Cross-Scale Resilience in Socio-Ecological Simulations

Description and aim

Mankind is having a huge impact upon the species with which it cohabits, maybe to the extent that we are causing a sixth major extinction of species at this very moment. To address this we need to understand how societies interacting with their local ecologies are either fragile or resilient to the impact of humans and other shocks. Simulations can represent combinations of complex ecological and social systems. These allow us to generate multiple artificial ‘histories’ from which we can gain a deeper understanding of the long-term outcomes. Crucially, this allows us to evaluate the resilience of the socio-ecological systems at any scale: from global species diversity to the welfare of group or even of individuals. A Socio-ecological system that is resilient at all these scales is said to have cross-scale resilience. It is no good saving global species variety if we destroy local niches or communities in the process.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers working on different elements of the simulation tools and approaches to understand complex socio-ecological systems and to develop a practical and coherent approach to characterizing cross-scale resilience.