nations Environment
Programme (2001).
• UN Commission on Sustainable
Development (1995).
• Global Commission on Fresh Water
Resources (2004).
• Water recognized as single-most important
variable in rapid change.
Emergent tools
agent-based models
(ABM)
Agent Based Models
• Specify the rules of behavior of individuals
(agents) as well as rules of interaction
• Simulate many agents using a computer
model
• Explore the consequences of the agentlevel rules on the population as a whole
• “Simple” models to produce complex
behaviors
“How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on”
--Antoine du Sainte-Exupery
Agents and Systems
• agents have connections to each other, and
form a system and operate in an
environment with feedbacks
• agents behave autonomously thus they each
have their own parameters (data) and
behaviors
• systems change once the agents affect the
threshold in a significant way
Agent Based Models
Are not
• An attempt to perfectly reproduce reality (usually)
Are
• Are a tool to gain intuition about the system of interest
without needing to know all of the details
• A tool to run “experiments” which cannot be performed
in real life
• A tool to generate and test hypotheses about what is
occurring
• A tool to refine data collection foci
Big Questions
• What drives the human hydrological
system?
• How do societies ‘overshoot’ their
resources (both social and physical)?
• How can we learn to avoid this fate?
(Should we? If so, why?)
• Move beyond rhetoric.
Source: Alessa , Kliskey, and Altaweel. 2009, In Press, Sustainability
Technology Networks
Learning
Exposure
Perceptions,
Values
Resources
Policies
Disasters/Conflicts
Vulnerable
Desire,
Means
Resilient
Forecasting Environmental Resilience of Arctic
Landscapes (FERAL)
Developing “Real” Rules
• Too often, ABMs rely on ‘artificial’ rules
(e.g., games).
• Or ….”what ifs”.
• It is critical that rules be derived from the
messy, real world.
• Humans are not logical but they are
predictable.
"Man is a complex being; he makes the deserts bloom and lakes die."
— Gil Stern
Developing Real Rules
• There are three rules of thumb to
successfully developing rule sets for ABM.
1. Observe your system to the point of intimacy.
2. Establish colleagues in it who will assist you
with field work and data collection.
3. Include modelers at the outset, not once you
think it would be “nice” to model.
Screen shot of JASSS 2 paper
Your Immersion Experience
• Tomorrow you will go out into three “SES”
(two being primarily “STS”).
• As yourself “who/what are the objects in the
landscape” (e.g., people, terrain,
interventions, others?).
• For each of these objects, what would you
need to know about them to develop
meaningful rule sets?
Applying Agent-Based Modeling
Source: Altaweel, Alessa, and Kliskey, JASSS, Forthcoming
Values held toward water
18-39 years
40-59 years
Most important value of water
drinking
travel
washing and cleaning
recreation
subsistence uses
60-99 years
cultural activities
biological
Source: Alessa , Kliskey, Williams. Society & Natural Resources. 2008.
Current Social
Step 1: Assess water source selection process
with observed trends and
in
determine consequences of water
FERAL
selection choices.
ABM
Integrated Models: Example Runtime Output 2
Maximum
River Discharge
Quantity change belief
Mean
How People Make Choices: Why We Need to Know This
Social influence and behavior affects water use
The thought process
Person’s decision
A person’s ideas
People make decisions according to their life experiences,
social relationships, and perceptions of what is around them.
Different people have different influence and goals that influences
other people around them: three agent types, alpha, beta and gamma.
Decision Making: Divisions in the Decision Process
Plot points show agents.
Red=Reject
Blue=Accept
1
10
Results show cliques
forming and social position
of those rejecting
an idea.
Different agent types affect
whether decisions made result
In collective or individual
benefits
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Decision Making: Representation in Social Space
10
1
Black=Reject
Light Blue=Accept
Over a few ticks, more
people agree to accept the
initial idea. However, this
often occurs if leaders agre
initially and coordinate thei
efforts.
Social network
representation of
relationships.
Negative Relationships
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Changing Viewpoints: Effect on Decision Making
Group vs. Individual
goals
FERAL: White Mountain Scenario
White Mountain
Municipal Water source
World Wind 3D
visualization view
agent
Fish River
10-Year Scenario: Travel To River
Fish River
agents
White Mountain
Agents concentrate at river
sources nearest to
White Mountain.
10-Year Scenario: Tracking Total Movements
Aggregate agent movements during each
Time tick.
Concentration of movements
over entire simulation and time.
Municipal and non-municipal sources fluctuate seasonally.
agents accessing
the municipal source
house icon varies in size based
on population levels
Colors in water sources indicate relative levels, blue
colors indicate high volume, while red is lower volume.
10-Year Scenario: Travel To River
Fish River
agents
White Mountain
Evolution of Water Use on the Seward
Peninsula
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18000
Population
180
16000
Water use
160
14000
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12000
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6000
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1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
In: Alessa, Kliskey, Busey, Hinzman, White. Global Environmental Change, 2008.
0
Water Use (litres per capita per day)
Population
20000
Take Home Messages
• Many of the challenges in sustainability are
not ‘fixable’ using technologies or good will.
• Agents drive the system from the bottom up
and some dynamics simply aren’t pretty.
• A powerful approach to understanding
consequences is to use agent based models.
• ABMs allow the unpredictable outcomes of
simple choices and changes in patterns of use
to be visualized in virtual worlds.
Acknowledgements
• The RAM Group at UAA
• My colleagues at the International Arctic Research Center,
and the Institute for Northern Engineering, UAF
• My colleagues at the Center for Social Dynamics and
Complexity, Arizona State University
• Fabrice Renaud, Head, Environmental Assessment and
Resource Vulnerability Section, United Nations University
• Volker Grimm, Director, Center for Environmental Research,
Leipzig-Halle, Germany.
• The National Science Foundation.