Landscape Partnership Resources Library
Ecosystem services: Foundations, opportunities, and challenges for the forest products sector
From the text: A social trap (7) is created when economic markets cannot efficiently or equitably deal with common pool resources (Hardin, 1968), which is often the case with ecosystem services.
The Historical Dynamics of Social–Ecological Traps
Environmental degradation is a typical unintended outcome of collective human behavior. Hardin’s metaphor of the ‘‘tragedy of the commons’’ has become a conceived wisdom that captures the social dynamics leading to environmental degradation. Recently, ‘‘traps’’ has gained currency as an alternative concept to explain the rigidity of social and ecological processes that produce environmental degradation and livelihood impoverishment. The trap metaphor is, however, a great deal more complex compared to Hardin’s insight. This paper takes stock of studies using the trap metaphor. It argues that the concept includes time and history in the analysis, but only as background conditions and not as a factor of causality. From a historical–sociological perspective this is remarkable since social–ecological traps are clearly path-dependent processes, which are causally produced through a conjunction of events. To prove this point the paper conceptualizes social–ecological traps as a process instead of a condition, and systematically compares history and timing in one classic and three recent studies of social– ecological traps. Based on this comparison it concludes that conjunction of social and environmental events contributes profoundly to the production of trap processes. The paper further discusses the implications of this conclusion for policy intervention and outlines how future research might generalize insights from historical–sociological studies of traps.
A SOCIAL TRAP ANALYSIS OF THE LOS ANGELES STORM DRAIN SYSTEM: A RATIONALE FOR INTERVENTIONS
The principles of analyzing social traps can be used to devise intervention strategies for the problems of toxic and solid waste dumping into the Los Angeles storm water drain system. Both problems readily fit into the social trap model. Intervention strategies center on 1) bringing long-term negative consequences to bear on behavioral choices of offenders, 2) increasing short-term positive consequences for correct behaviors, 3) decreasing short-term negative consequences that prevent correct behaviors, 4) increasing short-term negative consequences for environmentally destructive behaviors, 5) decreasing short-term positive consequences that support inappropriate behaviors, and 6) educating the public on the long-term positive consequences of appropriate behaviors.
Social Traps
A new area of study is the field that some of us are beginning to call social traps. The term refers to situations in society that contain traps formally like a fish trap, where men or whole societies get themselves started in some direction or some set of relationships that later prove to be unpleasant or lethal and that they see no easy way to back out of or to avoid.
After the talks
The real business of decarbonization begins after an agreement is signed at the Paris climate conference, argue David G. Victor and James P. Leape.
A ‘perfect’ agreement in Paris is not essential
Success at the latest climate talks will be a recognition by the world’s nations that incremental change will not do the job, says Johan Rockström.
The 2 °C dream
Countries have pledged to limit global warming to 2 °C, and climate models say that is still possible. But only with heroic — and unlikely — efforts.
Social traps and environmental policy
I argue that all the environmental problems mentioned above (and many other social problems) belong to a category of phenomenon called social traps (Platt 1973). Like animal traps, social traps lead an unwary victim into the jaws of disaster with a tempting bit of bait, and, once the victim is caught, make escape extremely difficult. By studying the features real-world social traps have in common, and by experimenting with some simple laboratory examples of social traps, we can learn more about their general nature and the nature of effective escapes from them. A broad ecological perspective can be effective in understanding, avoiding, and escaping from some social traps, but it must be coupled with effective public policy. Effective policy involves a range of activities from education to regulation to correcting the misleading short-term incentives (the bait) that create traps in the first place.
Creation of a Gilded Trap by the High Economic Value of the Maine Lobster Fishery
Unsustainable fishing simplifies food chains and, as with aquaculture, can result in reliance on a few economically valuable species. This lack of diversity may increase risks of ecological and economic disruptions. Centuries of intense fishing have extirpated most apex predators in the Gulf of Maine (United States and Canada), effectively creating an American lobster (Homarus americanus) monoculture. Over the past 20 years, the economic diversity of marine resources harvested in Maine has declined by almost 70%. Today, over 80% of the value of Maine’s fish and seafood landings is from highly abundant lobsters. Inflation- corrected income from lobsters in Maine has steadily increased by nearly 400% since 1985. Fisheries managers, policy makers, and fishers view this as a success. However, such lucrative monocultures increase the social and ecological consequences of future declines in lobsters. In southern New England, disease and stresses related to increases in ocean temperature resulted in more than a 70% decline in lobster abundance, prompting managers to propose closing that fishery. A similar collapse in Maine could fundamentally disrupt the social and economic foundation of its coast. We suggest the current success of Maine’s lobster fishery is a gilded trap. Gilded traps are a type of social trap in which collective actions resulting from economically attractive opportunities outweigh concerns over associated social and ecological risks or consequences. Large financial gain creates a strong reinforcing feedback that deepens the trap. Avoiding or escaping gilded traps requires managing for increased biological and economic diversity. This is difficult to do prior to a crisis while financial incentives for maintaining the status quo are large. The long-term challenge is to shift fisheries management away from single species toward integrated social-ecological approaches that diversify local ecosystems, societies, and economies.
Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions towards the trillionth tonne
We find that the peak warming caused by a given cumulative carbon dioxide emission is better constrained than the warming response to a stabilization scenario. Furthermore, the relationship between cumulative emissions and peak warming is remarkably insensitive to the emission pathway (timing of emissions or peak emission rate). Hence policy targets based on limiting cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide are likely to be more robust to scientific uncertainty than emission-rate or concentration targets. Total anthropogenic emissions of one trillion tonnes of carbon (3.67 trillion tonnes of CO2), about half of which has already been emitted since industrialization began, results in a most likely peak carbon-dioxide- induced warming of 2 6C above pre-industrial temperatures, with a 5–95% confidence interval of 1.3–3.9 6C.
Expanding options for habitat conservation outside protected areas in Kenya: The use of environmental easements
This paper examines wildlife conservation in Kenya on land outside protected areas. It presents a context within which environmental easements as a mechanism to conserve wildlife habitat outside protected areas can be considered based on property rights over land and the management of wildlife resources and their implication for habitat conservation. This paper also describes easements, the legal environment needed in Kenya for adopting environmental easements and makes specific legislative recommendations. A sample environmental easement, adapted for Kenyan circumstances from an American model, is presented. Also outlined are methods of valuing environmental easements, a critical link in establishing a solid framework and process for having an environmental easement granted.
Rethinking Private Land Conservation in the Face of Climate Change: A California Case Study & Future Options
This Article looks at how private land conservation may need to be rethought in the face of climate change, with a particular emphasis on the protection of biodiversity.
The Use of Conservation Easements in Adapting Conservation to a Changing Climate
Rally 2009: The National Land Conservation Conference Portland, Oregon
Conservation easements and global climate change
Land conservation is necessary to combat the ills of climate change and environmental degradation. The warming of the climate system is unequivocal. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released an updated report regarding the existence and impacts of global climate change. The report noted that the “resilience of many ecosystems is likely to be exceeded this century by an unprecedented combination of climate change, associated disturbances (e.g., flooding, drought, wildfire, insects, ocean acidification) and other global climate change drivers (e.g., land use change, pollution,fragmentation of natural systems, overexploitation of resources).”
CONSERVATION EASEMENTS AT THE CLIMATE CHANGE CROSSROADS
This article examines the conundrum that occurs when climate change leads to a landscape that conflicts with conservation easement terms. In facing the challenge of a disconnect between conservation easements and a changing world, there are two main tacks. First, conservationists can make conservation easements fit the changing landscape. Second, conservationists can change the landscape to fit the conservation easements. Both of these options present challenges and conflict with the essence of the conservation easement tool. A conservation easement that is too changeable endangers the perpetual protection that is the cornerstone of conservation easements. But, forcing the landscape to fit a conservation easement requires active management, something more often associated with fee-simple ownership. The solution to using conservation easements in a changing world lies somewhere between these two extremes, with the most important level of analysis being an assessment of when to use conservation easements.
Conservation Easements and Climate Change
The current law of conservation easements does not recognize the full potential for carbon capture.
Scaling up from gardens: biodiversity conservation in urban environments
As urbanisation increases globally and the natural environment becomes increasingly fragmented, the importance of urban green spaces for biodiversity conservation grows. In many countries, private gardens are a major component of urban green space and can provide considerable biodiversity benefits. Gardens and adjacent habitats form interconnected networks and a landscape ecology framework is necessary to understand the relationship between the spatial configuration of garden patches and their constituent biodiversity. A scale-dependent tension is apparent in garden management, whereby the individual garden is much smaller than the unit of management needed to retain viable populations. To overcome this, here we suggest mechanisms for encouraging ‘wildlife-friendly’ management of collections of gardens across scales from the neighbourhood to the city.
The declining uptake rate of atmospheric CO2 by land and ocean sinks
Through 1959–2012, an airborne fraction (AF) of 0.44 of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions remained in the atmosphere, with the rest being taken up by land and ocean CO2 sinks. Understanding of this uptake is critical because it greatly alleviates the emissions reductions required for climate mitigation, and also reduces the risks and damages that adaptation has to embrace. An observable quantity that reflects sink properties more directly than the AF is the CO2 sink rate (kS), the combined land–ocean CO2 sink flux per unit excess atmospheric CO2 above preindustrial levels. Here we show from observations that kS declined over 1959–2012 by a factor of about 1/3, implying that CO2 sinks increased more slowly than excess CO2. Us- ing a carbon–climate model, we attribute the decline in kS to four mechanisms: slower-than-exponential CO2 emissions growth (∼ 35 % of the trend), volcanic eruptions (∼ 25 %), sink responses to climate change (∼ 20 %), and nonlinear responses to increasing CO2, mainly oceanic (∼ 20 %). The first of these mechanisms is associated purely with the trajectory of extrinsic forcing, and the last two with intrinsic, feedback responses of sink processes to changes in climate and atmospheric CO2. Our results suggest that the effects of these intrinsic, nonlinear responses are already detectable in the global carbon cycle. Although continuing future decreases in kS will occur under all plausible CO2 emission scenarios, the rate of decline varies between scenarios in non- intuitive ways because extrinsic and intrinsic mechanisms respond in opposite ways to changes in emissions: extrinsic mechanisms cause kS to decline more strongly with increasing mitigation, while intrinsic mechanisms cause kS to decline more strongly under high-emission, low-mitigation scenarios as the carbon–climate system is perturbed further from a near-linear regime.
Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet
The planetary boundaries framework defines a safe operating space for humanity based on the intrinsic biophysical processes that regulate the stability of the Earth System. Here, we revise and update the planetary boundaries framework, with a focus on the underpinning biophysical science, based on targeted input from expert research communities and on more general scientific advances over the past 5 years. Several of the boundaries now have a two-tier approach, reflecting the importance of cross-scale interactions and the regional-level heterogeneity of the processes that underpin the boundaries. Two core boundaries—climate change and biosphere integrity—have been identified, each of which has the potential on its own to drive the Earth System into a new state should they be substantially and persistently transgressed.
Habitat fragmentation and its lasting impact on Earth’s ecosystems
We conducted an analysis of global forest cover to reveal that 70% of remaining forest is within 1 km of the forest’s edge, subject to the degrading effects of fragmentation. A synthesis of fragmentation experiments spanning multiple biomes and scales, five continents, and 35 years demonstrates that habitat fragmentation reduces biodiversity by 13 to 75% and impairs key ecosystem functions by decreasing biomass and altering nutrient cycles. Effects are greatest in the smallest and most isolated fragments, and they magnify with the passage of time. These findings indicate an urgent need for conservation and restoration measures to improve landscape connectivity, which will reduce extinction rates and help maintain ecosystem services.
