Saturday, October 20, 2007

The Resilience Science weblog

We have added another blog to our growing blogroll. Whilst not economics, it touches on a number of the same issues are gives a little more "science" linked to the Resilience Alliance "a multidisciplinary research group that explores the dynamics of complex adaptive systems."

They define the social-ecological system as: – an integrated system in which the dynamics of the social and ecosystem domains are strongly linked and of equal weight.

Do equal weightings make sense?

Resilience Science

The Resilience Science weblog is operated by Garry Peterson, a professor in Geography and the School of the Environment at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. It was started in early 2005 by Garry Peterson and Marco Janssen as an experiment to communicate recent work by and of interest to those interested in resilience in social ecological systems.

Currently its contributors are members of Resilience Alliance (RA), a research network of scientists and practitioners from many disciplines who collaborate to explore the dynamics of social-ecological systems. Key RA concepts include resilience, the adaptive cycle, and panarchy. The RA works to develop a practical theoretical foundation for a sustainable civilization. The RA develops sustainability science along three paths:

* Contributing toward theoretical advances in the dynamics of complex adaptive systems
* Supporting rigorous testing of theory via: participatory regional case-studies, adaptive management, minimal-modelling, and the use of scenarios and other qualitative modelling tools.
* Developing guidelines and principles that will enable others to assess the resilience of coupled human-natural systems and develop policy and management tools that support sustainable development


Some interesting reading from a different perspective.

This is a paper I must read - any title that include the word "bandit" deserves credit. I still never know why Science papers tend to have so many authors. What do they all do? Especially if this paper really is only 1 page long. That is about 3 lines each.

Berkes F, Hughes TP, Steneck RS, Wilson J, Bellwood DR, Crona B, Folke C, Gunderson LH, Leslie HM, Norberg J,. Nyström M, Olsson P, Österblom H, Scheffer, M, Worm B. (2006). Globalization, roving bandits and marine resources. Science 311: 1557-1558.

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