Prototype of social-ecological system’s resilience analysis using a dynamic index

Abstract

Resilience is understood as a social-ecological system (SES) property that embodies nature and society and a research perspective with high potential to be applied in reaching sustainability goals. A system’s property is composed of ecological and social limits representing boundaries that, if trespassed, result in the system’s regime change with increasing uncertainties. These changes can impact the reliability of delivering a set of desired ecosystem services, and consequently, society’s wellbeing can be negatively affected. Thus, modeling a complex and adaptive SES, with feedback, nonlinearities, and path–dependence becomes a crucial tool to inform building a responsible governance behavior that tackles SES resilience. This work built a prototype model of SES resilience for a case study in a Brazilian coastal city with the following aims: 1) to formalize the principles underpinning resilience into a dynamic index, 2) to assess the extent to which this understanding highlights system interdependencies and tradeoffs, and 3) to learn about the benefits of making quantitative assessments of such socio–institutional principles. Multiscale Integrated Model of Ecosystem Services – MIMES (Boumans et al., 2015; Oliveira et al., 2022) is a SES modeling framework using System Dynamics that embraces complexities’ attributes in an interdisciplinary and integrated model. Constructing a causal loop diagram embracing the social sphere represented by the seven resilience principles proposed by Biggs et al. (2015), revealed the necessity to include social goals in the model. It was considered that the Homo economicus represents the most common social perspective and determinant for those goals. Ten different types of ecosystem services were extracted from the ecological part of the simulation (Oliveira et al. 2022) and then combined with those seven resilience principles into the Dynamic Resilience Index (DRI) using a Cobb Douglas–like production function. The numerical simulation produced four insights about resilience that are described and discussed: 1st insight: resilience of what to what? The resilience of the whole system in providing a set of Ecosystem Services against changes in slow variables; 2nd insight: resilience presents seasonal variations; 3rd insight: the system is operating as if it is in the K phase during ecological succession; 4th insight: not all resilience principles have the same weight in resilience. Conclusions point out that resilience can present seasonal variations, and that response diversity and functional redundancy are leverage principles with higher influence in resilience.