OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES
NO 1 – JANUARY 2008

Social-Ecological Sustainability
in Alaskan Boreal Forests:
The Challenges of Global Change

By
F. Stuart Chapin, III

This paper is based on the Second Annual Natural Resources and
Environmental Studies Institute Annual Lecture presented by Dr. F.
Stuart Chapin, III., on 29 March, 2007. Professor Chapin is with
the Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks,
Fairbanks, AK 99775, USA.

The correct citation for this paper is:
Chapin, F.S. III 2007. Social-Ecological Sustainability in Alaskan Boreal
Forests: The Challenges of Global Change. Natural Resources and
Environmental Studies Institute Occasional Paper No. 1, University of
Northern British Columbia, Prince George, B.C., Canada.
This paper can be downloaded without charge from
http://www.unbc.ca/nres/occasional.html

ii

The Natural Resources and Environmental Studies Institute (NRES
Institute) is a formal association of UNBC faculty and affiliates that
promotes integrative research to address natural resource systems
and human uses of the environment, including issues pertinent to
northern regions.
Founded on and governed by the strengths of its members, the NRES
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on complex problems and disseminate results. The NRES Institute
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integrate research into management, and to keep research relevant
and applicable to problems that require innovative solutions.

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Email: nresi@unbc.ca
URL: www.unbc.ca/nres

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CONTENTS
Abstract ....................................................................................................... 2
Introduction................................................................................................. 3
Integrating Conceptual Frameworks........................................................... 4
Global-Local Linkages ........................................................................... 4
Human-Environment Interactions........................................................... 6
Social-Ecological Response to Warming in Interior Alaska ...................... 7
Identifying Policy Strategies....................................................................... 8
Reduce vulnerability ............................................................................... 8
Enhance adaptive capacity.................................................................... 11
Enhance Resilience ............................................................................... 12
Enhance Transformability..................................................................... 13
Conclusions............................................................................................... 15
Acknowledgments..................................................................................... 15
References................................................................................................. 16

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Abstract
Human activities are altering many
factors that determine the fundamental
properties of ecological and social
systems. Is sustainability a feasible goal
in a world in which these controls are
changing with a directional trend over
time? This is global problem, but
Alaska is particularly appropriate place
to address this question because of
rapid climate warming. This has
profoundly affected factors that
influence landscape processes (climate
regulation and disturbance spread) and
natural hazards; the goods that people
harvest from ecosystems such as food,
water, and wood; and many of the
cultural benefits that people derive from
ecosystems. Four broad policy
strategies emerge for sustaining socialecological systems at times of rapid
change: (a) reducing vulnerability by
sustaining basic ecological processes
and reducing those hazards and stress
that cause changes; (b) increasing
adaptability by maintaining a diversity
of options and experimenting with
potentially innovative solutions; (c)
fostering resilience by learning to cope
with surprises and strengthening
feedbacks that stabilize the current state
of the system; and (d) facilitating
transformation to new, potentially more
beneficial states by taking advantage of
opportunities created by crisis. Each
strategy provides societal benefits, and
all of them can be pursued
simultaneously.

Chapin y Social-Ecological Sustainability

2

Introduction
The world is undergoing
unprecedented changes in many of
the factors that determine both its
fundamental properties and their
influence on society. Throughout
human history, people have
interacted with and shaped
ecosystems for social and economic
development (Turner et al. 1990,
Redman 1999, Diamond 2005). In
the last 50 years, however, human
activities have changed ecosystems
more rapidly and extensively than at
any comparable period of human
history, with even more rapid and
extensive changes projected for the
next half century and beyond
(Steffen et al. 2004, Foley et al.
2005, MEA 2005). As human
population expands, the increased
demand for food and natural
resources has led to an expansion of
agriculture, forestry, and other
human activities, causing large-scale,
land-cover change and loss of
habitats and biological diversity.
Increased human mobility is
spreading plants, animals, diseases,
industrial products, and cultural
perspectives more rapidly than ever
before.
This globalization of
economy, culture, and ecology is
important because it modifies the life
support system of the planet (Odum
1989), i.e., the capacity of the planet
to meet the needs of all organisms,
including people. The dramatic
increase in the extinction rate of
species (100- to 1000-fold in the last
two centuries) indicates that global
changes have been catastrophic for
some species, although a few have
benefited and expanded their ranges.
Human society has both benefited
and suffered from global changes,

3

with increased food production,
increased income and living
standards (in parts of the world),
improved treatment of many
diseases, and longer life-expectancy
being offset by deterioration in
ecosystem services, the benefits that
society receives from ecosystems.
More than half of the ecosystem
services on which society depends
for survival and a good life have
been degraded – not deliberately, but
inadvertently as people seek to meet
their material needs (MEA 2005).
Change creates both challenges and
opportunities. People have amply
demonstrated their capacity to alter
the life support system of the planet.
Given the importance and
difficulty of fostering sustainability
in a world with an uncertain future,
many approaches are being explored
(Gunderson and Holling 2002,
Berkes et al. 2003, Clark and
Dickson 2003, Turner et al. 2003). In
this paper I integrate several of these
approaches and apply this framework
to the impacts of climate warming on
Alaska’s boreal forest (Chapin et al.
2006c). I then describe a suite of
policy strategies that could
contribute to sustainability. Alaska is
a particularly appropriate place to
apply this framework, because
ecosystem services, which are key
processes that mediate climate
effects on society, are critical to the
sustainability of traditional
subsistence livelihoods and culture.
Most of ideas presented here have
been published previously (Chapin et
al. 2006b, Chapin et al. 2006d) and
are the basis of a textbook on natural
resource stewardship now in
preparation (Chapin et al. In
preparation).

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Integrating
Conceptual
Frameworks
Global-Local Linkages
Ecological and social systems affect
one another so strongly that they are
best viewed as a social-ecological
system (i.e., a coupled humanenvironment system) (Berkes et al.
2003, Clark and Dickson 2003) (Fig.
1). Although the relative importance
of social and ecological processes
may vary from forests to farms to

cities, the functioning of each of
these systems, and of the larger
regional system in which they are
embedded, is strongly influenced by
physical, ecological, economic, and
cultural factors. They are, therefore,
best viewed, not as ecological or
social systems, but as socialecological systems that reflect the
interactions of physical, ecological,
and social processes.
Ecological components of
social-ecological systems respond to
a spectrum of controls that operate

Figure 1. Diagram of a social-ecological system comprised of an ecological
subsystem (left-hand side) and a social subsystem (right-hand side), each with a
spectrum of controls that operate across a range of temporal and spatial scales.
Environmental impacts, ecosystem services, and social impacts govern the wellbeing of human actors, who affect ecological and social systems through a variety
of institutions. Modified from Chapin et al. (2006b).

Chapin y Social-Ecological Sustainability

4

across a range of temporal and
spatial scales. These can be roughly
grouped as exogenous controls, slow
variables, and fast variables (Fig. 1).
Exogenous controls are factors such
as regional climate or biota that
strongly shape the properties of
broad regions. They remain
relatively constant over long (e.g., a
century) time scales and are not
strongly influenced by short-term,
small-scale dynamics of a single
forest stand or lake. At the scale of
an ecosystem or watershed, there are
a few critical slow variables (i.e.,
variables that strongly influence
social-ecological systems but remain
relatively constant over years-todecades despite interannual
variationin weather and other
factors), because they are buffered
by stabilizing (negative) feedbacks
that prevent rapid change (Chapin et
al. 1996, Carpenter and Turner
2000). Critical slow variables
include presence of particular
functional types of plants and
animals (e.g., evergreen trees or
herbivorous mammals); disturbance
regime; and the capacity of soils or
sediments to provide water and
nutrients. Slow variables in
ecosystems, in turn, govern fast
variables at the same spatial scale
(e.g., moose or aphid density,
individual fire events) that respond
sensitively to daily, seasonal, and
interannual variation in weather and
other factors. When aggregated to
regional or global scales, changes
that occur in ecosystems, for
example those mediated by human
activities, can modify the
environment to such an extent that
even regional controls such as
climate and regional biota that were
once considered constant parameters
are now directionally changing at

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decade-to-century time scales (Foley
et al. 2005). Regardless of the
causes, persistent directional changes
in broad regional controls, such as
climate and biodiversity, must
logically lead to directional changes
in critical slow variables and
therefore the structure and dynamics
of ecosystems, including the fast
variables. The exogenous and slow
variables are particularly critical to
long-term sustainability, but most
management and public attention
focuses on fast variables, whose
dynamics are more visible.
Analogous to the ecological
subsystem, the social subsystem can
be viewed as composed of
exogenous controls, critical slow
variables, and fast variables
(Straussfogel 1997). These consist of
vertically nested relationships,
ranging from global to local, and
linked by cross-scale interactions
(Ostrom 1999, Young 2002, Adger
et al. 2005). At the sub-global scale a
predominant history, culture,
economy, and governance system
often characterize broad regions or
nation states (Chase-Dunn 2000).
These exogenous social controls tend
to be less sensitive to interannual
variation in stock-market prices and
technological change than are the
internal dynamics of local socialecological systems; these exogenous
controls constrain local options. This
asymmetry between regional and
local controls occurs in part because
of asymmetric power relationships
between national and local entities
and in part because changes in a
small locality must be very strong to
substantially modify the dynamics of
large regions. Regional controls
sometimes persist for a long time and
change primarily in response to
changes that are global in extent
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(e.g., globalization of markets and
finance institutions), but at other
times change can occur quickly, as
with the collapse of the Soviet Union
in the 1990s or the globalization of
markets and information (Young et
al. 2006). As in the biophysical
system, a few slow variables (e.g.,
wealth and infrastructure; propertyand-use rights; and cultural ties to
the land) are constrained by regional
controls and interact with one
another to shape fast variables like
community income or population
density. Both slow and fast social
variables can have major effects on
ecological processes (Costanza and
Folke 1996, Holling and Sanderson
1996).
Human-Environment
Interactions
Important advances in understanding
the effects of climate change on
social-ecological systems have
occurred by focusing on processes
that link ecological and social
subsystems through their effects on
human actors (Fig. 1) (Young 2002).
These linkages include direct
environmental impacts (Turner et al.
2003, McCarthy et al. 2005) and
ecosystem services (i.e., the benefits
that society derives from ecosystems;
Daily 1997, MEA 2005). I use the
categories of ecosystem services
developed by the Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment (MEA 2005).
The ecosystem services most readily
incorporated into a socioeconomic
framework are the goods
(provisioning services) that are
directly harvested and used by
society (e.g., food, water, and fuel
wood). In addition, there are
Chapin y Social-Ecological Sustainability

supporting services (basic ecological
processes that shape the structure
and dynamics of ecosystems);
regulating services such as climate
and disturbance regulation that
extend the spatial scale of socialecological interactions from
individual stands to landscapes; and
cultural services that provide a sense
of place and identity, aesthetic or
spiritual benefits, and opportunities
for recreation and tourism. The
societal importance of ecosystem
goods is well recognized, because
they are valued and traded in the
market place. Other ecosystem
services, especially supporting and
cultural services that do not enter the
marketplace, are often taken for
granted by society and are
particularly vulnerable to unintended
degradation, despite their societal
value (Costanza et al. 1997, Daily et
al. 2000).
Human actors (both
individuals and groups) respond to
social, environmental, and ecological
impacts that they perceive through a
complex web of institutions (i.e., the
rules of the game that give rise to
enduring regularities of human
action; Young 2002, Ostrom 2005)
(Fig. 1). Human actions, mediated by
institutions, then affect slow and fast
variables of both ecological and
social systems. Institutions are a
useful focus for analyzing societal
responses to directional
environmental changes because they
affect politics by organizing and
directing social behaviors (Putnam
1993). In addition, institutions are
shaped by and structure history
(Putnam 1993) by offering particular
organizational opportunities,
perpetuating values, and cultivating a
set of actors within the political

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system (Brosius 1999, Lovecraft
2004).

Social-Ecological
Response to
Warming in Interior
Alaska
Climate warming has triggered
pronounced ecological and social
change in Interior Alaska. Since
1950, air temperature has increased
by 0.4°C decade-1, the growing
season has lengthened by 2.6 days
decade-1, and permafrost
(permanently frozen ground) has
warmed by 0.5°C decade-1, with
projections that air temperature will
increase more rapidly during the 21st
century (0.4-0.7°C decade-1)
(Hinzman et al. 2005, Chapin et al.
2006c).
Warming has affected
ecosystem and population processes
(i.e., supporting services), primarily
through changes in the hydrologic
cycle that alter two categories of
slow variables – soil resources and
the disturbance regime. As climate
warms, increased evapotranspiration,
combined with modest increase in
precipitation, has lowered regional
water tables, causing soil drying
(Hinzman et al. 2005), reductions in
tree growth (Barber et al. 2000),
increases in severity and extent of
wildland fire (Kasischke and
Turetsky 2006), and bark beetle
outbreaks, in part because warming
reduced the length of the beetle’s life
cycle from two years to one, causing
a threshold shift in the balance
between the tree and the insect (Berg
et al. 2006). Warming and
disturbance foster other disturbances.
Insect outbreaks increase the
probability of fire and salvage

7

logging. Permafrost thaw occurs
more rapidly after fire because loss
by combustion of the insulative
organic mat makes permafrost
temperature more responsive to
warming air temperature. In
lowlands, permafrost thaw creates
ponds and wetlands, and in uplands
it amplifies soil drying through
improved vertical draining. The large
predicted increases in permafrost
thaw (Hinzman et al. 2005) would
profoundly alter the hydrologic
controls over ecosystem processes
and challenge ecological resilience.
Climate warming affects
social slow variables through both
direct environmental impacts and
changes in ecosystem services. In
Interior Alaska, buildings and oil
pipelines are generally built with a
sufficient safety margin that
permafrost thaw has had modest
impacts on infrastructure, whereas in
Siberia, where safety margins are
smaller, permafrost thaw has
contributed to catastrophic failure of
roads and pipelines, causing oil spills
and erosion that have substantially
impacted the ecosystem services on
which local reindeer herders and
fishers depend (Forbes et al. 2004).
This illustrates the importance of
regional variation in exogenous
social controls and institutional
responses when assessing societal
impacts of climate warming. Climate
warming directly reduces access and
use of lands surrounding villages in
Interior Alaska by reducing summer
river levels and slowing the rate at
which river ice freezes to a thickness
that supports winter travel by snow
machine. Thin ice reduces the safety
of over-ice travel. Warming also
reduces access because the more
extensive fires destroy trapping
cabins and topple trees, making
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overland travel more hazardous and
difficult (Huntington et al. 2006).
Cues that were traditionally used to
predict weather and assess the safety
of over-ice travel are now less
predictive, eroding cultural ties to the
land (Berkes 2002).
The impacts of climate
warming on Alaska depend on a
hierarchy of interactions among
processes occurring at different
scales (Peterson 2000, Adger et al.
2005). Warming is largely the
product of global-scale processes,
including anthropogenic emissions
of greenhouse gases, but is amplified
at high latitudes as reflective sea ice,
glaciers, and snow cover are replaced
by heat-absorbing water, land, and
forests (McGuire et al. 2006). The
impacts of warming on fire regime
depend on legacies of human
activities, such as the active burning
of forests by early 20th-century gold
miners, which increased the
proportion of less flammable early
successional deciduous forests, in
contrast to current fire suppression,
which increases the continuity of
late-successional flammable fuels
(DeWilde and Chapin 2006). In
summary, understanding the
warming effects on a societally
important property like fire risk
depends on processes occurring at
many temporal and spatial scales.

Identifying Policy
Strategies
The previous section shows that
climate warming has had pervasive
effects on social-ecological
processes in Interior Alaska. No
cohesive policy response, however,
has yet developed. Recent advances
in the emerging science of
Chapin y Social-Ecological Sustainability

sustainability (NRC 1999,
Gunderson and Holling 2002, Clark
and Dickson 2003, MEA 2005) now
provide a suite of at least four policy
strategies that could be integrated to
address the consequences of large
directional changes: (1) reduced
vulnerability, (2) enhanced adaptive
capacity, (3) increased resilience,
and (4) enhanced transformability.
Each of these approaches emphasizes
a different set of processes by which
sustainability is fostered (Table 1,
Fig. 2). Vulnerability addresses the
nature of stresses that cause change,
the sensitivity of the system to these
changes, and the adaptive capacity to
adjust to change. Adaptive capacity
addresses the capacity of actors or
groups of actors to adjust so as to
minimize the negative impacts of
changes. Resilience incorporates
adaptive capacity, but also entails
additional system-level attributes of
social-ecological systems that
enhance flexibility to adjust to
change. Transformability addresses
active steps that might be taken to
change the system to a different,
potentially more desirable state.
Although anthropologists, ecologists,
and geographers developed these
approaches somewhat independently
(Janssen et al. 2006), they are
becoming increasingly integrated
(Berkes et al. 2003, Turner et al.
2003, Young et al. 2006). This
integration of ideas provides policy
makers and managers with an
increasingly sophisticated and
flexible tool kit to address the
challenges of sustainability in a
directionally changing world.
Reduce vulnerability
Vulnerability is the degree to which
a system is likely to experience harm

8

Table 1. Principal sustainability approaches and mechanisms (Levin 1999, Folke
et al. 2003, Turner et al. 2003, Chapin et al. 2006b, Walker et al. 2006).
Vulnerability
Reduce exposure to hazards or stresses
Reduce sensitivity to stresses
Sustain natural capital
Maintain components of well-being
Pay particular attention to vulnerability of the disadvantaged
Enhance adaptive capacity and resilience (see below)
Adaptive capacity
Foster biological, economic, and cultural diversity
Foster social learning
Experiment and innovate to test understanding
Select, communicate, and implement appropriate solutions.
Resilience
Enhance adaptive capacity (see above)
Sustain legacies that provide seeds for recovery
Foster resilience learning
Foster a balance between stabilizing feedbacks and disturbance
Adapt governance to changing conditions
Transformability
Enhance diversity and adaptation
Enhance capacity to learn from crisis

Figure 2. Conceptual framework linking human adaptability, vulnerability,
resilience and transformability. Modified from Chapin et al. (2006b).

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due to exposure to a specified hazard
or stress (Turner et al. 2003, Adger
2006). Vulnerability theory is rooted
in socioeconomic studies of impacts
of events (e.g., floods or wars) or
stresses (e.g., chronic food shortage)
on social systems but has been
broadened to address responses of
entire social-ecological systems.
Vulnerability theory deliberately
addresses human values such as
equity and is oriented toward
providing practical outcomes.
Vulnerability to a particular stress
can be reduced by: (1) reducing
exposure to the stress (mitigation);
(2) reducing sensitivity of the system
to stress by sustaining natural capital
and the components of well-being,
particularly for the disadvantaged;
and/or (3) increasing adaptive
capacity and resilience (see below)
to cope with stress (Table 1) (Turner
et al. 2003). The incorporation of
adaptive capacity and resilience as
integral components of the
vulnerability framework (Turner et
al. 2003, Ford and Smit 2004)
illustrates the integration of different
approaches to sustainability science.
Exposure to a stress can be
reduced by minimizing its intensity,
frequency, duration, or extent.
Prevention of pollution or banning of
toxic pesticides, for example,
reduces the vulnerability of people
who would otherwise be exposed to
these hazards. Mitigation (reduced
exposure) is challenging, however,
when the stress is the cumulative
effect of processes occurring at
scales that are larger than the system
being managed. Reducing the
anthropogenic contribution to
climate warming is the key to
mitigating climate-change-related
vulnerability in Interior Alaska. This
is challenging because anthropogenic
Chapin y Social-Ecological Sustainability

forcing of climate change is
primarily the result of greenhousegas emissions at lower latitudes,
where human demographic and
technological change and political
power are concentrated. Because the
anthropogenic source of change is
dispersed globally, it cannot be
reversed by actions taken solely at
high latitudes, where climate change
and its ecological and societal
impacts are most pronounced
(McCarthy et al. 2005). If
vulnerability to climate change is to
be reduced, strong actions must be
initiated promptly, given the long
time-lag between changes in carbon
emissions and reductions in
atmospheric concentrations (Schimel
1995). The most logical approaches
to mitigating climate change are to
strengthen international institutions
such as treaties (e.g., Kyoto
Protocol) and market mechanisms
(e.g., carbon credits) that address
causes and consequences at the same
scale and to foster cross-scale
linkages among institutions, for
example between locally based arctic
indigenous groups and the Arctic
Council, as described earlier. The
United States accounts for 25% of
anthropogenic CO2 emissions (and
arctic nations as a group account for
40% of these emissions), so
increased responsiveness of arctic
nations to arctic warming could
substantially reduce climate forcing
from emissions of greenhouse gases.
Sensitivity to a stress can be
reduced in at least three ways: (1)
sustaining the slow ecological
variables that determine natural
capital; (2) maintaining key
components of well-being; and (3)
paying particular attention to the
needs of the disadvantaged segments
of society, who are generally most

10

vulnerable. The poor or
disadvantaged, for example, are
particularly vulnerable to food
shortages or economic downturns,
and people living in floodplains or
the wildland-urban interface are
particularly vulnerable to flooding or
wildfire, respectively. An
understanding of the causes of
differential vulnerability can lead to
strategies for targeted interventions
to reduce overall vulnerability of the
social-ecological system.
Making the system less
sensitive to stressors can also reduce
vulnerability (Turner et al. 2003).
Actions can be taken to reduce the
sensitivity of specific processes to
climate warming—for example, the
use of passive heat pumps to protect
pipeline integrity from permafrost
warming or mechanical fuel
reduction programs to reduce
wildland-fire risk to communities.
Some ecological responses to
warming reduce system sensitivity to
warming (e.g., the increased
proportion of less flammable early
successional forests as climatedriven fires become more extensive).
Other climate warming effects
augment sensitivity to warming – for
example, the increased likelihood of
winter travel fatalities as river and
lake ice becomes thinner and fails to
support snow machines. In general,
the options to reduce vulnerability to
climate warming in Interior Alaska
by reducing climate sensitivity
appear relatively limited, except
through human adaptation, for
example by relocating villages
threatened by coastal erosion.

11

Enhance adaptive
capacity
Adaptive capacity is the capacity of
actors, both individuals and groups,
to respond to, create, and shape
variability and change in the state of
the system (Folke et al. 2003, Walker
et al. 2004, Adger et al. 2005).
Although the actors in socialecological systems include all
organisms, I focus almost entirely on
people in addressing the role of
adaptive capacity in socialecological change, because human
actors base their actions not only on
their past experience but also on their
capacity to plan for the future
(reflexive action). This contrasts
with evolution, which shapes the
properties of organisms based
entirely on their genetic responses to
past events. Evolution has no
forward-looking component.
Adaptive capacity depends on: (1)
biological, economic, and cultural
diversity that provides the building
blocks for adjusting to change; (2)
the capacity of individuals and
groups to learn how their system
works and how and why it is
changing; (3) experimentation and
innovation to test that understanding;
and (4) capacity to govern
effectively by selecting,
communicating and implementing
appropriate solutions (Table 1).
Many types of learning could
enhance adaptive capacity in Interior
Alaska. For example, enhanced
educational and training
opportunities, especially for
disadvantaged segments of society,
increases social capital and therefore
society’s capacity to adapt (Turner et
al. 2003). Alaska’s relatively welldeveloped cyberinfrastructure for
distance delivery and history of
Occasional Paper No. 1

knowledge sharing between western
scientists and traditional knowledge
holders provide opportunities for
different stakeholder groups to learn,
in culturally appropriate ways, how
climate warming will likely affect
them. At a more technical level, the
integration of science and technology
with local understanding could
provide novel solutions (e.g., heat
pumps that prevent permafrost thaw
or introduction of community
gardens to regions that were
previously too cold for gardening),
often involving substitutions among
financial, natural, physical, and
human capital through time (Clark
and Dickson 2003, Arrow et al.
2004). Development of plausible
scenarios of future trajectories of
entire suites of ecosystem services
and environmental impacts is
feasible and could interconnect some
of the stove-piped institutions to
allow more informed and
comprehensive planning. Active
experimentation in management and
governance (i.e., adaptive
management and adaptive
governance, respectively) provide
opportunities for social learning to
foster adjustments to change
(Walters 1986, Dietz et al. 2003,
Carpenter and Folke 2006), for
example managing a gradually
evolving arctic fishery that will
likely develop as the Arctic Ocean
becomes increasingly ice-free and
fish-rich (Chapin et al. 2006a).
Active participation and interaction
of multiple stakeholder groups is
critical to effective learning, coping,
innovating, and adapting and must be
nested across organizational scales
through development of flexible
systems of adaptive governance
(Dietz et al. 2003, Folke et al. 2005).
Adaptation will be most successful if
Chapin y Social-Ecological Sustainability

it is compatible with and supported
by changes occurring at other scales
(Adger et al. 2005, Berkes et al.
2005). Changes in management of
commercial and subsistence salmon
fisheries in Alaska, for example, are
most likely to be successful if
planned with the expectation that
farmed salmon produced in other
countries will continue to provide a
cheap alternative to Alaskan salmon
(NRC 2004).
Enhance Resilience
Resilience is the capacity of a socialecological system to absorb a
spectrum of shocks or perturbations
to sustain its fundamental function,
structure, identity, and feedbacks
through either recovery or
reorganization in a new context
(Holling 1973, Gunderson and
Holling 2002, Walker et al. 2004,
Folke 2006). The unique
contribution of resilience theory is
the identification of system
properties that foster regeneration
and reorganization after
perturbations (Holling 1973).
Resilience depends on: (1) adaptive
capacity (see above); (2) biophysical
and social legacies that contribute to
diversity and provide proven
pathways for rebuilding; (3) the
capacity of people to plan for the
long term within the context of
uncertainty and change; (4) a balance
between stabilizing feedbacks that
buffer the system against stresses
and disturbance and innovation that
creates opportunities for change; and
(5) the capacity to adjust governance
structures to meet changing needs
(Holling and Gunderson 2002, Folke
et al. 2003, Walker et al. 2006)
(Table 1).

12

Subsistence hunting and
fishing are major components of the
economy and diet of rural Alaskan
communities (Magdanz et al. 2002).
Subsistence depends on harvest of
fish and game that are public goods
rather than owned by private
individuals or government. Extensive
inter-comparisons of systems that
manage these common-pool
resources suggest that a welldeveloped system of institutional
negative feedbacks increases the
likelihood of sustaining these
resources (Dietz et al. 2003, Ostrom
2005). These institutional analyses
suggest that stabilizing feedbacks in
Alaska could be strengthened
through greater involvement of local
users in the management,
monitoring, and enforcement of
subsistence-resource use. Game
management to meet alternative
social goals (e.g., equal access by
local subsistence users and non-local
sport hunters) requires a different set
of socially imposed negative
feedbacks to prevent over-harvest.
Institutions that foster
biological, cultural, institutional, and
economic diversity increase the
likelihood that important functional
components of the current socialecological system will persist
(Elmqvist et al. 2003). Although
Interior Alaska has a low species
diversity, which is typical of high
latitudes, it has a high landscape
diversity maintained by wildfire
(Chapin and Danell 2001). By
retaining wildfire as an important
landscape process, Alaska has the
opportunity to retain this source of
landscape diversity in ways that are
no longer feasible in more urbanized
regions. In contrast to its ecology,
Alaska’s economy has low diversity
and is dominated by extraction of

13

one non-renewable resource (oil).
Diversification of the economy could
enhance Alaska’s resilience to
economic surprises such as pipeline
corrosion that shuts down oilfields
(Chapin et al. 2006a).
Enhance
Transformability
Transformability is the capacity to
create a fundamentally new system
with different characteristics (Walker
et al. 2004). There will always be a
creative tension between resilience
(fixing the current system) and
transformability (seeking a new,
more desirable state) because actors
in the system will likely differ in
their opinions about when to fix
things and when to cut losses and
move to a new alternative structure
(Walker et al. 2004). In addition, the
dividing line between resilience of a
given system and transformation to a
new state is often fuzzy. Even
though total collapse seldom occurs
(Turner and McCandless 2004,
Diamond 2005), active
transformations of important
components of a system are frequent
(e.g., from an extractive to a touristbased economy). In general,
diversity and adaptive capacity,
which are key components of
resilience, also enhance
transformability because they
provide the seeds for a new
beginning and the adaptive capacity
to take advantage of these seeds.
Transformations (including socially
beneficial transitions) are often
triggered by crisis, so the capacity to
recognize opportunities associated
with crisis contributes to
transformability (Gunderson and
Holling 2002, Berkes et al. 2003).
For example, the global increase in
Occasional Paper No. 1

oil prices threatens the viability of
many rural communities in Interior
Alaska, which depend on diesel fuel
for power and heat. This increases
the economic feasibility of switching
to biomass fuels, which could
simultaneously provide wage income
within the community and reduce
warming-induced wildfire risk to
communities (Fresco 2006).

Chapin y Social-Ecological Sustainability

14

15

Conclusions

Acknowledgments

Despite the substantial challenge of
sustaining the beneficial attributes of
complex social-ecological systems in
the face of multiple large-scale
directional changes, the dynamics of
these systems suggest at least four
general policy strategies that could
meet this challenge. The greatest
opportunities appear to include: (a)
reducing vulnerability by reducing
the anthropogenic contribution to
climate warming (through reduced
emissions of greenhouse gases) or
reducing the sensitivity of vulnerable
populations; (b) fostering human
adaptive capacity through enhanced
diversity and through learning and
innovation within the context of
changes occurring at other scales; (c)
enhancing resilience by
strengthening negative feedbacks
that enhance the capacity to deal
with change and surprise; and (d)
facilitating transformation under
circumstances where components of
the current system are no longer
desirable. Implementation of these
strategies in a concurrent and
complementary fashion could be
most effective. Although strong
directional changes in climate
generate challenges and
opportunities that are specific to
Alaska, the general policy strategies
described here should be broadly
applicable.

I thank S.R. Carpenter, W.C. Clark,
E. Ostrom, C. Folke, P.A. Matson,
B.L. Turner, II, and B. Walker for
constructively critical reviews, and
we gratefully acknowledge the
following programs for their
financial support: the Resilience and
Adaptation Program (IGERT, NSF
0114423), EPSCoR (NSF 0346770),
the Bonanza Creek LTER (funded
jointly by NSF grant DEB-0423442
and USDA Forest Service, Pacific
Northwest Research Station grant
PNW01-JV11261952-231), and the
Human-Fire Interaction Project (NSF
0328282).

Occasional Paper No. 1

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