糖心TV Complexity Science Events
Complexity Centre and MathSys CDT events carry priority over room D1.07.
To book D1.07 please email Sheetal dot Sharma at warwick dot ac dot uk
Please note that your event booking is for D1.07 only. The adjacent common room is a private area for the MathSys Centre that cannot used as part of your booking.
Complexity forum: John Dearing (Southampton)
Speaker: John Dearing (School of Geography, University of Southampton)
Title: Complex socio-ecological systems: bridging the gap between theory and reality
Abstract:
Chief Scientist Sir John Beddington recently spoke about a Perfect Storm scenario: a not-so-distant future where climate and population drive converging, and declining, trajectories in the availability of food, water, energy and land. It brought to a head the need to understand the impact of human activities on environmental processes in terms of adaptive socio-ecological systems and their associated complex behaviour, operating over diverse spatio-temporal scales. But as reported in international reports, like the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the need is rarely matched by appropriate assessment methods. This talk looks at the gap that exists between system science theory and methods to assess and model the sustainability and resilience of real regional landscapes. It focuses on reconstructing multi-decadal timescales of human activities, environmental processes and ecosystem services as key elements in identifying complex system behaviour. Regional integration of environmental history, palaeoenvironmental reconstructions, document and instrument records is now providing extended timescales within which to observe and model system interactions, thresholds, alternative steady states and critical states.
Further reading: Dearing, J. A., A. K. Braimoh, A. Reenberg, B. L. Turner and S. Van der Leeuw. 2010. Complex Land Systems: the Need for Long Time Perspectives to Assess their Future. Ecology and Society 15 (4): 21.