PLEA Network

4 November 2015, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Ecosystem management: Don’t fence me in. Managing ecosystems for predictable outcomes may backfire, new study warns When it comes to ecosystem goods and services, we humans tend to want to know what we are going to get: We want to have clean water every time we turn on the tap, beaches free of algae and bacteria, and robust harvests of crops, fish and fuel year after year. As a result, we try to manage the use of our ecosystems in ways that minimizes their variability. But a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that managing ecosystems for predictable outcomes is risky. In fact, more often than not, it backfires. Co-author and Centre science director Carl Folke explains: “Command-and-control management of ecosystems might make flows of ecosystem services predictable in the short term, but unpredictable and less resilient in the long term.” The pathology of short-term thinking.  At the heart of the problem is the fact that while we can reduce variability in the short frame, variability doesn’t go away, it just goes somewhere else. Take for example our attempts at flood control on rivers. By installing levees, engineers are able to constrain flow and curb the fluctuations in water levels that once led to routine flooding of low-lying areas. These levees work so well that whole communities now exist in what were once floodplains. But, of course, the levees cannot remove all variability from the system. Sometimes a levee breaks or a river reaches levels higher than what the levee was built to withstand. The end result is a flood that is much more destructive than before. Steve Carpenter, lead author and director of the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison explains: “For many years the river stays in the levee and everything is fine. However, every once in a while, it goes out and everything is worse.” Read More here