Publications

Schlüter, M., L. J. Haider, S. J. Lade, E. Lindkvist, R. Martin, K. Orach, N. Wijermans, and C. Folke. 2019. Capturing emergent phenomena in social-ecological systems: an analytical framework. Ecology and Society 24(3):11.https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11012-240311

 Social-ecological systems (SES) are complex adaptive systems. Social-ecological system phenomena, such as regime shifts, transformations, or traps, emerge from interactions among and between human and nonhuman entities within and across scales. Analyses of SES phenomena thus require approaches that can account for (1) the intertwinedness of social and ecological processes and (2) the ways they jointly give rise to emergent so...

Lade, S.J., Norberg, J., Anderies, J.M.,, Beer, C. et.al. 2019. Potential feedbacks between loss of biosphere integrity and climate change. Global Sustainability, Volume 2 2019, e21. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2019.18

Individual organisms on land and in the ocean sequester massive amounts of the carbon emitted into the atmosphere by humans. Yet the role of ecosystems as a whole in modulating this uptake of carbon is less clear. Here, we study several different mechanisms by which climate change and ecosystems could interact. We show that climate change could cause changes in ecosystems that reduce their capacity to take up carbon, further a...

Ringsmuth, A.K., Lade, S.J., Schlüter, M. 2019. Cross-scale cooperation enables sustainable use of a common-pool resource. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 286 Proc. R. Soc. B

In social-ecological systems (SESs), social and biophysical dynamics interact within and between the levels of organization at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Cross-scale interactions (CSIs) are interdependences between processes at different scales, generating behaviour unpredictable at single scales. Understanding CSIs is important for improving SES governance, but they remain understudied. Theoretical models are neede...

Harker-Schuch, I.E.P., Mills, F.M., Lade, S.J., Colvin, R.M. 2019. CO2peration – Structuring a 3D interactive digital game to improve climate literacy in the 12-13-year-old age group. Computers & EducationVolume 144, January 2020, 103705

Preparing students for their future and qualifying them to enter public life is the essential role of the public-school system. As such, an understanding of climate science ought to be an essential – and significant – component of that preparation. This research proposes a novel pathway to teach climate science via a 3D interactive digital game and examines the potential of 12–13-year olds as a prepatent group for climate scie...

Elsawah, S., Filatova, T., Jakeman, A. J., Kettner, A. J., Zellner, M. L., Athanasiadis, I. N., Hamilton, S. H., Axtell, R. L., Brown, D. G., Gilligan, J. M., Janssen, M. A., Robinson, D. T., Rozenberg, J., Ullah, I. I. T., & Lade, S. J. 2020. Eight grand challenges in socio-environmental systems modeling. Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling, 2, 16226. https://doi.org/10.18174/sesmo.2020a16226

Modeling is essential to characterize and explore complex societal and environmental issues in systematic and collaborative ways. Socio-environmental systems (SES) modeling integrates knowledge and perspectives into conceptual and computational tools that explicitly recognize how human decisions affect the environment. Depending on the modeling purpose, many SES modelers also realize that involvement of stakeholders and expert...

Downing, A., Bhowmik, A., Collste, D. Cornell, S.E., Donges, J., et.al. 2019. Matching scope, purpose and uses of planetary boundaries science. Environ. Res. Lett. 14 073005. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ab22c9

Background : The Planetary Boundaries concept (PBc) has emerged as a key global sustainability concept in international sustainable development arenas. Initially presented as an agenda for global sustainability research, it now shows potential for sustainability governance. We use the fact that it is widely cited in scientific literature (>3500 citations) and an extensively studied concept to analyse how it has been used and...

Lade, S.J., Peterson, G.D. 2019. Comment on “Resilience of Complex Systems: State of the Art and Directions for Future Research”. Complexity Volume 2019, Article ID 6343545, 4 pages, https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/6343545

Fraccascia, Giannoccaro, and Albino (hereafter FGA) recently reviewed research on the resilience of complex systems [1]. They identified several different fields in which research on the resilience of complex systems is commonly undertaken but found that the literature is highly compartmentalised with few citations between these fields. This result matches previous cross-disciplinary reviews of resilience that have found a sim...

Steffen, W., Rockström, J., Richardson, K., Lenton, T.M. et.al. 2018. Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. PNAS August 14, 2018 115 (33) 8252-8259. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1810141115

We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years a...

W. Barfuss, J.F. Donges, S.J. Lade, J. Kurths. 2018. When optimization for governing human-environment tipping elements is neither sustainable nor safe. Nature Communications [DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04738-z]

Optimizing economic welfare in environmental governance has been criticized for delivering short-term gains at the expense of long-term environmental degradation. Different from economic optimization, the concepts of sustainability and the more recent safe operating space have been used to derive policies in environmental governance. However, a formal comparison between these three policy paradigms is still missing, leaving po...

Lade, S. J., Donges, J. F., Fetzer, I., Anderies, J. M., Beer, C., Cornell, S. E., Gasser, T., Norberg, J., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., and Steffen, W. 2018. Analytically tractable climate–carbon cycle feedbacks under 21st century anthropogenic forcing, Earth Syst. Dynam., 9, 507-523, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-9-507-2018, 2018.

Changes to climate–carbon cycle feedbacks may significantly affect the Earth system’s response to greenhouse gas emissions. These feedbacks are usually analysed from numerical output of complex and arguably opaque Earth system models. Here, we construct a stylised global climate–carbon cycle model, test its output against comprehensive Earth system models, and investigate the strengths of its climate–carbon cycle feedbacks ...