Topic 1: Emergent Properties of Human-Environment Systems

One potential critique of this chapter is the narrow focus on resilience and vulnerability. Would the chapter benefit from an introduction that addressed a broader range of emergent properties. The proposed focus would be on identifying behaviors and properties that are characteristic of coupled socio-ecological systems, but not of the sub-systems considered independently.

I have raised similar concerns in my comments to the general chapter. In addition, I am having trouble with the notion of "emerging" - what is emerging and what is not. is there a non-emerging change? How do you recognize and how do you measure? 

I also have another issue: are the two notions of vulnerability and resilience always invariably involved in an inverse relationship? Could it possible that the vulnerability is high as also the resilience and vice-versa? In the former case, does it alter the way we can think about sustainable development and human well-being?

Two weeks ago Karina (ASU graduate student) asked Steve Carpenter whether it was appropriate to consider cultural ecosystem services as a product of the natural system.  Steve replied, as I assume most everyone recognized once Karina posed the question, that such services were more appropriately attributed to both systems, or rather, from their relationship.   This would seem to be an emergent property in the whole-greater-than-sum sense, and perhaps one in the complex-adaptive-systems sense.  To some extent, all ecosystem services are this kind of relational emergent property - that is, they don't exist as services per se without a human system seeking value from a natural system. 

I think the chapter would benefit from an introduction that discusses examples of emergent behavior that have been raised previously in the book, but not identified or engaged as such.  Ecosystem services might be an example, depending on how broadly emergence is defined.  Such a configuration might allow the chapter to remain focused on resilience and vulnerability and their relation to sustainability without ignoring the broader concept of emergence.  Conversely, the earlier chapters (especially the human-environment framework chapter and perhaps the ecosystem services chapter) could be revised with an eye toward supporting this aspect of the present chapter.

After the presentation, the Cambridge group discussed whether the chapter would be better called "dynamics of CHES" rather than "emergent properties." This got me thinking about whether resilience, vulnerability and tipping points are really the same units of analysis. In system dynamics, we can distinguish between stocks and flows. A simple test to distinguish between the two involves freezing the system (mentally) and seeing whether you can measure the item in question; if you can, you are likely dealing with a stock; if you can't, it is likely a flow. (For those familiar with energy systems, this is like the difference between kW and kWh).

Vulnerability could surely be measured at any point in the system - indeed, that is the idea behind a vulnerability assessment used in the climate adaptation literature. In a sense, vulnerability is a way to characterize the system at a certain point in time. For an interesting application of these ideas, see Agrawal (2008) "The Role of Local Institutions in Adapting to Climate Change" which was recently published in a World Bank collection (along with other relevant articles, including the piece by Jesse Ribot). Agrawal's piece attempts to classify different types of adaptations, embedded within local institutions: "The review proposes a focus on different forms of mobility, storage, diversification, communal pooling, and exchange in rural settings as the basic mechanisms through which households address riskiness of livelihoods." For the book draft, this kind of research could be a useful complement to ecological work on resilience (assuming resilience is the inverse of vulnerability) within forests and other ecosystems. If we conceive of resilience in this way, which I am not 100% confident is correct, then resilience too is a measure of the state of the system at a given point in time and could be considered a stock.

In contrast, tipping points are a dynamic with a time function; they occur over a time period. For this reason, we could not stop the system and see the tipping point; it is only through the course of time that the change in the system becomes apparent. So, in this sense, a tipping point is like the valve which empties the particular stock (resilience / vulnerability) over time. 

I am not sure if this analysis is correct or useful, but it certainly helped me feel more resolved about how these three ideas could potentially be put together and integrated as like terms in a coherent way.