Abstract
Recent global crises reveal an emerging pattern of causation that could increasingly characterize the birth and progress of future global crises. A conceptual framework identifies this pattern's deep causes, intermediate processes, and ultimate outcomes. The framework shows how multiple stresses can interact within a single social-ecological system to cause a shift in that system's behavior, how simultaneous shifts of this kind in several largely discrete social-ecological systems can interact to cause a far larger intersystemic crisis, and how such a larger crisis can then rapidly propagate across multiple system boundaries to the global scale. Case studies of the 2008-2009 financial-energy and food-energy crises illustrate the framework. Suggestions are offered for future research to explore further the framework's propositions.
Highlights
It has recently been proposed that identifiable boundaries mark the safe limits of human alteration of planetary biophysical systems such as nitrogen and carbon cycles (Rockström, et al 2009a, b, Steffen et al 2015)
The framework shows how multiple stresses can interact within a single social-ecological system to cause a shift in that system’s behavior, how simultaneous shifts of this kind in several largely discrete social-ecological systems can interact to cause a far larger intersystemic crisis, and how such a larger crisis can rapidly propagate across multiple system boundaries to the global scale
Rather than a single critical transition at the planetary scale, smaller crises originating within particular systems or geographical regions might propagate across system boundaries, connect together, and expand into a global crisis (Lee and Preston 2012)
Summary
It has recently been proposed that identifiable boundaries mark the safe limits of human alteration of planetary biophysical systems such as nitrogen and carbon cycles (Rockström, et al 2009a, b, Steffen et al 2015). The first of the three above trends, the sharply rising scale of human economic activity in relation to natural resources and systems, is causing greater scarcity of some critical resources such as conventional oil (Sorrell et al 2012, IEA 2013, Höök et al 2014), where this scarcity is gauged by the amount of energy needed to extract and process an additional increment of final output (Davidson et al 2014).
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