SEES Fellows: Understanding the Dynamics of Resilience in a Social-Ecological System

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

The project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. Sustainability science is an emerging field that addresses the challenges of meeting human needs without harm to the environment, and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. A strong scientific workforce requires individuals educated and trained in interdisciplinary research and thinking, especially in the area of sustainability science. With SEES Fellowship support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish herself in an independent research career related to sustainability. This fellowship project examines the dynamics of social and ecological resilience. Scientists have long sought to understand how human societies and ecosystems respond to and recover from disruptive events such as natural disasters, economic collapse, war, and changing physical climate. As research in both the natural and social sciences has progressed, it has become clear that human societies and ecosystems are inextricably connected or coupled. Likewise, our examination of the processes and components that influence a system's resilience in the face of disruption must incorporate data from both the social and ecological components of the system. Despite this recognition of the complexity of resilience, it is difficult to find sufficiently comprehensive, multi-year data that includes unpredictable disruptive events. Mazvihwa, Zimbabwe is uniquely situated to provide such data because an ongoing community-based research project has been collecting data about the area's social and ecological conditions since 1980. Mazvihwa has also undergone several significant system shocks (including dramatic change in public health and land access and economic booms/busts) in the last 30 years making it an ideal site for studying resilience. Understanding the dynamics of resilience in coupled social and ecological systems may help communities, cities, and nations better plan for and manage unexpected and disruptive change so that negative consequences are minimized. This research draws on Mazvihwa's remarkably robust dataset that tracks human demography, health, nutrition, agricultural practices, rainfall, land use choices, woodland dynamics, household assets, and land tenure in the area over the last 30 years. The quantitative data are modelled using multiple techniques (including a state-and-transition model, a hierarchical statistical state-space model, and an agent-based model using cellular automata) to allow for a robust exploration of resilience measurements. The researcher will also gather qualitative data that captures community members' experiences with change and resilience and experiment with a variety of techniques for incorporating these qualitative data into the quantitative models. The combination of qualitative and quantitative data provide an even richer understanding of the resilience dynamics at work in this system. Finally, the researcher will use the models to develop a decision support tool that will help community members understand tradeoffs between land use choices and better plan for their future.