1. SOS 510 Perspectives on Sustainability Chuck Redman Oct. 29, 2018
Integrating or Separating Resilience Thinking and Sustainability Science
SOS 510
Perspectives on Sustainability
Chuck Redman
Oct. 29, 2018

2. Adaptation Transformation
Major, fundamental change
Action due to recognition of secular stresses
Create new order, open ended
Reorder system dynamics
Agency, leadership, and power enable change
Incremental change
Respond to shock
Maintain previous order
Build adaptive capacity into current system
Context and emergent properties guide trajectory

3. What is Sustainability? What is Resilience?
Resilience: The ability to maintain functions and identity in face of change
Sustainability: enhance environmental integrity, human well-being, and social justice
But one must ask:
Of what?
For whom?
For how long?
At what cost?

4. Resilience Theory Sustainability Science Approach Approach
Origin in ecology, nature is optimal
Change is normal, multiple stable states
Experience adaptive cycle gracefully
Result of change is open ended, emergent
Concerned with system dynamics that enhance resilience
Can be desirable or undesirable
Stakeholder input may be limited
Origin in social sciences, society is flawed
Envision the future, act to make it happen
Utilize transition management approach
Desired results of change are specified in advance
Focus is on interventions that lead to sustainability measures
Should only be desirable
Stakeholder input is essential for future scenarios

5. Is there a problem?
When I started as a grad student we were working toward similar human/natural system integration; we have not reached our goal
The big challenges of the world have been known and worked on by the best minds with huge funding, yet we still are threatened by them
LTER and other SES projects don’t seem to attract meaningful interest from community decision-makers
SOS (and CAP LTER) started with strong engineering, planning, architecture components. Drifted away as faculty focus on coupled socio-ecological systems as the integrating framework
Hence, the development of URExSRN and SETS

6. Social, Ecological, Technological System

7. Intellectual Misalignment: Hurdle to Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Each discipline is defined by its own set of rules
Communication Differences (e.g., vocabulary)
Objectives of research (answers we seek)
What is acceptable knowledge?
Disciplinary methods (i.e., what is data, what is accepted as proof, what are appropriate methods)
How does the system I study work, does it have a distinctive logic?

8. How can we anticipate future sustainability research?
Trade-offs: What trade-offs are inherent in coupled social- ecological-technological systems? What are the tools available to recognize and navigate those trade-offs?
Understanding uncertainty: Which uncertainties in complex adaptive systems are reducible and which are irreducible? Will these uncertainties grow or diminish over time?
Understanding innovation: How does innovation occur and spread? What technical, economic, and social conditions must be met for technologies to succeed?

9. Concepts to organize our thinking
Knowledge networks
Mental models
Intervention points
Triggering events
Regime shifts
Projections of the future
Scenarios of the future

10. A Nobel Prize if you can solve these!
How do we convert avoided future costs into current revenue streams?
How do we embed flexibility and redundancy into a fully efficient system?
How can long term sensibilities and values be integrated into short term management and decision making?