Resilience, Robustness, and Marine Ecosystem-based Management

TLDR

Marine ecosystems provide essential services, yet human exploitation threatens their robustness and resilience, potentially triggering regime shifts and collapses. The study aims to protect these services by preserving adaptive capacities through a balance of heterogeneity, modularity, and redundancy, and by tightening feedback loops to incentivize sound stewardship. The authors propose increasing incentives to individuals and tightening reward loops to strengthen system robustness and resilience, ensuring continued service provision for future generations.

Abstract

Marine ecosystems provide essential services to humans, yet these services have been diminished, and their future sustainability endangered, by human patterns of exploitation that threaten system robustness and resilience. Marine ecosystems are complex adaptive systems composed of individual agents that interact with one another to produce collective effects, integrating scales from individual behaviors to the dynamics of whole systems. In such systems, small changes can be magnified through nonlinear interactions, facilitating regime shifts and collapses. Protection of the services these ecosystems provide must therefore maintain the adaptive capacities of these systems by preserving a balance among heterogeneity, modularity, and redundancy, tightening feedback loops to provide incentives for sound stewardship. The challenge for management is to increase incentives to individuals, and tighten reward loops, in ways that will strengthen the robustness and resilience of these systems and preserve their ability to provide ecosystem services for generations to come.