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Climate change effects are already being felt around the globe, and governance systems need to adapt to this new reality to foster greater resilience in social–ecological systems (SES). Anticipatory governance is a concept proposed for such a purpose. However, its definition remains rather vague in the literature, as is its practical use for decision makers. In this paper, we contribute to filling these two shortcomings. First, we conducted a systematic literature review of the concept and derived the following main criteria: foresight, networked engagement, integration and feedback. Second, we use the identified criteria to analyse two social–ecological systems around lakes in Lower Saxony, Germany and in Quebec, Canada. In both cases, data were generated using a participatory approach (interviews and workshops) with local stakeholders. We examined these data, identifying opportunities and barriers to anticipatory governance. Our findings support, with empirical data for the first time, the claim in the literature that ensemble-ization—the fact that all anticipatory governance criteria must be put forward jointly and not in isolation—is a facilitator for the emergence of anticipation. Furthermore, by highlighting opportunities and barriers to anticipatory governance within two temperate lake SES cases, we illustrate how to understand a given system's limitations with respect to anticipatory governance, as well as how to engage with the concept through concrete, already existing opportunities. The proposed course of actions could help design more anticipatory governance systems to support decision-making processes that could enhance SES resilience.

The acceptance and usefulness of simulation models are often limited by the efficiency, transparency, reproducibility, and reliability of the modelling process. We address these issues by suggesting that modellers (1) “trace” the iterative modelling process by keeping a modelling notebook corresponding to the laboratory notebooks used by empirical researchers, (2) use a standardized notebook structure and terminology based on the existing TRACE documentation framework, and (3) use their notebooks to compile TRACE documents that supplement publications and reports. These practices have benefits for model developers, users, and stakeholders: improved and efficient model design, analysis, testing, and application; increased model acceptance and reuse; and replicability and reproducibility of the model and the simulation experiments. Using TRACE terminology and structure in modelling notebooks facilitates production of TRACE documents. We explain the rationale of TRACE, provide example TRACE documents, and suggest strategies for keeping “TRACE Modelling Notebooks.”

Freshwater ecosystems are under a constant risk of being irreversibly damaged by human pressures that threaten their biodiversity, the sustainability of ecosystem services (ESs), and human well-being. Despite the implementation of various environmental regulations, the challenges of safeguarding freshwater assets have so far not been tackled successfully. A promising way forward to stop the loss of freshwater biodiversity and to sustain freshwater-based ESs is by implementing ecosystem-based management (EBM), an environmental planning and adaptive management approach that jointly considers social and ecological needs. Responsible for considerable recent success in sustainably managing and conserving marine ecosystems, EBM has not yet been championed for fresh waters. A major reason for the delayed uptake of EBM in fresh waters is likely to be its complexity, requiring planners to be familiar with the latest developments in a range of different research areas. EBM would therefore benefit from becoming more tangible to receive attention on the ground. To facilitate uptake, eight core research areas for EBM and their innovations are introduced, and the way in which they feed into the workflow that guides the EBM planning stage is explained. The workflow links biodiversity distributions with ES supply-and-demand modelling and SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely) target planning, including scenario- and cross-realm perspectives, the prioritization of management alternatives, spatial prioritization of biodiversity conservation and ES areas, and the quantification of uncertainties. Given the extensive resources, time, and technical capacity required to implement the full workflow, a light and an ultralight version of the workflow are also provided. Applied in concert, the eight well-known research areas allow for better planning and operationalizing, and eventually for implementing EBM in freshwater ecosystems. EBM has great potential to increase

Livestock grazing in drylands supports pastoral livelihoods but is facing multiple changes including shocks such as severe droughts. Herdsmen specifically cite drought events as a reason for the abandonment of their transhumance practices. The purpose of this study is to assess the relevance of drought as a driving force for losses of livelihood security leading to a specific systemic change households abandoning transhumant pastoralism. We present and apply a framework for systematic analyses of the social ecological functioning of pastoral resource use that consists of the following components: (1) A spatially-explicit social ecological model for analyzing the system dynamics, especially in face of severe drought in connection with other driving forces of variability, (2) an operationalized measure for assessing livelihood security, and (3) a strategy for systematic vulnerability assessments of pastoral households by scenario comparison. This approach is applied to the land use system of the transhumant pastoralists in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The results indicate that drought is the main threat to livelihood security in only a few cases, eventually forcing households to abandon their transhumant lifestyle. Instead, other (endogenous and exogenous) sources of variability were found to be the main driving force for vulnerability, depending on the household characteristics such as income needs and the level of pastoral mobility. We discuss implications on the role of severe drought in connection with other processes of global change such as social change and land use change for livelihood security in pastoral systems. Moreover, on the basis of these findings, we discuss how the relevance of shocks as a driving force of systemic changes in coupled human-nature-systems may be adequately explored. These conclusions concern the interplay of exogenous and endogenous factors, and unintended side-effects of intended changes. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights re

Modeling social-ecological interactions between humans and ecosystems to analyze their implications for sustainable management of social-ecological systems (SES) has multiple challenges. When integrating social and ecological dynamics, which are often studied separately, one has to deal with different modeling paradigms, levels of analysis, temporal and spatial scales, and data availabilities in the social and ecological domains. A major challenge, for instance, is linking the emergent patterns from individual micro-level human decisions to system level processes such as reinforcing feedbacks determining the state of the ecosystem. We propose building a hybrid model that combines a system dynamics with an agent-based approach to address some of these challenges. In particular, we present a procedure for model development and analysis that successively builds up complexity and understanding of model dynamics, particular with respect to feedbacks between the social and ecological system components. The proposed steps allow for a systematic increase of the coupling between the submodels and building confidence in the model before deploying it to study the coupled dynamics. The procedure consists of steps for (i) specifying the characteristics of the link between the social and ecological systems, (ii) validating the decoupled submodels, (iii) doing sensitivity analysis of the decoupled submodels with respect to the drivers from the respective other subsystem and, finally (iv) analyzing the coupled model. We illustrate the procedure and discuss opportunities and limitations of hybrid models against the background of an archetypical SES case study, namely the restoration of a turbid lake. Our approach exemplifies how a hybrid model is used to unpack SES complexity and analyze interactions between ecological dynamics and micro-level human actions. We discuss the benefits and challenges of combining a system dynamics models as an aggregated view with an agent-based model a, LimnoTip, SESLINK