ARCUS 14th Annual Meeting and Arctic Forum 2002

Arctic People in Complex Adaptive Systems: The Case of Climate Change

Fikret Berkes^1
1Natural Resources Institute, University of Manitoba, 70 Dysart Road, Winnipeg, MB, R3T 2N2, Canada, Phone 204-474-6731, Fax 204-261-0038, berkes@cc.umanitoba.ca

I am going to talk about linking social systems and natural systems as complex systems, and give some examples from the area of climate change. Many of our environmental problems, including climate change, are complex systems problems, and are not adequately addressed by the familiar scientific approach of developing and testing hypotheses serially. As well, conventional disciplines are inadequate to deal with problems involving the interaction of humans with their environment. These coupled social and ecological systems (social-ecological systems for short) need to be understood and approached as complex adaptive systems.

What does complex systems theory say about social-ecological systems? I am going to concentrate on lessons from two attributes: scale and emergence. Scale really does matter; reductionist approaches have limited explanatory power because reality has a hierarchical structure. Each level along the hierarchical scale is independent, to some degree, of the levels above and below. Thus, each level requires new concepts and principles. Social-ecological systems can be studied at various levels, with some similarities and some key differences. The human component must be understood in all its social complexity, and not treated simply as a blackbox that produces feedbacks.

In the language of complexity, emergence refers to systems properties that cannot be predicted or understood simply by examining the parts of the system. Emergent properties provide a window for the study of system-wide phenomena. In our work, we have been using the resilience (buffering or absorptive capacity in the face of perturbations), for the study of change. Resilience is particularly suitable for the study of change because it deals with the flexibility of responses to stress, and it focuses on system's capacity for learning, self-organization and adaptation at multiple scales.

While working on the Epilogue of the new ARCUS book, The Earth Is Faster Now, I had a chance to think about the implications of complexity thinking for climate change and impacts in the Arctic. Cross-scale interactions are occurring both horizontally (geographically) and vertically across institutional levels (community, regional, national, international). No single level is the "correct" one for analysis; levels must be analyzed both separately and simultaneously across scale. The emergent property, resilience, helps focus on the adaptive capacity of communities to deal with climate change. Switching species and adjusting the "where, when and how" of hunting are strategies for dealing with change - up to a limit. Evolving co-management institutions create additional linkages for cross-scale feedback and help increase resilience.

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