The importance of transient social dynamics for restoring ecosystems beyond ecological tipping points

Abstract

Regime shift modeling and management generally focus on tipping points, early warning indicators, and the prevention of abrupt shifts to undesirable states. Few studies assess the potential for restoring a deteriorating ecosystem that is on a transition pathway toward an undesirable state. During the transition, feedbacks that stabilize the new regime are still weak, providing an opportunity to reverse the ongoing shift. Here, we present a social-ecological model that explores both how transient social processes affect ecological dynamics in the vicinity of a tipping point to reinforce the desired state and how social mechanisms of policy implementation affect restoration time. We simulate transitions of a lake, policy making, and behavioral change by lake polluters to study the time lags that emerge as a response to the transient, deteriorating lake state. We found that restoration time is most sensitive to the timing of policy making, but that the transient dynamics of the social processes determined outcomes in nontrivial ways. Social pressure to adopt costly technology, in our case on-site sewage treatment, was up to a degree capable of compensating for delays in municipal policy making. Our analysis of interacting social and ecological time lags in the transient phase of a shallow lake highlights opportunities for restoration that a stable state analysis would miss. We discuss management perspectives for navigating critical feedbacks in a transitioning social-ecological system. The understanding of transient dynamics and the interaction with social time lags can be more relevant than solely stable states and tipping points.