Resilience and Regime Shifts: Assessing Cascading Effects

By Ann Kinzig, Paul Ryan, Michel E. Etienne, H. Allison, T. Elmqvist, B. Walker. 2006

487 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Most accounts of thresholds between alternate regimes involve a single, dominant shift defined by one, often slowly changing variable in an ecosystem. This paper expands the focus to include similar dynamics in social and economic systems, in which multiple variables may act together in ways that produce interacting regime shifts in social-ecological systems. We use four different regions in the world, each of which contains multiple thresholds, to develop a proposed general model of threshold interactions in social-ecological systems. The model identifies patch-scale ecological thresholds, farm- or landscape-scale economic thresholds, and regional-scale sociocultural thresholds. Cascading thresholds, i.e., the tendency of the crossing of one threshold to induce the crossing of other thresholds, often lead to very resilient, although often less desirable, alternative states.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b37de9da1210027f6314a410c3cacde8cb8aaad8

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In Environmental Engineering

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

A metric and frameworks for resilience analysis of engineered and infrastructure systems (2014, background): “as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks [77] Ability to absorb disturbance”
Governance and Complexity—Emerging Issues for Governance Theory (2008, background): “Hence, seemingly stable systems can suddenly undergo comprehensive transformations into something entirely new, with internal controls and characteristics that are profoundly different from those of the original (Gunderson and Holling 2002; Kinzig et al. 2006).”
Cascading climate change impacts and implications (2020, background): “The change in key variables results in a cascading effect that induces or accelerates the crossing of other thresholds in connected domains and sub-systems (Kinzig et al., 2006).”
Capturing the cornerstones of coral reef resilience: linking theory to practice (2008, background): “Second, thresholds are notoriously difficult to study since the value is likely to vary depending on what ecosystem process is in focus, the geographic position (van Nes and Scheffer 2005), and the nature of the environmental variables acting upon the system (Carpenter 2003; Kinzig et al. 2006).”
Tipping elements and climate–economic shocks: Pathways toward integrated assessment (2016, background): “In addition, socioecological studies have examined how human actions, climate change, and other factors trigger ecological regime shifts, but the tipping elements in these studies are ecological, not social [Kinzig et al., 2006].”
Guest Editorial, part of a Special Feature on Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems Through Comparative Studies and Theory Development: Introduction to the Special Issue (2006, background): “The last of the main papers (Kinzig et al. 2006) offers a new insight into the complex ways in which multiple regime shifts occur in social-ecological systems, across domains, and across scales.”
A handful of heuristics and some propositions for understanding resilience in social-ecological systems (2006, background): “A paper on multiple domains in this special issue (Kinzig et al. 2006) gives four examples of socialecological systems with multiple possible regime shifts, two in the ecological and one each in the economic and social domains.”
Resilience-based perspectives to guiding high-nature-value farmland through socioeconomic change (2013, background): “Social–ecological memory in urban gardens—retaining the capacity for management of ecosystem services.”
Institutional and political leadership dimensions of cascading ecological crises (2011, background): “Cascading dynamics By cascading dynamics we mean the capability of ecological change to trigger changes that move across ecological and geographical boundaries (local, regional, national, and international) and/or societal sectors (for example, environmental, health, economic, foreign policy) (Kaspe”
Turning back from the brink: Detecting an impending regime shift in time to avert it (2009, background): “In practice, regime shifts often involve multiple driving variables (2, 46).”
The concept of the Anthropocene as a game-changer: a new context for social innovation and transformations to sustainability (2017, background): “Research from disciplines outside of social innovation has demonstrated that when critical ecological thresholds are crossed, degradation in the social system can and often does follow (e.g., Homer-Dixon 1999, Kinzig et al. 2006, Cinner 2011).”
Evaluating Successful Livelihood Adaptation to Climate Variability and Change in Southern Africa (2010, background): “Insights into the resilience of social-ecological systems (Adger 2000, Gunderson and Holling 2001, Walker et al. 2004, Cumming et al. 2006, Kinzig et al. 2006, Lebel et al. 2006) suggest that many resource management practices lead to locked-in patterns of resource use that are detrimental to the…”
RESILIENCE: THE EMERGENCE OF A PERSPECTIVE FOR SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS ANALYSES (2006, background): “Furthermore, multiple thresholds and regime shifts at different scales and in different and interacting ecological, economic and social domains are proposed to exist within regional social–ecological systems (Kinzig et al., 2006).”
Exploring Panarchy in Alpine Grasslands: an Application of Adaptive Cycle Concepts to the Conservation of a Cultural Landscape (2012, background): “The possibilities of cross-scale and cross-domain interaction might result in “cascading” effects, as described in Kinzig et al. (2006), in which collapse at one scale or domain may trigger a collapse elsewhere and any inbuilt resistance to this represents a measure of the resilience of the system…”