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Biosphere Futures (https://biospherefutures.net/) is a new online database to collect and discover scenario studies from across the world, with a specific focus on scenarios that explicitly incorporate interdependencies between humans and their supporting ecosystems. It provides access to a globally diverse collection of case studies that includes most ecosystems and regions, enabling exploration of the multifaceted ways in which the future might unfold. Together, the case studies illuminate the diversity and plurality of people’s expectations and aspirations for the future. The objective of Biosphere Futures is to promote the use of scenarios for sustainable development of the biosphere and to foster a community of practice around social-ecological scenarios. We do so by facilitating the assessment, synthesis, and comparative analysis of scenario case studies, pointing to relevant resources, and by helping practitioners and researchers to disseminate and showcase their own work. This article begins by outlining the rationale behind the creation of the database, followed by an introduction to its functionality and the criteria employed for selecting case studies. Subsequently, we present a synthesis of the first 100 case studies included in the scenarios database, highlighting emerging patterns and identifying potential avenues for further research. Finally, given that broader utilization and contributions to the database will enhance the achievement of Biosphere Futures’ objectives, we invite the creators of social-ecological scenarios to contribute additional case studies. By expanding the database’s breadth and depth, we can collectively foster a more nuanced understanding of the possible trajectories of our biosphere and enable better decision making for sustainable development.

There are many calls to use the COVID 19 crisis as an opportunity for transforming to a future trajectory that is more equitable and environmentally sustainable. What is lacking is a cohesive framework for bringing these calls together. We propose that such transitions could be informed by lessons from three decades of scholarship on abrupt and surprising change in systems of humans and nature. Over time, many social-ecological systems exhibit cycles of change consisting of sequential patterns of growth, development, crisis, and reorganization. A critical phase in the cycle is the brief period after crisis when novelty and innovation can change the future trajectory. Without being prepared for this window of opportunity, deep, systemic change may be unachievable. We propose a three-step process to identify the major drivers of the global system that need to be changed: (1) identifying what society values; (2) identifying the determinants of these valued variables; and (3) identifying the underlying drivers of the determinants and how they need to be changed. A tentative list of five such drivers are identified and discussed: (i) the economic system, (ii) homogenization, (iii) human population growth, size, and densities, (iv) consumption patterns, human ethics, and behavior, and (v) governance. They are linked to seven questions relating to how we might proceed in addressing the drivers. If response to the crisis merely reinforces the existing system, its incompatibility with the natural world and its propensity to increase inequity and conflict will likely increase fragility and lead to another version of the present calamity. If it is a deliberately transformed system that emerges its future will depend on the reorganization process, and the way the system is guided into the future. What is needed is a deliberate, fundamental cultivation of emergence to enable transformation toward better futures in order to avoid an inevitable deepening of a system that ultimately is worse for all.

Many funding agencies rely on grant proposal peer review to allocate scientific funding, i.e., researchers compete for funding by submitting proposals that are reviewed and ranked by committees of their peers. Only a fraction of applicants are awarded the requested funds. This system has a long and venerable tradition, but it is increasingly struggling to handle the larger number of applications, suffers from high levels of administrative overhead, may be unreliable in separating successful from unsuccessful projects, and may suffer from bias against innovative ideas, young researchers, and female scientists. We have proposed redesigning funding systems according to a few simple principles, namely, focusing on funding people instead of projects and involving as many scientists in funding decisions as possible. This underpins a proposal for a novel funding system in which every scientist periodically receives an equal, unconditional amount of funding but must anonymously donate a given fraction of everything he or she receives to other scientists of his or her choice. Over time, this simple process will lead to a funding distribution that reflects the entire scientific community, fosters young scientists, and reduces overhead. However, in spite of its simplicity, we must address certain challenges in its implementation such as deciding who participates in the funding system, how to control for conflicts of interest and bias, and how to manage its application. Funding agencies will play a pivotal role in the development and management of this system.

Radical recent developments such as Brexit, the rise of extreme nationalism, the gilets jaunes, polarizing leaders, the Arab Spring, and fundamentalist movements are indications of societal discontent with the status quo. Other societal phenomena such as gender fluidity, veganism, and bartering are also associated with a perceived need to change. The context is the Anthropocene, a human-dominated biosphere challenging the resilience of a livable planet. Such a broad set of developments may be interpreted in the light of new insights from theory of complex systems about what happens as resilience of the current pathway (societal organization as we know it) decreases. Rising fluctuations characterize a phase of uncertainty and exploration, potentially leading into a transition of the system toward a new pathway. We reflect on global changes that may contribute to social destabilization such as rising wealth concentration and environmental degradation and ask how responses may be understood from social-psychological forces such as the need for group identity and managing the terror of mortality. The emerging image is that of a society engaged in multifaceted experimentation. Maintaining such experimentation may help inspire novel pathways to desirable futures, but there is a risk of societies becoming trapped in backward-looking narratives that threaten long-term sustainable outcomes.

Contrasting social-ecological scenarios can help stakeholders envision potential futures and navigate change and uncertainty. Scenario developers integrate stakeholder perceptions into storylines to increase scenario relevance and plausibility while relying on archetypes of change from scenario literature to enrich narratives. This research examines the contributions of local perspectives and global archetypes to scenario development through a case study of a regional scenario project, Yahara 2070, in Wisconsin, USA. Interviews with 50 Yahara watershed stakeholders and 5 members of the project's scenario development team were examined to compare themes from scenario archetypes with local perspectives on how change is expected to occur. We next examined how these two sources of inspiration for trajectories of change were used in the development of the Yahara 2070 scenarios. Both global archetypes and local stakeholders emphasized social values, market forces, and policy reform as influences in determining the future, which were reflected in Yahara 2070. However, stakeholders were less likely to mention institutional breakdown, an important theme from the global scenarios literature that was included in Yahara 2070. This research offers a new approach to analyzing similarities and differences between scenarios' narratives and local perspectives. Scenario development may involve tensions between the goals of reflecting stakeholder views and including narratives from the global scenarios literature that may be useful for creating divergent model trajectories and addressing dramatic change into the future. To improve scenario development, scenario projects should document the development process in academic and nonacademic venues, explicitly highlighting sources and constraints in storyline development.

Agricultural watersheds are affected by changes in climate, land use, agricultural practices, and human demand for energy, food, and water resources. In this context, we analyzed the agricultural, urbanizing Yahara watershed (size: 1345 km², population: 372,000) to assess its responses to multiple changing drivers. We measured recent trends in land use/cover and water quality of the watershed, spatial patterns of 10 ecosystem services, and spatial patterns and nestedness of governance. We developed scenarios for the future of the Yahara watershed by integrating trends and events from the global scenarios literature, perspectives of stakeholders, and models of biophysical drivers and ecosystem services. Four qualitative scenarios were created to explore plausible trajectories to the year 2070 in the watershed's social-ecological system under different regimes: no action on environmental trends, accelerated technological development, strong intervention by government, and shifting values toward sustainability. Quantitative time-series for 2010-2070 were developed for weather and land use/cover during each scenario as inputs to model changes in ecosystem services. Ultimately, our goal is to understand how changes in the social-ecological system of the Yahara watershed, including management of land and water resources, can build or impair resilience to shifting drivers, including climate.

Recent studies provide compelling evidence for the idea that creative thinking draws upon two kinds of processes linked to distinct physiological features, and stimulated under different conditions. In short, the fast system-I produces intuition whereas the slow and deliberate system-II produces reasoning. System-I can help see novel solutions and associations instantaneously, but is prone to error. System-II has other biases, but can help checking and modifying the system-I results. Although thinking is the core business of science, the accepted ways of doing our work focus almost entirely on facilitating system-II. We discuss the role of system-I thinking in past scientific breakthroughs, and argue that scientific progress may be catalyzed by creating conditions for such associative intuitive thinking in our academic lives and in education. Unstructured socializing time, education for daring exploration, and cooperation with the arts are among the potential elements. Because such activities may be looked upon as procrastination rather than work, deliberate effort is needed to counteract our systematic bias.

Different uses of the terms "drivers," "variables," and "shocks" cause confusion in the literature and in discussions on the dynamics of ecosystems and social-ecological systems. Three main sources of confusion are unclear definition of the system, unclear definition of the role of people, and confusion between variables and drivers. As a contribution to resolving some of the confusion, we offer one interpretation of how the terms might be used.

Resilience thinking addresses the dynamics and development of complex social-ecological systems (SES). Three aspects are central: resilience, adaptability and transformability. These aspects interrelate across multiple scales. Resilience in this context is the capacity of a SES to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds. Adaptability is part of resilience. It represents the capacity to adjust responses to changing external drivers and internal processes and thereby allow for development along the current trajectory (stability domain). Transformability is the capacity to cross thresholds into new development trajectories. Transformational change at smaller scales enables resilience at larger scales. The capacity to transform at smaller scales draws on resilience from multiple scales, making use of crises as windows of opportunity for novelty and innovation, and recombining sources of experience and knowledge to navigate social-ecological transitions. Society must seriously consider ways to foster resilience of smaller more manageable SESs that contribute to Earth System resilience and to explore options for deliberate transformation of SESs that threaten Earth System resilience.

Addressing the environmental challenges of the 21st century requires substantial changes to the way modern society views and manages ecosystems. In particular, many authors contend that fundamental transformation of the largely sectoral, expert-centered ecosystem-management institutions of modern, Western societies is needed. There is increasing agreement that more adaptive, integrated, collaborative ecosystem-management approaches, interlinked at multiple scales, would improve society's ability to sustainably manage complex social-ecological systems. Therefore, understanding processes of transformation, and factors that may enable transformation in ecosystem management, has become an active research area. We explore ecosystem-management transformations using a social-innovation framework. Based on three local-level case studies of transformation in freshwater management, we provide a pilot assessment of factors that may promote the emergence and adoption of integrated, collaborative ecosystem-management approaches. Our analysis suggests that ongoing environmental degradation, increasing environmental awareness, and shifting societal values are creating fertile ground for the emergence and adoption of new approaches to ecosystem management. Based on the case studies we examined, we suggest that initiatives that foster environmental awareness and attachment to local ecosystems, develop capacity for social entrepreneurship in the environmental arena, promote dialogue between key stakeholders, and provide institutional support to new institutions may facilitate the emergence of integrated, collaborative ecosystem-management approaches.

Plans to solve complex environmental problems should always consider the role of surprise. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to emphasize known computable aspects of a problem while neglecting aspects that are unknown and failing to ask questions about them. The tendency to ignore the noncomputable can be countered by considering a wide range of perspectives, encouraging transparency with regard to conflicting viewpoints, stimulating a diversity of models, and managing for the emergence of new syntheses that reorganize fragmentary knowledge.

Adaptive capacity is the ability of a living system, such as a social-ecological system, to adjust responses to changing internal demands and external drivers. Although adaptive capacity is a frequent topic of study in the resilience literature, there are few formal models. This paper introduces such a model and uses it to explore adaptive capacity by contrast with the opposite condition, or traps. In a social-ecological rigidity trap, strong self-reinforcing controls prevent the flexibility needed for adaptation. In the model, too much control erodes adaptive capacity and thereby increases the risk of catastrophic breakdown. In a social-ecological poverty trap, loose connections prevent the mobilization of ideas and resources to solve problems. In the model, too little control impedes the focus needed for adaptation. Fluctuations of internal demand or external shocks generate pulses of adaptive capacity, which may gain traction and pull the system out of the poverty trap. The model suggests some general properties of traps in social-ecological systems. It is general and flexible, so it can be used as a building block in more specific and detailed models of adaptive capacity for a particular region.

Many environmental conflicts involve pollutants such as greenhouse gas emissions that are dispersed through space and cause losses of ecosystem services. As pollutant emissions rise in one place, a spatial cascade of declining ecosystem services can spread across a larger landscape because of the dispersion of the pollutant. This paper considers the problem of anticipating such spatial regime shifts by monitoring time series of the pollutant or associated ecosystem services. Using such data, it is possible to construct indicators that rise sharply in advance of regime shifts. Specifically, the maximum eigenvalue of the variance-covariance matrix of the multivariate time series of pollutants and ecosystem services rises prior to the regime shift. No specific knowledge of the mechanisms underlying the regime shift is needed to construct the indicator. Such leading indicators of regime shifts could provide useful signals to management agencies or to investors in ecosystem service markets.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) scenarios address changes in ecosystem services and their implications for human well-being. Ecological changes pose special challenges for long-term thinking, because of the possibility of regime shifts that occur rapidly yet alter the availability of ecosystem services for generations. Moreover, ecological feedbacks can intensify human modification of ecosystems, creating a spiral of poverty and ecosystem degradation. Such complex dynamics were evaluated by a mixture of qualitative and quantitative analyses in the MA scenarios. Collectively, the scenarios explore problems such as the connections of poverty reduction and ecosystem services, and trade-offs among ecosystem services. Several promising approaches are considered by the scenarios, including uses of biodiversity to build resilience of ecosystem services, actively adaptive management, and green technology. Although the scenarios do not prescribe an optimal path, they illuminate the consequences of different policies toward ecosystem services.

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is controversial for environmental issues, but is nevertheless employed by many governments and private organizations for making environmental decisions. Controversy centers on the practice of economic discounting in CBA for decisions that have substantial long-term consequences, as do most environmental decisions. Customarily, economic discounting has been calculated at a constant exponential rate, a practice that weights the present heavily in comparison with the future. Recent analyses of economic data show that the assumption of constant exponential discounting should be modified to take into account large uncertainties in long-term discount rates. A proper treatment of this uncertainty requires that we consider returns over a plausible range of assumptions about future discounting rates. When returns are averaged in this way, the schemes with the most severe discounting have a negligible effect on the average after a long period of time has elapsed. This re-examination of economic uncertainty provides support for policies that prevent or mitigate environmental damage. We examine these effects for three examples: a stylized renewable resource, management of a long-lived species (Atlantic Right Whales), and lake eutrophication.

The concept of resilience has evolved considerably since Holling's (1973) seminal paper. Different interpretations of what is meant by resilience, however, cause confusion. Resilience of a system needs to be considered in terms of the attributes that govern the system's dynamics. Three related attributes of social-ecological systems (SESs) determine their future trajectories: resilience, adaptability, and transformability. Resilience (the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks) has four components - latitude, resistance, precariousness, and panarchy - most readily portrayed using the metaphor of a stability landscape. Adaptability is the capacity of actors in the system to influence resilience (in a SES, essentially to manage it). There are four general ways in which this can be done, corresponding to the four aspects of resilience. Transformability is the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social structures make the existing system untenable. The implications of this interpretation of SES dynamics for sustainability science include changing the focus from seeking optimal states and the determinants of maximum sustainable yield (the MSY paradigm), to resilience analysis, adaptive resource management, and adaptive governance.

The dynamics of and policies governing spatially coupled social-ecological mosaics are considered for the case of fisheries in a lake district. A microeconomic model of households addresses agent decisions at three hierarchic levels: (1) selection of the lake district from among a larger set of alternative places to live or visit, (2) selection of a base location within the lake district, and (3) selection of a portfolio of ecosystem services to use. Ecosystem services are represented by dynamics of fish production subject to multiple stable domains and trophic cascades. Policy calculations show that optimal policies will be highly heterogeneous in space and fluid in time. The diversity of possible outcomes is illustrated by simulations for a hypothetical lake district based loosely on the Northern Highlands of the State of Wisconsin. Lake districts are frequently managed as if lakes were independent, similar, endogenously regulating systems. Our findings contradict that view. One-size-fits-all (OSFA) policies erode ecological and social resilience. If regulations are too stringent, social resilience declines because of the potential rewards of overharvesting. If regulations are too lax, ecological resilience is diminished by overharvesting in some lakes. In either case, local collapses of fish populations evoke spatial shifts of angling effort that can lead to serial collapses in neighboring fisheries and degraded fisheries in most or all of the lakes. Under OSFA management, the natural resources of the entire landscape become more vulnerable to transformation because of changes in, e.g., human population, the demand for resources, or fish harvesting technology. Multiplicity of management regimes can increase the ecological resilience, social resilience, and inclusive value of a spatially heterogeneous social-ecological system. Because of the complex interactions of mobile people and multistable ecosystems, management regimes must also be flexible over time. A rights-based scheme may facilitate policy regimes with appropriate spatial patterns and intertemporal fluidity. In lake fisheries, habitat protection adds an important dimension to policy design. Habitat is a slowly changing variable that creates ecological resilience and thereby provides managers with a broader range of options.

The Northern Highlands Lake District of Wisconsin is in transition from a sparsely settled region to a more densely populated one. Expected changes offer benefits to northern Wisconsin residents but also threaten to degrade the ecological services they rely on. Because the future of this region is uncertain, it is difficult to make decisions that will avoid potential risks and take advantage of potential opportunities. We adopt a scenario planning approach to cope with this problem of prediction. We use an ecological assessment framework developed by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment to determine key social and ecological driving forces in the Northern Highlands Lake District. From these, we describe three alternative scenarios to the year 2025 in which the projected use of ecological services is substantially different. The work reported in this paper demonstrates how scenarios can be developed for a region and provides a starting point for a participatory discussion of alternative futures for northern Wisconsin. Although the future is unknowable, we hope that the assessment process begun in this paper will help the people of the Northern Highlands Lake District choose the future path of their region.

Approaches to natural resource management are often based on a presumed ability to predict probabilistic responses to management and external drivers such as climate. They also tend to assume that the manager is outside the system being managed. However, where the objectives include long-term sustainability, linked social-ecological systems (SESs) behave as complex adaptive systems, with the managers as integral components of the system. Moreover, uncertainties are large and it may be difficult to reduce them as fast as the system changes. Sustainability involves maintaining the functionality of a system when it is perturbed, or maintaining the elements needed to renew or reorganize if a large perturbation radically alters structure and function. The ability to do this is termed "resilience." This paper presents an evolving approach to analyzing resilience in SESs, as a basis for managing resilience. We propose a framework with four steps, involving close involvement of SES stakeholders. It begins with a stakeholder-led development of a conceptual model of the system, including its historical profile (how it got to be what it is) and preliminary assessments of the drivers of the supply of key ecosystem goods and services. Step 2 deals with identifying the range of unpredictable and uncontrollable drivers, stakeholder visions for the future, and contrasting possible future policies, weaving these three factors into a limited set of future scenarios. Step 3 uses the outputs from steps 1 and 2 to explore the SES for resilience in an iterative way. It generally includes the development of simple models of the system's dynamics for exploring attributes that affect resilience. Step 4 is a stakeholder evaluation of the process and outcomes in terms of policy and management implications. This approach to resilience analysis is illustrated using two stylized examples.

Simulation models were developed to explore and illustrate dynamics of socioecological systems. The ecosystem is a lake subject to phosphorus pollution. Phosphorus flows from agriculture to upland soils, to surface waters, where it cycles between water and sediments. The ecosystem is multistable, and moves among domains of attraction depending on the history of pollutant inputs. The alternative states yield different economic benefits. Agents form expectations about ecosystem dynamics, markets, and/or the actions of managers, and choose levels of pollutant inputs accordingly. Agents have heterogeneous beliefs and/or access to information. Their aggregate behavior determines the total rate of pollutant input. As the ecosystem changes, agents update their beliefs and expectations about the world they co-create, and modify their actions accordingly. For a wide range of scenarios, we observe irregular oscillations among ecosystem states and patterns of agent behavior. These oscillations resemble some features of the adaptive cycle of panarchy theory.

We demonstrate an approach for integrating social and ecological models to study ecosystem management strategies. We focus on the management of lake eutrophication. A model has been developed in which the dynamics of the lake, the learning dynamics of society, and the interactions between ecology and society are included. Analyses with the model show that active learning is important to retain the resilience of lakes. Although very low levels of phosphorus in the water will not be reached, active learning reduce the chance of catastrophic high phosphorus levels.

Lake water quality and ecosystem services are normally maintained by several feedbacks. Among these are nutrient retention and humic production by wetlands, nutrient retention and woody habitat production by riparian forests, food web structures that cha nnel phosphorus to consumers rather than phytoplankton, and biogeochemical mechanisms that inhibit phosphorus recycling from sediments. In degraded lakes, these resilience mechanisms are replaced by new ones that connect lakes to larger, regional economi c and social systems. New controls that maintain degraded lakes include runoff from agricultural and urban areas, absence of wetlands and riparian forests, and changes in lake food webs and biogeochemistry that channel phosphorus to blooms of nuisance al gae. Economic analyses show that degraded lakes are significantly less valuable than normal lakes. Because of this difference in value, the economic benefits of restoring lakes could be used to create incentives for lake restoration.