 In the previous module, we talked about industrial ecology as a framework for looking at the relationship between industrial economic activity and the natural environment. Although the industrial ecology paradigm can provide a lot of insight, it can also be somewhat limiting in placing too much emphasis on technology while failing to recognize a more complex dynamic at play behind this. The natural environment is deeply embedded within the socio-cultural fabric of societies around the world. What may at first glance look like an industrial problem of efficiency, pollution or over usage is often really a socio-economic issue and when we expand that we find behind it is really a cultural one. This of course vastly expands the complexity of what we're dealing with but it is important in identifying all the moving parts on all the different levels. In this video, we'll be looking at the model of a socio-ecological system that is specifically focused on the interaction between the ecological and social domains, trying to model and analyze them as an integrated system. Complex environmental problems such as climate change, soil loss, biodiversity loss and groundwater scarcity have been constantly increasing in relevance in both the scientific, policy and public domains. The experiences of various scholars have led to the insight that these complex problems cannot be analyzed with disciplinary approaches alone. They have to be dealt with in an integrative interdisciplinary way that considers the interaction between social and ecological systems. In the last decade, significant progress has been made with respect to interdisciplinary investigation and modeling of coupled socio-ecological systems. Various research approaches have been developed and applied to different studies in which the interaction between the social system and the ecological system have been explicitly considered. These approaches include combining material or energy flows and economic flows, modeling human behavior and drivers that specifically impact on some aspect of the ecosystem, identifying modeling and trying to quantify specific ecosystem services within an economic context, or studying the resilience and adaptive management of socio-ecological systems. Most all of these different approaches take systems theory as their theoretical underpinning, using it to look at and place emphasis on various aspects to the socio-ecological interaction. A socio-ecological system is a type of complex adaptive system composed of two primary subsystems, a human society and economy on the one hand and a biological ecology on the other. They are systems in that they are composed of a set of parts that are interdependent in affecting some joint outcome. They are complex in that they typically consist of a very many parts interacting in a non-linear network fashion. They are adaptive in that the components in the system change their state in response to that of others, and in this capacity, socio-ecological systems exhibit strong co-evolution as they develop over time. Like all complex systems, socio-ecological systems are multi-dimensional. They exist on many qualitatively different levels. Within the ecological domain we have basic geological processes taking place in the hydrological cycle, mineral cycles, atmosphere and various biological processes. Within the social domain we have technology and industrial infrastructure, economic, social and cultural institutions. All of these levels are interacting and co-evolving. Added to this, socio-ecological systems exist on all scales from the individual to an agricultural farm to a metropolitan area to a nation state to the whole global economy and the supporting biosphere. The theory and science of socio-ecological systems is then focused on these two subsystems and how they interact. So we'll firstly provide some generic description of these two major subsystems before going on to talk about their interaction. Like all complex systems, both ecologies and economies are regulated on the macro scale by a set of feedback loops, but the internal dynamics of each system is governed by a different set of feedback loops. As we've previously discussed, natural ecologies are governed by the laws of thermodynamics. The input of energy from the Sun and Earth's core drives the whole system, and this energy is processed through networks of connections within abiotic and biotic processes. This is a complex system that has evolved over millions of years. Through this, evolution negative feedback loops have developed that work to stabilize the system on various levels. As we've previously talked about, ecosystems in all phases will attempt to move away from thermodynamic equilibrium, selecting the components and the organization that yields the maximum flux of useful energy throughout the system and the most energy stored in the system corresponding to the highest level of what's called ascendancy. The social component is what we might call an economy, consisting of both social institutions and technology infrastructure, what we can call a socio-technical system. An economy is an engineered construct produced by human beings for human beings. This industrial ecology has also evolved over a prolonged period according to the logic of providing humans with the things that they need and want in an economic fashion and also in congruence with the set of cultural and social institutions of those societies. Today, on the macro level, this is done primarily through the vast supply chain network of our global economy and regulated by public policy and increasingly market mechanisms. These market mechanisms recognize value in terms of utility, which can be correlated to the desire or want of some economic agent. Here, the regulatory feedback loops are structured around industrial supply and demand. The interaction between these two systems then involves the exchange of energy, matter and information. Human society and economy is deeply dependent upon the natural environment and this flow of natural resources of all kind from the ecosystem to the economy is called ecosystem services. These include broad categories of services like provisioning such as the production of food and water, regulation such as the control of climate and diseases, supporting such as nutrient cycles and crop pollination, and cultural such as spiritual and recreational benefits. Inversely, we can look at the exchange from the economy to the biosphere, which includes both energy, materials and information, economies as dissipative systems take in large amounts of energy and materials and export waste material back to the ecosystem. But as we've previously talked about, humans can also now be understood as the regulators of earth systems. Human society plays a fundamental role in designing ecosystems around the planet. We have essentially replaced many natural regulatory processes with those that we've engineered. Whether we're talking about altering hydrological cycles through irrigation, nitrogen cycles through agriculture, carbon cycles through combustion, or just the sheer movement of biomass, we engineer all of earth's systems on almost all scale. Systematic systems such as socio-ecological systems are regulated by distributed feedback loops. For a system to be under regulation or under control means that it has negative feedback counterbalancing the different forces. We can see these feedback loops everywhere in economies and ecologies. A system becomes out of control when these negative feedback loops become broken and we see this often with socio-ecological systems, where humans can gain economic value from the natural environment without the economic expenditure to balance it. Thus, the system stays developing off in that direction, but equally it happens the other way around when economic activity breaks some natural feedback loop and some element within the ecosystem is released from the natural feedback loop that stabilizes it. Such as with invasive species where we put a creature into an environment without any natural predator, leading to a destabilization of the ecosystem. As we talked about when discussing the Anthropocene, human society and economy has evolved with the natural environment over thousands of years, starting out like all other creatures subject to the same natural feedback loops and regulation within the ecosphere. But through successive technological and economic transformations, we've developed engineered environments with their own set of internal economic feedback loops, its own value system that has become largely decoupled from that of the natural environment. In order for the feedback loop to work, there has to be some uniform value. In order to be able to enable feedback to regulate the two systems in an integrated fashion, we need to define some common metric of value. And this in many ways defines a big part of the challenge presented today, trying to correlate value between the two systems and quantify it. We understand to some extent what economic value is, but defining what exactly the value of an ecosystem service is would appear to be much more complex. What we're trying to do though is by valuing ecosystem services be able to manage them through economic feedback loops. By incorporating the value of these things into economic accounting, try to make people financially accountable for their effects on the natural environment. Ecosystem services only really define their ecosystems value in relation to human utility, but ecosystems require the functioning of many internal subsystems in order to enable the functioning of the whole system. Plants might need nitrogen fixing microbes that will themselves be of no economic value, but are still required to maintain that ecosystem in a functional state. This intrinsic value required to maintain the ecosystem in a functional state so that it can render services cannot be easily given immediate economic value. It is in a sense a public good and requires an associated socio-cultural framework for supporting it. The derivative value of the ecosystem may be given immediate economic value, but the primary value that supports the maintenance of the ecosystem is of a different kind and may require social and cultural coordination. This is described by the so-called tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons or social dilemma is a dynamic where it is in the best interest of each individual to overuse a resource unless everyone else does likewise. The dilemma arises when members of a group share a common good such as an ecosystem when this common good is rivalrous and non-excludable, meaning that anyone can use the resource but there is a finite amount of resources available and is therefore prone to over-exploitation. The tragedy of the commons has proven to be a core dynamic within the management of many socio-ecological systems around the world, from the management of forestry to pasture and in particular fisheries, many of which have collapsed due to over-exploitation and lack of solutions to the social dilemma. In the relationship between a society and its ecosystem, there is invariably going to be some commons in the form of ecosystems functions that are required to deliver the ecosystem services such as clean water so that people can go fishing or clean air. These are most effectively managed through social and cultural frameworks of coordination. Traditional societies, through their close interaction with their local ecosystem and strong social and cultural integration, were able to live sustainably for prolonged periods using traditional social institutions to manage the commons. With the Industrial Revolution, many of these traditional socio-cultural institutions were disintegrated and the modern nation state became the new form of social contract that has in many ways taken over this function providing the social institutions for managing the commons. But over the past few decades, as economies have developed beyond national borders into an increasingly integrated global economy with an associated effect on the global biosphere, there are now many questions remaining as to whether the nation-based social contract is still fit for service within this new global context. The tragedy of the commons is essentially a failure of trust, coordination and social institutions. When everyone can trust everyone to cooperate, then often an optimal global outcome can be achieved. But it typically requires some form of social contract to achieve that and those social contracts are enabled by strong social institutions of some kind. Socioecological systems are highly complex in that they involve not only technology, economic frameworks and the social institutions that we've been discussing, but also a strong cultural dimension that cannot be simply ignored and may be found behind many of the most important issues. For many people around the world, the ecosystem within which they inhabit forms an integral part of their way of life and interpretation of reality. That interpretation forms the basis for how they interact with the natural environment. Some societies revere their natural environment while others would appear to care little about it. And this cultural aspect plays a big part in the whole dynamic within socioecological systems. All individuals and societies have a schema with which they interpret their environment. A somewhat coherent belief system about how the world is and their place within it. On a cultural level, people live their lives based upon a narrative that is emotionally and conceptually appealing and endorsing. It doesn't have to be logically consistent. For example, we have been communicating the theory of biological evolution for over a century now, but it's reported that 40% of Americans don't adhere to it. Not because of its logical inconsistencies, but because of its lack of consistency with their pre-existing schema. People, groups and whole societies go on functioning by creating narratives that offer them a coherent picture of how the world works at a level of complexity that they can deal with. If something doesn't fit into this narrative or is simply too complex a story, the human psychology is not short of mechanisms for filtering it out. People may well simply ignore data and information and adopt or create simple narratives that protect them from a reality that they do not wish to deal with. Thus, how people interpret information and how it is turned into culturally acceptable narratives can be an important part of how the overall socio-ecological system works. In this module, we've been talking about socio-ecological systems, which we defined as a type of complex adaptive system composed of two primary sub-domains, a human society and economy on the one hand and a biological community. We talked about how the two systems are governed by different internal feedback loops. On the one hand, those are the economy. On the other, those are thermodynamics and the ecology. How the interaction between these two systems involves the exchange of energy, matter and information. We talked about how creating integrated balancing feedback loops between them requires defining some form of common value, what is often called ecosystem services. But how the maintenance of ecosystem services invariably involves some form of commons that is best managed through social institutions that can build trust and enable cooperation towards effective global outcomes. Finally, we've mentioned the cultural dimension that can play a very significant role in its capacity to change how people see the world, enabling better relations between the social and ecological domains.