Integrating policy and ecology systems to achieve path dependent climate solutions

Abstract

The Paris Agreement emphasizes regional “bottom-up” policy solutions to address climate change. We argue that efforts to develop these regional solutions require treating ecological and policy processes as interacting together. Through this approach, policy decisions affect ecological processes, and subsequent ecological changes create feedbacks into policy and political processes. Such a re-orientation can help uncover heretofore hidden “policy triggers”, thereby offering new and perhaps more durable climate solutions. We illustrate this with a case example of the interplay among boreal forest natural resource management policies that created path dependent extractive industries, which in turn, triggered path dependent carbon cycling processes within boreal ecosystems, causing higher carbon emissions. The ability to apply path dependency analysis in general, and identify creative solutions in particular, requires a much more systematic conversation between ecological and policy sciences. We illustrate how path dependent innovations can be identified and triggered, through our own integration of ecological and path dependency analysis: the use of arguably “easy to change, but hard to reverse” policy decisions over hunting licenses. This trigger is not just identified because it is consistent with climate science for managing predator-prey relationships towards lower carbon emissions, but because it holds promise in creating a durable solution even in the face of pressures to reverse course. Hence, the policy is also expected to help lower carbon emissions, in the same way forestry policies (inadvertently) helped increase carbon emissions over a century ago.Our goal is not to argue that this is the only or best solution that might emerge from integrating policy and ecological sciences, but rather to highlight how unforeseen, practical solutions can be nurtured when fostering conversations among largely qualitative historically inclined policy scientists that focus on the complex casual impacts of non-generalizable “critical junctures”, and largely quantitative ecologists seeking general patterns with complex ecosystems. We advance the significant work underway by path dependency focused policy scientists by calling for greater integration of knowledge across these disciplines that currently tend to treat knowledge from the other as “exogenous” shocks.