Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Socioecological resilience can be understood as the system’s ability to innovate and generate more stable configurations, being insufficient to conceive it only as of the maintenance of relative stability. Although this has been explored through the concept of Panarchy, as the transition of change phases into an adaptive cycle (growth, conservation, creative destruction or collapse, and reorganization), they do not necessarily constitute a fixed sequence. Thus, a resilient socio-ecological system will be one that can successfully navigate its phases, sometimes skipping some of them, not stopping or getting into rigidities or traps. Alternatively, ecosystem services (i.e. the benefits that humans derive from ecosystems) historically used by human societies can be good indicators of the sustainability of these systems. Therefore, the coupling of both theoretical frameworks (e.g. through the development of conceptual models) allows the integration of bidirectional interactions between both subsystems (social and ecological). In this work, we characterize these interactions at several levels and scales (Panarchy) for Chiloé, which can be considered as a reference of ecological changes (e.g. recurring red tide events). The results show the existence of excessive subsidies from larger-scale cycles which tend to increase dependencies to those of smaller scales and higher speed. We propose that this could eventually reduce the ability of the socio-ecological system to self-organize (its resilience) and thereby limit its long-term sustainability. Financial support was provided by CONICYT-Chile (project FONDECYT N°1170532).