Prof. Dr. Maria Schlüter, professor in Social-ecological Systems Science at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, will give a presentation in the topic
"How do transformations towards sustainability happen, and why do they often fail? Simulating processes of change in complex social-ecological systems"
as part of the VAC Colloquium.
Afterwards we look forward to discussions while enjoying coffee and cookies.
The event is open to anyone interested.
Abstract:
Understanding and governing unintentional and intentional change such as ecological regime shifts or societal transformations is a key challenge for sustainable development. Such change emerges from complex interactions between people, societies and ecological processes across multiple scales. Modelling and simulation offers unique opportunities for studying such social-ecological dynamics, however, the complex and interdisciplinary nature of the phenomena of interest pose multiple challenges.
I will present examples of social-ecological models of adaptive policy making in fisheries and ecosystem restoration and discuss methodological challenges related to
- building models about human-nature interactions in data-poor contexts,
- modelling human behaviour, and
- using modelling and simulation to uncover mechanisms of adaptive or transformative change.
I will highlight some recent developments to tackle these challenges when modelling local social-ecological systems. Finally, I will reflect on the challenges of dealing with human behaviour and social-ecological dynamics at larger scales, e.g. in Earth System models.
Speaker Bio
Maja Schlüter Schlüter has a background in marine ecology and a PhD in Applied System Science from Osnabrück University. Before her PhD she worked for 1.5 years at UNESCO’s regional office in Uzbekistan on a Regional Vision for the Aral Sea Basin. Her experiences in Central Asia have greatly shaped her interests in applying complexity science approaches to understand the interplay of social and ecological dynamics and developing policy-relevant insights into real-world problems. Before coming to SRC in 2012 she has been a visiting researcher at Princeton University (with Prof. Simon Levin) with a EU Marie Curie and a Branco Weiss Fellowship, and held researcher positions at the UFZ Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (Department of Ecological Modelling) and the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries.