Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society: Knowledge for sustainable stewardship of social-ecological systems
Summary
The Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) is an international research program with a focus on social-ecological systems and how we can transform them towards sustainable pathways. PECS has emerged in a time where many advances in sustainability science and practice are being inspired by social-ecological research (Fischer et al. 2015). While work on the interplay between nature and society has a long history and multiple interpretations (Brondizio 2016, Folke et al. 2016) the concept of social-ecological systems was introduced by Berkes and Folke (1998) as an integrated view of humans-in-nature. In essence this research highlights that people are part of ecosystems and shape them, from local to global scales, and are at the same time fundamentally dependent on these systems to provide services for human wellbeing and societal development. In 2005 The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) helped mainstream this approach, while also revealing significant gaps in the scientific knowledge on the dynamics of social-ecological systems. In 2008, an expert group established by the International Council for Science (ICSU) and partners recommended the establishment of a research program that could deal with these knowledge gaps (Carpenter et al. 2009). The result was the Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS), which was established in 2011 and is hosted by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Since the beginning of 2014 PECS is officially part of Future Earth, the newly created global research platform that aims to provide the knowledge and support to accelerate our transformations to a sustainable world.
