Regime Shifts in the Anthropocene: Drivers, Risks, and Resilience

Abstract

Many ecosystems can experience regime shifts: surprising, large and persistent changes in the function and structure of ecosystems. Assessing whether continued global change will lead to further regime shifts, or has the potential to trigger cascading regime shifts has been a central question in global change policy. Addressing this issue has, however, been hampered by the focus of regime shift research on specific cases and types of regime shifts. To systematically assess the global risk of regime shifts we conducted a comparative analysis of 25 generic types of regime shifts across marine, terrestrial and polar systems; identifying their drivers, and impacts on ecosystem services. Our results show that the drivers of regime shifts are diverse and co-occur strongly, which suggests that continued global change can be expected to synchronously increase the risk of multiple regime shifts. Furthermore, many regime shift drivers are related to climate change and food production, whose links to the continued expansion of human activities makes them difficult to limit. Because many regime shifts can amplify the drivers of other regime shifts, continued global change can also be expected to increase the risk of cascading regime shifts. Nevertheless, the variety of scales at which regime shift drivers operate provides opportunities for reducing the risk of many types of regime shifts by addressing local or regional drivers, even in the absence of rapid reduction of global drivers.

Resilience (Republished)

“…As resilience declines, it takes progressively smaller disturbances to push the system into a different regime, or basin of attraction (Scheffer and Carpenter 2003). Such regime shifts are at the core of resilience thinking (e.g., Biggs et al 2012b, Rocha et al 2015.…”

“…The likelihood of such shifts increases with loss of resilience (e.g., Scheffer et al 2001). During the last decades it has become clear that human actions cause such shifts by altering resilience and disturbances (e.g., , Biggs et al 2012b, Schoon and Cox 2012 as is now illustrated from a growing set of examples of both ecosystems and social-ecological systems (Rocha et al 2015) and even largescale reorganizations like historical shifts from foraging to farming (Ullaha et al 2015). The Regime Shifts DataBase provides examples of different types of regime shifts that have been documented.…”

Potential Disasters can Turn the Tragedy into Success

“…A regime shift can lead to abrupt and potentially persistent changes in the system's function and structure and, hence, negatively influence the growth of natural resources that stem from the ecosystem. Case studies have documented regime shifts in many different types of ecosystems and at various scales, ranging from local to global (Folke et al 2004;Rocha et al 2015) 1 . There is, for example, scientific evidence suggesting that such changes may occur in the Barents Sea, a region hosting one of the most productive fish stocks in the world (ACIA 2005;Wassmann and Lenton 2012).…”

Taxonomies for structuring models for World-Earth system analysis of the Anthropocene: subsystems, their interactions and social-ecological feedback loops

“…and Breedveld, 1991; Rocha et al, 2015). Overall, such higher-order taxonomies could help in the design of models or model suites that can deal with different aspects of (nonlinear) interactions between World-Earth subsystems and serve as tools for understanding the emergent co-evolutionary macrodynamics.…”