Dennis Ojima: Toll on the Commons: What have we taken and what will be the future costs?

For millennia, humans have harnessed common resources — atmosphere, water, land, and biotic resources — to enrich and nurture their well-being. Society now appropriates a large fraction of global primary productivity the land systems can provide. We produce more reactive nitrogen compounds than are produced naturally, and we have altered the atmospheric and ocean chemistry in ways that are affecting the earth system processes we depend upon. We are now faced with serious degradation of ecosystem services, and strategies are needed that will set a path toward sustainability and stewardship of social-ecological systems. Given our current knowledge of how ecosystems operate and how human activities have altered ecosystem services, we need to develop strategies that restore these ecosystem services. These strategies can be developed to reduce catastrophic collapse of social-ecological systems in ways that enhance system resilience and lead to sustainability of ecosystem services. A select set of strategies will be explored to deal with ecosystem resilience relative to security of energy, food, and water resources.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Bren
• School
• Environmental
• Climate
• Change
• Ojima
• Tradgedy of the Commons