PARENT SESSION
Symposium 10: The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment Conceptual Framework: An Ecological and Social Challenge
Organized by: L Neville and H Mooney
Wednesday, August 6. 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM, SITCC Oglethorpe Auditorium.
The role of ecology in global scenario development.
Bennett, Elena*,1, Carpenter, Stephen1, Peterson, Garry 1, Cumming, Graeme2, Zurek, Monika 3, Pingali, Prabhu3, 1 University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI2 University of Florida, Gainsville, FL3 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Rome, Italy
ABSTRACT- Human well-being depends on consistent provision of ecosystem services. Yet ecosystems and the services they provide are changing, often in ways that we cannot anticipate. The ubiquity of change in ecosystems explains the frequency of surprise in ecosystem management. How can we manage for surprises and uncertainties when we cannot predict them? One approach is to make decisions that are robust to a number of different futures. Scenarios, sets of stories about the future, have been used in the business and planning communities for decades as an alternative to single future planning methods. Scenarios have been used extensivly to examine global environmental futures. Global scenarios have successfully focused the world's attention on key global environmental issues; involved experts and stakeholders in discussions about the environment; and have been used to examine the prospects for world development. To date, however, most global environmental scenarios have treated ecosystem dynamics as the result of large scale drivers, and have not considered ecosystem feedbacks to larger-scale processes. To the contrary, recent studies suggest that cross scale ecological feedbacks and emergent properties of interacting subsystems can and do serve as major drivers of global processes. Global scenarios could greatly benefit from the input of ecologists to incorporate more realistic ecosystem dynamics. Similarly, ecology could benefit from involvement in scenario planning. Unlike many technical models, scenarios, easily understood as stories, can also be used for communication and outreach that builds public appreciation of ecological science and the ecological dilemmas that society faces.
Key words: cross-scale feedbacks, scenarios, ecosystem services, ecosystem management