Sustainability in coupled social-ecological systems: Integrating ecological and economic science for the management of global change

Globalization involves the closer integration of both socioeconomic and ecological systems. This has important implications for the evolutionary behavior of the system, and for the spatial and temporal scales at which it should be analyzed. Moreover, the growth of uncertainty in an evolutionary system has implications for the way we think about uncertainty and learning in the decision process. One important dimension of globalization is the integration of ecological systems through the trade-induced dispersal of species. Species dispersal has a number of potential but uncertain consequences. These include the emergence of novel diseases along with changes in the diversity and structure of local species assemblages that affect their capacity to deliver ecosystem services. In many cases, the effect is to homogenize ecosystems with implications for both the correlation of risks across space and the resilience of individual systems. The resulting “portfolio effect” alters responses to environmental stressors. Using species dispersal one of the most important global change processes, the paper considers the limitations of monodisciplinary (especially economic) approaches to the analysis of the increasingly tightly coupling within the system. It then discusses the advantages of combining insights from ecological and economic science on the implications of globalization, and identifies the main challenges for the development of an integrated sustainability science.