Applying resilience thinking to production ecosystems

Abstract

Abstract. Production ecosystems typically have a high dependence on supporting and regulating ecosystem services and while they have thus far managed to sustain production, this has often been at the cost of externalities imposed on other systems and locations. One of the largest challenges facing humanity is to secure the production of food and fiber while avoiding long-term negative impacts on ecosystems and the range of services that they provide. Resilience has been used as a framework for understanding sustainability challenges in a range of ecosystem types, but has not been systematically applied across the range of systems specifically used for the production of food and fiber in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments. This paper applied a resilience lens to production ecosystems in which anthropogenic inputs play varying roles in determining system dynamics and outputs. We argue that the traditional resilience framework requires important additions when applied to production systems. We show how sustained anthropogenic inputs of external resources can lead to a ''coercion'' of resilience and describe how the global interconnectedness of many production systems can camouflage signals indicating resilience loss.

Resilience (Republished)

“…In the globally intertwined social-ecological system everyone is in everyone else's backyard, and cities both shape and are dependent on huge areas across the planet of ecosystems support (e.g., Folke et al 1997, Grimm et al 2008) for water, food, and other ecosystem services (e.g., Bennett et al 2014, Rist et al 2014, Rockström et al 2014b). It will be in the selfinterest of urban dwellers in the Anthropocene to create incentives for stewardship of their supporting ecosystems, or socialecological systems often far away from city borders that secure the basis of city life.…”

Synchronous failure: the emerging causal architecture of global crisis

“…In rich countries, intensification's marginal benefits are already low: it can boost agricultural yields, but sustaining past rates of output growth through intensification alone usually produces external costs, such as greater water pollution and loss of ecosystem services, and these costs can significantly offset any benefits (Matson and Vitousek 2006, Bennett et al 2014, Rist et al 2014. In poorer regions where big gains from intensification are more achievable, social, infrastructure, and institutional problems often hinder such a strategy.…”

Eco-Labeled Seafood: Determinants for (Blue) Green Consumption

“…Capture fisheries and aquaculture (farming of aquatic organisms, including animals and plants) can, just as other food production sectors, negatively impact aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, e.g., through overfishing (fisheries for human consumption and for aquatic oils and proteins used in animal feeds), eutrophication due to the release of excess nutrients, feed production and the spread of invasive species and diseases [1][2][3]. Such adverse environmental and social impacts have together with a perceived failure of regulatory mechanisms (e.g., implementation of national legislation and codes of conduct to improve the sector) largely driven the development of seafood eco-certification programs.…”