Analysing Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems (ReSES)

1
Analysing Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems
(ReSES) a simple model of water management in
a semi-arid river delta
UFZ - Centre for Environmental Research
Leipzig/Halle
Maja Schlüter1 Claudia Pahl-Wostl2 1Centre for
Environmental Research Leipzig/Halle, Leipzig,
Germany, maja.schlueter_at_ufz.de 2Institute of
Environmental Systems Research, University of
Osnabrück, Germany
INTRODUCTION Resilience is 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 1. Resilience is seen
as an important system property that determines a
systems capacity to cope with and benefit from
change 2. Understanding of mechanisms and
dynamics of resilience in a resource management
context can support an adaptive management
process. We aim to use a simple model of a
coupled social-ecological system in the Amudarya
river basin (Central Asia) to explore the
influence of organisational structure,
information availability, and learning on system
resilience and its capacity to cope with
uncertainty and to adapt to changing conditions.
MECHANISMS OF RESILIENCE
WATER MANAGEMENT IN THE AMUDARYA RIVER DELTA

• HUMAN-ENVIRONMENT INTERACTIONS
• Coupling between social and bio-physical models
  is facilitated by the link of both systems
  through the water resource and harvesting of
  the products crop and fish. Feedbacks between
  the human and natural systems are explicitly
  taken into account (Fig.2).

• Irrigated agriculture and lake ecosystems are
  dependent on water supply by the river.

• Water supply to the delta area is highly
  variable and uncertain.
• Water allocation to users is managed at
  different levels (national, regional, local).
• River flow supports crop production and sustains
  fish populations in the lakes.
• Humans exploit both agricultural resources and
  fish.

• Decision making and information flows are
  represented at different levels (Fig. 3).
• Hybrid model combining differential equa- tions
  for fish population, water flows network with
  agent based model composed of simple rules.

ReSES - MODEL STRUCTURE
RESES - AGENTS
Fig 1 Simplified scheme of water management in
Amudarya delta
Fig 2 Scheme of components of ReSES and their
interactions 1Environmental Policies and
Insitutions for Central Asia (EPIC) Modelling
System for water-balance optimization models in
GAMS

• SIMULATION EXPERIMENTS
• Implementation of different allocation regimes
  (from administrative to user-based) characterized
  by degree of distribution of decision making,
  transfer of information, intensity of agent
  interactions, potential of agents and social
  networks to exchange and store knowledge.
• Analysis of resilience (global and local
  achievement of production goals, survival of fish
  population) of the regimes to different levels of
  variability and uncertainty in water availability
• Study of evolution of decentralized regime and
  multi-user (irrigation and fish) water allocation

Fig 3 Class diagram of agent model (WA Water
availability)
DISCUSSION
EXPECTED RESULTS
Bottom-up (distributed) management is more
flexible and can better cope with uncertainty
than top-down (centra-lized) management. However,
some administrative control is necessary. Buffer
capacity of reservoir and fish population is
important for resilience of the system. Access to
and transfer of information and learning
processes among agents are major factors
influencing the capacity of the system to adapt
to changes. Resilience of Social-Ecological
System can only be understood by analyzing the
coupled system.

• Development of simplified model of real world
  case study example as tool to analyse mechanisms
  of resilience for management of resources.
• Challenges lie in determining the appropriate
  level of complexity in representation of decision
  making by agents, ecosystem and resource dynamics
  - and in analysing the influence of model
  uncertainties on the robustness of the
  conclusions derived from model results.
• Analysis of resilience has to be context-based.
  Is generalization on the role of system structure
  for its resilience possible?

References 1 Walker B, Holling CS, Carpenter
SR, Kinzig A (2004). Resilience, Adaptability and
Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems.
Ecology and Society 9(2)5. http//www.ecologyands
ociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5 2 Folke C, Carpenter
S, Elmqvist T, Gunderson L, Holling CS, Walker B
(2002). Resilience and Sustainable Development
Building Adaptive Capacity in a World of
Transformations. Ambio 31(5) 437-440