Abstract
Abstract. Human societies depend on the resources ecosystems provide. Particularly since the last century, human activities have transformed the relationship between nature and society at a global scale. We study this coevolutionary relationship by utilizing a stylized model of private resource use and social learning on an adaptive network. The latter process is based on two social key dynamics beyond economic paradigms: boundedly rational imitation of resource use strategies and homophily in the formation of social network ties. The private and logistically growing resources are harvested with either a sustainable (small) or non-sustainable (large) effort. We show that these social processes can have a profound influence on the environmental state, such as determining whether the private renewable resources collapse from overuse or not. Additionally, we demonstrate that heterogeneously distributed regional resource capacities shift the critical social parameters where this resource extraction system collapses. We make these points to argue that, in more advanced coevolutionary models of the planetary social–ecological system, such socio-cultural phenomena as well as regional resource heterogeneities should receive attention in addition to the processes represented in established Earth system and integrated assessment models.
Highlights
Whether, when and how human usage of biophysical resources meets limits that produce feedbacks onto social functioning has a long history of controversial discussion (Malthus, 1798; Meadows et al, 1972; Rockström et al, 2009)
Barfuss et al.: Sustainable use of renewable resources in a social–ecological network model day analysis the Earth system is either modeled from a purely biophysical point of view (Claussen et al, 2002) or from a biophysical–economic one, depending on the scope of the research question. Both approaches do not take into account social dynamics beyond macroeconomic paradigms
We set out a simple model to demonstrate that social network interactions, imitation and homophily may have a profound influence on the environmental state, such as determining whether a collection of private renewable resources collapses from overuse or not
Summary
Whether, when and how human usage of biophysical resources meets limits that produce feedbacks onto social functioning has a long history of controversial discussion (Malthus, 1798; Meadows et al, 1972; Rockström et al, 2009). W. Barfuss et al.: Sustainable use of renewable resources in a social–ecological network model day analysis the Earth system is either modeled from a purely biophysical point of view (Claussen et al, 2002) or from a biophysical–economic one (van Vuuren et al, 2012), depending on the scope of the research question. Barfuss et al.: Sustainable use of renewable resources in a social–ecological network model day analysis the Earth system is either modeled from a purely biophysical point of view (Claussen et al, 2002) or from a biophysical–economic one (van Vuuren et al, 2012), depending on the scope of the research question Both approaches do not take into account social dynamics beyond macroeconomic paradigms. This is important as real-world resource data suggest that access to biophysical resources may be distributed with heavy tails
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