Steven Lade, Researcher, Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and Honorary Senior Lecturer, Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University.

Dr. Lade will briefly present two recent projects with time afterwards for discussion. This lecture is informal and you are welcome to bring a lunch.

Potential feedbacks between loss of biosphere integrity and climate change

The terrestrial and marine biospheres are important sinks for carbon dioxide. Human actions that undermine the integrity of the biosphere, such as biodiversity loss, risk undermining the biosphere’s capacity to maintain this store of carbon. Here, we investigate the risk that loss of biosphere integrity will amplify climate-carbon cycle feedbacks. Interactions between mechanisms of biosphere integrity, such as biodiversity, and climate change are highly uncertain, and are rarely implemented in climate models. We therefore extend a previous stylized dynamical model of the global carbon cycle to include interactions with biosphere integrity. Our model constitutes a study of the interactions between the two core planetary boundaries: climate change and biosphere integrity.

Resilience offers escape from trapped thinking on poverty alleviation

The poverty trap concept has encouraged widespread recognition that poverty can persist. Yet interventions intended to push the rural poor out of poverty traps can fail unexpectedly, with ecological and social consequences that reinforce poverty. Policy and research on poverty and its alleviation must move beyond a one-dimensional understanding of poverty traps to incorporate knowledge on the complex and dynamic social-ecological environments in which rural poor live. Extending existing poverty trap models, we construct multidimensional poverty trap models to: understand the consequences of these diverse poverty-environment relationships; and navigate among the diverse poverty alleviation strategies, such as transformative change, that may be required. We use resilience thinking’s perspectives on social-ecological system dynamics to help formulate these models.