On identity, complexity and a ‘little’ fossil fuel project off the West Australian coast

By David Salt

Earlier this month I spotted a tweet that chilled my soul while neatly summing up the challenge of sustainability for our age.

Here it is:

In a nutshell it shows the CEO of a major fossil fuel company extolling the virtues of a massive new project, the Scarborough development, with a comment from one of the world’s top coral scientists describing it as ‘a crime against humanity’ (while asking the responsible politicians to respond appropriately).

One single development

We’ve discussed aspects of the Scarborough development (the biggest oil and gas development to be built in Australia in a decade, situated off the coast of Western Australia) a few times on Sustainability Bites (see Lies, damned lies and environmental economics). It’s worth repeating that an analysis by the company Climate Analytics found that the total emissions from the proposed Scarborough project will be just under 1.4 billion tonnes, three times Australia’s annual emissions! Think about that. Climate Analytics is under no illusion and points out this single project undermines the Paris Agreement (of which Australia is a signatory).

The Australian Conservation Foundation has calculated these emissions will result in 0.000394 degrees of additional global warming that will, among other things, accelerate the decline of the Great Barrier Reef (which may partly account for the coral scientist’s dismay at Woodside’s promotional tweet).

Is an extra 4 x 10,000ths of a degree significant? Keep in mind this is a single development which, by itself, has the capacity to create a measurable global temperature increase at a time when the world is already overheating. This summer has seen unprecedented droughts, storms, fires and floods across Asia, Europe and North America. At this time no-one has even attempted to calculate the economic impact of the carnage from this northern summer, let alone tally the lives lost. And this situation only promises to get worse as carbon emissions increase.

A boon for the economy

Despite the accelerating impacts from climate change being felt all around the world, Woodside’s CEO tells us (though more likely she’s really wanting her shareholders and politicians to hear this) that Scarborough will “deliver value for Woodside shareholders and significant long-term benefits locally and nationally, including thousands of jobs, taxation revenue and supply of gas to export and domestic markets for decades to come.”

I cynical paraphrase might read: “let this project proceed and shareholders will be richly rewarded by quarterly rises in share price; while the enabling government can claim ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’, regional development and a secure supply of energy well into the future (and definitely beyond your next election).”

The planet? Well, it may endure a little more heating but focus on the profits.

And humanity? Bits of it will do very nicely, thank you very much, from the increased economic activity. And those that don’t? Well, most of them don’t vote in Australia and they definitely aren’t shareholders in Woodside, so there’s nothing to worry about here.

In any event, the planet and humanity are not the focus of the CEO’s missive to the masses; she’s more worried about quarterly returns to shareholders.

The standard model

The standard explanation for this situation goes something like this: some people put the economy before all else and believe the ‘climate alarmists’ are overstating the problem. These people might even acknowledge the climate is becoming increasingly problematic but are confident that as the crisis grows we’ll make more of an effort to fix it, and science and technology will save us. These people think that radical action to reduce carbon emissions will cause deep and unjustifiable pain to the economy and everyone’s standard of living.

The other side (which includes most scientists) believe humanity is changing the Earth System in deep and unpleasant ways that will hurt everyone. We need to do something now. Enabling new fossil fuel developments is mad; some describe them as ‘crimes again humanity’.

Both sides think the other side is crazy, and many have stopped listening to anything coming out of the other side.

You might have your own variant on this ‘standard model’ of the sustainability challenge but I believe most people subscribe to some version of it: two sides/tribes, two sets of values/priorities, situation gets worse, both sides blame the other and after a while everyone stops listening to anyone outside of their own tribe. It’s simple and neat – my side right, your side wrong.

A more complex model

Now here’s a more nuanced explanation that uses a bit of complexity (resilience) theory. Each of the players/actors/groups in this situation are complex systems, and each has its own identity emerging from the structure, function and feedbacks that make up that system. Understanding the feedbacks is important to understanding the behaviours of these systems.

The politicians are very responsive to voter’s needs and the level of support received from party supporters (including lobbyists and political donations).

The fossil fuel companies are very responsive to changes to the quarterly returns on investment and shareholder sentiment.

The scientists are very responsive to changes in biophysical indicators of the many components that make up the Earth System, the respect of their peers and the papers they can publish.

And the voters just want to be able to pay their bills, have a little certainty in what tomorrow brings, and maybe have the occasional holiday.

These are interacting complex systems and expecting them to behave in simple rational ways doesn’t necessarily help us resolve the differences that emerge between them over time.

Pointing out that the other side is wrong may work well with your own tribe but it usually does nothing to change the behaviour of the other side.

However, understanding what’s central to the identity of the other side and working on the feedbacks that shore up that identity is much more likely to produce change.

If voters don’t believe the future is safe, if shareholders no longer trust their shares will yield dividends in the longer term, if politicians are only allowed to make fully accountable and transparent decisions, then the very identity of their systems change, as does its behaviour. Of course, changing these feedbacks is never easy.

Another thing about complex systems

Another thing about complex systems that’s very relevant to this discussion. They are non-linear. That means you can’t always predict how they’ll change based on how they have changed in the past. Sometimes big disturbances can hit your system and yet it can absorb them and its identity remains intact (the system is ‘resilient’). Other times, it will only take a small disturbance and the system’s identity collapses (unexpectedly and often quickly, does anyone remember the Soviet Empire?).

The Earth System itself is a good example of this non-linearity. The group of scientists who first proposed the idea of ‘planetary boundaries’ (Rockstrom et al, 2009) pointed out that the Earth System itself is a complex system that has considerable capacity to absorb disturbances (changing atmospheric concentrations, declining biodiversity etc) and still retain its identity. For the past 10,000 years, that identity has been one of a relatively stable climate that has enabled the rise of civilisation.

But this capacity to continually absorb disturbance has limits, sometimes referred to as thresholds. They proposed a set of planetary boundaries (possible thresholds) beyond which the stability of the Earth System could well be lost. They proposed nine planetary boundaries, most of which we have now transgressed.

In some ways, the scientists suggest, the complexity of the Earth System has lulled us into a false sense of security. All the change we’ve imposed on it (most of it in the last half century), has been absorbed by the Earth System and it continues to function in a way conducive for humanity. But, having crossed these planetary boundaries, we have exhausted the planet’s capacity to absorb further disturbance. Many now believe further incremental disturbance may change things drastically. Indeed, we may even be seeing this with the savage summer of 2022.

Which all serves to underscore how complex the challenge of sustainability can be. We are all complex units operating in complex groups within a complex Earth System. ‘Simply’ pointing out why the opposite side is wrong may score points with our side but does little to fix the problem. For that to happen we need a deeper engagement with the complexity in which we find ourselves, more reflection on what gives us (our tribe and our planet) our identity, and a greater respect for the things that impact on that identity.

Banner image: Civilisation rose during an epoch of climate stability. Now that stability is possibly breaking down. So far, our response to this possibility has been simplistic and ineffective. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge the problem is complex. (Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay)

Game of Sustainability – Episode One: A New Hope

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By Peter Burnett

This is another in our series on the environmental policies of previous Australian Governments. This time, the policy story is too long for a single blog …

In my last blog in this series I told the story of how the Hawke government started with an environmental bang in 1983 by blocking Tasmania’s Franklin Dam project. It did this by passing laws to protect the World Heritage status of the surrounding wilderness.

By taking this unprecedented action, Hawke dramatically expanded federal environmental power through the High Court decision in the Tasmanian Dam Case. After that, Hawke pretty much lost interest in the environment.

Until, that is, the 1987 election was in the offing.

The second wave

There was a second global wave of environmental concern in the mid 1980s (the first wave was in the late 1960s and early 1970s).

In 1984, the worst industrial disaster in world history, a chemical accident at Union Carbide’s Bhopal factory in India killed more than 22,000 people.

Then in 1986 there was a nuclear accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union (now in modern-day Ukraine). The casualties were much lower than Bhopal (the death toll will eventually reach around 4,000 when long-term injuries are included) but the accident forced the resettlement of some 350,000 people and released a radioactive cloud that gave the world, and Europeans in particular, enormous concern.

The resulting wave of environmental concern swept around the world. And it affected Australia as well, although the issues here played out more through a revival in anti-development sentiment, again played out in several instances through World Heritage nominations.

Environmental revival in politics

All this led the Hawke Government to run hard on environmental issues in the lead up to the 1987 election. Labor made campaign commitments about environmentally-significant areas such as Kakadu Stage II; in return the environment movement had advocated a vote for Labor.

Graham Richardson, an influential party fixer, was instrumental in this political deal-making. His reward after Labor won the election was not just promotion to the ministry as Environment Minister, but the elevation of the environment portfolio to cabinet.

Suddenly the environment was at the centre of Australian policy-making.

Let the games begin …

Yet there was more to this second wave than a return to prominence of environmental issues. The whole debate was about to shift from a case-by-case approach (revolving around ‘places of the heart’) to one based on joined up, but complex and contested, policy principles.

Just after the election, the United Nations released a major report, Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report. This is the report that put Sustainable Development on the map.

Brundtland argued that countries should pursue Sustainable Development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

This deceptively simple idea captured imaginations around the world. Within five years, at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, Sustainable Development would become the phrase on everyone’s lips and the foundation stone for Agenda 21, an action plan endorsed by almost every country and major stakeholder group in the world.

Meanwhile, back home …

Even though Australia was part of this global phenomenon, things played out differently at home during the five years between the publication of Our Common Future through to the Rio Earth Summit.

Richardson rejected early advice from his department to take the Brundtland Report to Cabinet for a discussion of its policy implications. He was a political hardhead and hardly a policy nerd — presumably he wanted to stick with the simple ‘case-by-case’ political appeal of World Heritage listings, rather than explore the rabbit warrens of a policy concept like Sustainable Development.

However, ministers with economic portfolios were deeply frustrated by Richardson’s ‘one-off forays’, or ‘icons’ approach as they called it (an icons approach only worries about the iconic bits of nature, the special rainforests and coral reefs, for example).

Richardson had the reputation of stitching up deals on popular environmental causes with Prime Minister Hawke in advance of Cabinet meetings, with the result (as they saw it) that well-developed proposals for economic development would be torpedoed by the latest popular environmental cause. Economic ministers wanted some rules to play by.

Primary Industries Minister John Kerin led a Cabinet revolt. He first took his frustrations to Cabinet at the end of 1987, arguing that existing processes for considering conservation and development proposals were characterised by a lack of consistency and frequent requirements for:

eleventh hour ad hoc responses to proposals … (both within and outside Governments), minimal recognition of the multiple objectives involved in resource allocation decisions and a propensity for parties to seek ‘winner take all outcomes’ without understanding economic, social or environmental consequences.*

Round one to rationality … sort of

Round one went to Kerin and the economic ministers. Sort of. The government announced in late 1988 that it would establish a Resource Assessment Commission (RAC) to assess major environment and development issues. However, while the advice of the RAC was to be based on three legislated principles, dealing with policy integration, optimising benefits and sequential use of land, this was not ‘Sustainable Development’ as was being discussed elsewhere around the world.

In fact, in a process later described by Richardson as ‘long and difficult’, officials had come up with no less than forty five principles related to environment and development, covering everything from ‘maintaining essential ecological processes and life support systems’ (spot-on) through ‘development and environmental considerations should be taken into account … early’ (relevant) to ‘rights of interested parties … in the decision-making process should be made clear and adequately publicised’ (marginal)!

In other words, although Sustainable Development had been on the table for more than a year, the Australian government had yet to engage with it properly.

All this would change the following year, 1989.

Watch this space for the next exciting episode in this ‘Game of Sustainability!’

*John C Kerin (2017). The Way I Saw It; the Way It Was: The Making of National Agricultural and Natural Resource Management Policy (Analysis and Policy Observatory)

Banner image: What is ‘sustainable development’? Is it protecting the best bits of nature? Is it the right to clean water and safe food for everyone? Or is it living in a way that doesn’t limit the choices of future generations? The debate on what sustainable development meant was raging towards the end of the 1980s; and in Australia it took on its own unique direction. (Image by David Salt)

The perils of command and control and the pathology of Natural Resource Management

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By David Salt

As a younger man I honestly believed that sustainability was a tractable problem; a difficult challenge no doubt but one that was solvable with hard work coupled with science and technology. And, as a confident young thing, I thought I could contribute to this outcome by serving in the area of science communication and education; get more talented young people into science, and increase community acceptance of emerging technological solutions so they can be effectively implemented.

How might science and technology save us? By providing us with insights on the many problems being faced by humanity and the environment, and by helping humanity lighten its footprint on Planet Earth. Well, science has definitely provided ample insights on the plight of our planet, and technology has given us so many ways to be more efficient in how we do things.

For all that, however, we are moving away from being sustainable; indeed, we seem to be accelerating away from it. In the last half century, humanity has pushed the Earth system over several planetary boundaries, unleashed a sixth extinction event, and seems unable as a global community to do anything about greenhouse gas emissions which are remorselessly on the increase (as a by-product of our addiction to economic growth).

Science and technology has underpinned so much of our wealth creation and economic activity, and many techno-boosters are fervent in their belief that science and technology is the solution to the many problems facing our environment (indeed, I heard Australia’s Chief Scientist say this exact thing on the radio this morning, as I write.)

As I grew older and watched the natural world decline around me (on a number of scales; think of weed infestation in your local bush reserve, glacial retreat or the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef), my enthusiasm for (and faith in) science and technology also declined. I could see the potential of all these new discoveries (think renewable energy, nanotech and biotech as examples) but could never see where the outcomes were creating a more sustainable future. For example, for every 10% improvement in efficiency in process X, we seemed to see 100% increase in people using that process resulting in more waste, more consumption and more damage (albeit less impact per capita, see the Rebound Effect for a discussion on this).

The dangers of partial solutions

It’s not that I’m anti science and technology and I do believe increasing efficiency is important. However, by themselves they are not enough.

Then I was asked to write a couple of books on resilience science (Resilience Thinking and Resilience Practice) and my doubts on the belief that ‘science and technology is the solution’ crystallised into a new way of looking at the world. The experience of writing about resilience opened my eyes to ideas of complexity, and the capacity of a complex systems to absorb disturbance and retain their identity (the definition of resilience). The consequences of these ideas are deep and far reaching. In a range of different ways, I’ve been attempting to articulate them in my stories for Sustainability Bites.

One major consequence of acknowledging the complexity around us is to be aware of the cost of partial solutions sold to us as complete answers. Science and technology (and endlessly increasing efficiency) are not only not enough to move us to being sustainable, an exclusive reliance on them (and belief in them, think ‘technology not taxes’) will actually reduce resilience in the systems we depend upon and make us more vulnerable to disturbance.

There are many lines of evidence supporting this contention (see Resilience Thinking and Resilience Practice) but in the space I have here I’d like to discuss how natural resource management agencies decline over time. Improving science and technology (and efficiency) is often touted as the solution but only fuels this decline. This discussion is based on a landmark paper by CS Holling (one of the founding fathers of resilience thinking) and Gary Meffe, written a quarter of a century ago: Command and Control and the Pathology of Natural Resource Management.

The command-and-control pathology

Holling and Meffe point out that when command and control is applied in natural resource management, the initial phase is nearly always quite successful. Insect pests are reduced by pesticide use; fishing and hunting are enhanced by stocking or predator removal; forest fires are suppressed for years; floods are minimized by levees and dams.

But what follows on these initial successes is rarely acknowledged. The agencies responsible for management shift their attention from the original social or economic purpose towards increasing efficiency and a reduction in costs. (Of course, all agencies/companies do this over time not just NRN agencies. It’s a pattern well described in the idea of ‘adaptive cycles’ first proposed by Holling.)

NRM agencies search for better and more efficient ways to kill insects, eliminate wolves, rear hatchery fish, detect and extinguish fires, or control flows. Priorities thus shift from research and monitoring (why ‘waste’ money studying and monitoring apparent success?) to internal agency goals of cost efficiency and institutional survival.

Holling and Meffe contend that as this happens, there is a growing isolation of agency personnel from the systems being managed and insensitivity to public signals of concern. They describe this as institutional myopia and increased rigidity (again, something well described by the theory of adaptive cycles).

At the same time, economic activities exploiting the resource benefit from success (of more fish, or water or whatever) and expand in the short term. We see greater capital investment in activities such as agricultural production, pulp mills, suburban development, and fishing and hunting. There’s nothing wrong with this, they say, within limits.

But the result is increasing dependency on continued success in controlling nature while, unknown to most, nature itself is losing resilience and increasing the likelihood of unexpected events and eventual system failure. When natural systems are ‘controlled’ they invariably lose their natural diversity and processes, which leads to a declining ability to absorb disturbance (while maintaining its identity).

With dependency comes denial and demands by economic interests to keep and expand subsidies, and pressure for further command and control.

So, the initial successes of command and control come with a costs that are usually never acknowledged. Command and control reduces natural variation and erodes resilience, environmental managers aim for efficiency rather than connection with the system they are managing, and economic interests that benefit from original command and control distort the system to maintain it. The composite result is increasingly less resilient and more vulnerable ecosystems, more myopic and rigid institutions, and more dependent and selfish economic interests all attempting to maintain short-term success.

Holling and Meffe point out that solutions to this pathology cannot come from further command and control (for example, stronger regulations) but must come from innovative approaches involving incentives leading to more resilient ecosystems, more flexible agencies, more self-reliant industries, and a more knowledgeable citizenry.

Back in the ‘real world’, you’ll largely hear our political leaders deny the complexity of this and simply say science and technology will save us. Unfortunately, in a complex world, simple solutions have a habit of only making the situation worse.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love science and technology. However, by themselves, they are not the solution. To contribute to a sustainable world, they need to work with complexity, not subjugate it.

Banner image: Dams are an important piece of human infrastructure offering many valuable short-term benefits by controlling our rivers. In the longer term they come with a range of often unacknowledged costs. They reduce the natural variability of the river; they encourage human settlement in areas subject to flooding; and allow food production in areas that normally wouldn’t support agriculture. Over time, the agencies managing the dam become myopic and rigid, the economic sectors depending on the dam become increasingly reliant and selfish, and the river system becomes increasingly vulnerable to disturbances. (Image by David Salt)

Triggering the safeguard or safeguarding the trigger: Climate, large emitters and the EPBC Act

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By Peter Burnett

Last week’s debate in the Australian Parliament on the new government’s Climate Change Bill generated a surprising level of debate on a side issue, the possible inclusion of a ‘climate trigger’ in Australia’s most significant environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act).

So much so that I made it the subject of my last blog, in which I argued that we mostly didn’t need a climate trigger, because it would double up on the ‘safeguard mechanism’ that sets individual baselines for major carbon-emitting facilities like steelworks, and then reduces that baseline over time.

The exception was for actions that would generate significant carbon emissions but weren’t ‘major facilities’, which mostly means major land-clearing.

I’ve changed my mind. In light of last week’s debate, I now think we should have both a climate trigger and a safeguard mechanism, on the proviso that they must dovetail with each other.

Let me explain. As the government is committed to the safeguard mechanism but somewhat skeptical about a climate trigger, I’ll start with the former.

Safeguard mechanism

We don’t yet have the full detail of what the government is proposing — it has promised to release a discussion paper towards the end of August. We do know, however, from statements by climate minister Chris Bowen and from Labour’s election policy, that the gist of the proposal is to keep the existing legal machinery while reducing facility emissions baselines progressively to net zero by 2050.

The safeguard mechanism will apply to the 215 existing major emitters, together with any new facilities emitting more than 100,000 tonnes CO₂-e per annum.

Climate trigger

A climate trigger in the EPBC Act would prohibit developments likely to emit more than a certain volume of greenhouse gases per annum (lets say 100,000 tonnes), without first undertaking an environmental impact assessment (EIA) and obtaining a development approval from the environment minister. Such an approval might simply require the developer to use the best available emissions technology at the time of construction, with no follow-on requirements.

Alternatively, much like the safeguard mechanism, it could require reducing emissions from an initial baseline. It might even allow emissions credits to the traded with other such facilities, although this could be complicated in practice.

Dovetailing a safeguard with a trigger

If used together, these two mechanisms would be seeking to occupy much the same regulatory space. That’s why I argued that a climate trigger should be limited to actions that are not caught by the safeguard mechanism, such as land clearing.

However, there are some benefits that are better delivered by one or other of the two mechanisms.

For example, it seems that many projects underestimate their likely emissions by a significant amount. The rigour of the EIA process, including the opportunity for public scrutiny, will help ensure early and accurate estimates of emissions, before the final investment decision is made.

Another benefit of a climate trigger is that the environment minister would have the option of saying ‘no’ to a proposal for a high-emitting facility. Sometimes outright rejection is the right answer, even where the government has no objection to the activity itself, as with Tanya Plibersek’s proposed rejection of Clive Palmer’s latest Queensland coal mine shows.

On the other hand, the safeguard mechanism is designed to facilitate emissions trading, which is something not readily available under the more traditional regulatory mechanism of an EPBC approval.

This leads me to suggest that we can have the best of both, provided we ensure that the two mechanisms dovetail with each other and so avoid duplication.

It could work like this.

First, there would be a whole-of-government policy specifying that major emitters would be subject to a facility-specific emissions cap, set by reference to the lowest feasible emissions from existing technology. This cap would then decline to net zero by 2050.

Second, under the climate trigger, the environment minister would limit herself to assessing the likely emissions under best low-emission technology and setting that level as the initial cap. She would do so knowing that her approval of the project would, in turn, trigger the safeguard mechanism.

In the end, we would have the benefit of both mechanisms but no duplication — just a hand-off from one regulator to the other.

Objections anyone?

Some might object to this ‘dovetail’ approach on the basis that Professor Graeme Samuel recommended against a climate trigger in his review of the EPBC Act in 2020.

This objection lacks substance, for two reasons. First the review did not extend to policy matters such as a climate trigger, but was confined to the operation of the existing Act.

Second, while Professor Samuel did note that previous governments had chosen not to use a climate trigger, an outcome he said he agreed with, he left it at that, without making any arguments of substance against a climate trigger.

‘Both/and’, not ‘either/or’

This debate has quite some way to run —the government will not be responding to the Samuel review until late in 2022 and will not bring forward legislation to amend or replace the EPBC Act until 2023.

However, it is clear already that there will be a major episode of brinkmanship played out between the government and the Australian Greens over the climate trigger. The Greens are determined to push for ‘no new fossil fuel projects’ while the government are equally determined not to ban these projects unilaterally, on the ground that if we act alone, other countries will take up the slack as a suppliers of fossil fuels.

I hope my ‘both/and’ approach will prove useful as that debate plays out.

If we stick with the ‘either/or’ approach currently on the table, then we can expect high-stakes brinkmanship in the Senate next year, as the unstoppable force of the Greens’ passion for avoiding climate disaster collides with the immovable object of a government that knows that its future depends on occupying the centre lane on the political highway.

Banner image: Some want a ‘carbon trigger’ to stop the development of big emitting facilities. Others reckon a ‘safeguard mechanism’ is enough to constrain emissions. Maybe we can dovetail them and get the best of both. (Image by catazul from Pixabay)

The myth of the optimal state: adaptive cycles and the birth of resilience thinking

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By David Salt

Being sustainable, is tough. So far, we (as in humanity) are failing at the task miserably. My contention is that a big part of the problem is our inability to deal with the complexity of the systems around us, that we are a part of. Rather than acknowledging this complexity, we impose framings on these systems treating them as simple. (I discussed these ideas in complicated vs complex.)

Command and control

Simple systems can be managed and controlled, and held in an optimal state for as long as needed. Complex systems, on the other hand, self-organise around our efforts to control them. They can’t be held in an optimal state.

The notion of an ‘optimal sustainable yield’ was a widespread idea in natural resource management last century. The belief was that if you knew a little about what drives a natural resource (say reproductive capacity in fish stocks or forest trees), you could harvest that system removing an optimal amount of that resource forever as it would always replace itself. It’s a command-and-control approach that left countless collapsed fisheries and degraded landscapes in its wake.

‘Command and control’ involves controlling aspects of a system to derive an optimized return. The belief is that it’s possible to hold a system in a ‘sustainable optimal state’.

However, it’s not how the world actually works. Yes, we can regulate portions of the system, and in so doing increase the return from that portion over a short time frame, but we can’t do this in isolation of the rest of the system. If we hold some part of the system constant, the system adapts around our changes, and frequently loses resilience in the process (ie, loses the capacity to recover from a disturbance).

While we can hold parts of the system in a certain condition, the broader system is beyond our command. Indeed, no one is in control; this is a key aspect of complex adaptive systems.

Resilience thinking is an alternate approach to working with these systems, an approach that places their complexity front and centre. And the origins of this approach are entwined with an early realisation that a command-and-control approach to harvesting natural systems will always strike problems eventually. (The following example is based on a discussion that appears in the book Resilience Thinking.)

Of budworms and social-ecological systems

Spruce fir forests grow across large areas of North America, from Manitoba to Nova Scotia and into northern New England. They are the base of a highly valuable forestry industry.

Among the forests’ many inhabitants is the spruce budworm, a moth whose larvae eat the new green needles on coniferous trees. Every 40 to 120 years, populations of spruce budworm explode, killing off up to 80% of the spruce firs.

Following World War II, a campaign to control spruce budworm became one of the first huge efforts to regulate a natural resource using pesticide spraying (thanks in part to new technologies emerging from the war).

Initially, the pest control proved a very effective strategy, but like so many efforts in natural resource management that are based on optimizing production, it soon ran into problems.

In a young forest, leaf/needle density is low, and though budworms are eating leaves and growing in numbers, their predators (birds and other insects) are easily able to find them and keep them in check. As the forest matures and leaf density increases the budworms are harder to find and the predators’ search efficiency drops until it eventually passes a threshold where the budworms break free of predator control, and an outbreak occurs.

While the moderate spraying regime avoided outbreaks of budworms, it allowed the whole forest (as distinct from individual patches) to mature until all of it was in an outbreak mode. Outbreaks over a much greater area were only held in check by constant spraying (which was both expensive and spread the problem).

The early success of this approach increased the industry’s dependence on the spraying program, intensified logging and spawned the growth of more pulp mills.

Now there was a critical mass of tree foliage and budworms. The whole system was primed for a catastrophic explosion in pest numbers. The managers in this system were becoming locked into using ever increasing amounts of pesticide because the industry wouldn’t be able to cope with the shock of a massive pest outbreak. The industry had little resilience, and yet the continued use of chemicals was only making the problem worse. They had created a resource-management pathology.

Adaptive cycles

The industry acknowledged the looming crisis and engaged ecologists (including CS ‘Buzz’ Holling) to see how they might tackle the problem from a systems perspective. In 1973, Holling proposed a new analysis of the dynamics of the fir forests, one based on what he described as ‘adaptive cycles’.

Forest regions exist as a patchwork of various stages of development. The cycle for any one patch begins in the rapid growth phase, when the forest is young. The patch then proceeds through to maturity, and eventually, following some 40 to 120 years of stable and predictable growth (referred to as the ‘conservation phase’), the cycle tips into the release phase. The larvae outstrip the ability of the birds to control them, larvae numbers explode, and the majority of forest trees in that patch are killed. Their rapid demise opens up new opportunities for plants to grow, and during the reorganization phase the forest ecosystem begins to re-establish itself. The cycle then repeats.

With this understanding of the cycle and the key changing variables that drive the system, the forest managers were able to fundamentally modify the manner of their pest control. Rather than continually using low doses of pesticide over wide areas they switched to larger doses applied less frequently at strategic times over smaller areas. They re-established a patchy pattern of forest areas in various stages of growth and development rather than keeping wide areas of forest primed for a pest outbreak.

The forest industry also changed through the process, moving to regional leadership with a greater awareness of the ecological cycles that underpinned the forest’s productivity.

From budworms to resilience thinking

The case study of the spruce budworm and the fir forest is important on many levels as it was in part the genesis of what has become resilience thinking. During his investigations, Holling proposed that the key to sustainability was an ecosystem’s capacity to recover after a disturbance, not the ability to hold it in a notional optimal state.

He also recognized that the ecosystem and the social system had to be viewed together rather than analyzed independently, and that both went through cycles of adaptation to their changing environments. Adaptive cycles don’t just happen in nature, they happen in communities, businesses and nations, it’s feature of complex adaptive systems.

His proposal catalyzed the thinking of ecologists and researchers (with an interest in systems) all over the world because similar patterns were being identified everywhere social-ecological systems were being studied.

One key insight that grew out of an understanding of adaptive cycles is that bringing about change/reform in a social-ecological system is always difficult. However, windows of opportunity do open when a system goes into a release phase, although the window doesn’t open for long. You need to be prepared to seize the opportunity while it’s there.

A basic lesson I draw from the notion of adaptive cycles is that systems get locked into themselves over time and become rigid. There’s no such thing as a sustainable optimal state because even if the system is managed into a condition deemed desirable, it then progressively loses its capacity to learn, innovate or keep its flexibility (often in the name of efficiency). Efficiency is important but is never the complete answer. Efficiency is not the key to sustainability.

Over the decades since Holling first described adaptive cycles, the models and the thinking associated with managing for resilience has gone through much refinement but the two core ideas remain at its heart: the fact that social-ecological systems constantly move through adaptive cycles over many linked scales, and that they can exist in different stable states. I’ll discuss this second building block in my next blog.

Banner image: Spruce fir forests provide valuable timber. However, efforts to optimise these systems last century with the widespread application of pesticide almost destroyed the industry. Uncovering what was going wrong became the origins of resilience thinking. (Image by Reijo Telaranta from Pixabay.)