http://greencraft.co.

uk/

farm3.static.ickr.com

Can we grow economically without compromising options for future generations?

(Brundtland report)

Developing a comprehensive framework for answering that question is the rst order of business

Measurement of utility
Aggregation and intertemporal social welfare
Are we consuming too much?
Implications for policy

The challenges are interdisciplinary

www.colorado.edu
6

JSTOR: The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 18, No. 3...

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3216811

Sustainability means many things

www.waikato.govt.nz/enviroinfo

Sustainability means many things

www.serconline.org

Are the services we derive from ecosystems sustainable?

marinebio.org/i/

Key research questions

What are services?

Direct, indirect, aesthetic/ethical

and how do they depend upon features of

ecosystems?

Connections across scales

11

Characteristic regularities in macroscopic patterns exist in all ecosystems

www.bio.unc.edu

www.yale.edu/yibs

www.csiro.au

There are striking regularities in such macroscopic patterns, independent of much microscopic detail

Volkov, Banavar, Hubbell and Maritan Nature 424, 1035-1037

This implies a need to relate phenomena across scales, from

Sustainability must focus on macroscopic features, while recognizing that control of those rests at lower levels of organization

www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton

Studying emergence and evolution

Agent-based and hierarchical models of selforganizing systems
Statistical mechanics of ensembles of agents
Emergent description of macroscopic dynamics

16

Towards a Trait-Based Ecology, the MIT-DARWIN Model

u and K from ECCO2 GCM
Phyto growth
Remineralization & other sources

Growth

Mortality

Grazing

Sinking

N/P/Z= nutrients/phytoplankton/zooplankton

C Wunsch & P Heimbach, Physica D 230,197 (2007)

MJ Follows et al, Science 315, 1843 (2007)

Follows, Dutkiewicz, Chisholm,

Prochlorococcus
Synechococcus
Diatoms
Large eukaryotes

18

Key research questions

What are services, and how do they depend upon features of ecosystems?

Direct, indirect, aesthetic/ethical
Connections across scales

Thus, macroscopic regularities of systems emerge from

ecological and evolutionary interactions on ner scales

19

Key research questions

What are services, and how do they depend upon features of ecosystems?
What maintains characteristic features? What sustains robustness of key emergent properties of coupled human-environmental systems?

20

Ecosystems and the Biosphere are Complex Adaptive Systems

Heterogeneous collections of individual units (agents) that interact locally, and evolve based on the outcomes of those interactions.

21

So too are the socio-economic systems with which they are interlinked

22

www.suite101.com

Features of CAS

Self-organization
Multiple stable states, path dependence, hysteresis
Contagious spread and systemic risk
Multiple time scales, and potential for destabilization and regime shifts through slowtime-scale evolution

23

Characterizing the robustness/vulnerability of complex adaptive human-environment systems How do systems self-organize over time?
What makes systems robust?
Does robustness increase over time, or does system evolution carry the seeds of its own collapse?
What are the indicators of the erosion of robustness?

24

Vol 461j3 September 2009jdoi:10.1038/nature08227

REVIEWS
Early-warning signals for critical transitions
Marten Scheffer1, Jordi Bascompte2, William A. Brock3, Victor Brovkin5, Stephen R. Carpenter4, Vasilis Dakos1, Hermann Held6, Egbert H. van Nes1, Max Rietkerk7 & George Sugihara8
Complex dynamical systems, ranging from ecosystems to financial markets and the climate, can have tipping points at which a sudden shift to a contrasting dynamical regime may occur. Although predicting such critical points before they are reached is extremely difficult, work in different scientific fields is now suggesting the existence of generic early-warning signals that may indicate for a wide class of systems if a critical threshold is approaching.
t is becoming increasingly clear that many complex systems have critical thresholdsso-called tipping pointsat which the system shifts abruptly from one state to another. In medicine, we have spontaneous systemic failures such as asthma attacks1 or epileptic seizures2,3; in global finance, there is concern about systemic market crashes4,5; in the Earth system, abrupt shifts in ocean circulation or climate may occur6; and catastrophic shifts in rangelands, fish populations or wildlife populations may threaten ecosystem services7,8. It is notably hard to predict such critical transitions, because the state of the system may show little change before the tipping point is reached. Also, models of complex systems are usually not accurate enough to predict reliably where critical thresholds may occur. Interestingly, though, it now appears that certain generic symptoms may occur in a wide class of systems as they approach a critical point. At first sight, it may seem surprising that disparate phenomena such as the collapse of an overharvested population and ancient climatic transitions could be indicated by similar signals. However, as we will explain here, the dynamics of systems near a critical point have generic properties, regardless of differences in the details of each system9. Therefore, sharp transitions in a range of complex systems are in fact related. In models, critical thresholds for such transitions correspond to bifurcations10. Particularly relevant are catastrophic bifurcations (see Box 1 for an example), where, once a threshold is exceeded, a positive feedback propels the system through a phase of directional change towards a contrasting state. Another important class of bifurcations are those that mark the transition from a stable equilibrium to a cyclic or chaotic attractor. Fundamental shifts that occur in systems when they pass

considered to capture the essence of shifts at tipping points in a wide range of natural systems ranging from cell signalling pathways14 to ecosystems7,15 and the climate6. At fold bifurcation points (F1 and F2, Box 1), the dominant eigenvalue characterizing the rates of change around the equilibrium becomes zero. This implies that as the system approaches such critical points, it becomes increasingly slow in recovering from small perturbations (Fig. 1). It can be proven that this phenomenon will occur in any continuous model approaching a fold bifurcation12. Moreover, analysis of various models shows that such slowing down typically starts far from the bifurcation point, and that recovery rates decrease smoothly to zero as the critical point is approached16. Box 2 describes a simple example illustrating this. The most straightforward implication of critical slowing down is that the recovery rate after small experimental perturbation can be used as an indicator of how close a system is to a bifurcation point16. Because it is the rate of change close to the equilibrium that matters, such perturbations may be very small, posing no risk of driving the system over the threshold. Also, models indicate that in spatially extensive systems at risk of systemic collapse, small-scale experimental probing may suffice to test the vicinity of the threshold for such a large-scale transition. For instance, it has been shown that recovery times after local perturbation increase in models of fragmented populations approaching a threshold for global extinction17. For most natural systems, it would be impractical or impossible to monitor them by systematically testing recovery rates. However, almost all real systems are permanently subject to natural perturbations. It can be shown that as a bifurcation is approached in such a

25

2008

26

2008

27

2008

28

Key research questions

What are services, and how do they depend upon features of ecosystems?
What maintains those features?
Management of human-environmental systems to sustain services

29

Rohde

But adequate action to address them has been lacking

www.edie.net

The central issues are issues of behavior and culture

Intergenerational and intragenerational equity
Public goods and common pool resources
Cooperation in the Commons
Social norms and institutions
Role of leadership and collective behavior

32

Leadership and collective behavior

Carere

Role of leadership and collective decision-making

Couzin, Krause, Franks, Levin

Couzin/BBC

Collective decision-making

g1

Trend setter

Copier

Collective decision-making
1 informed individuals in group of 100.

Collective decision-making
5 informed individuals in group of 100.

Collective decision-making
10 informed individuals in group of 100.

39

Animal groups may be led by a small number of individuals

So too are human societies

http://interactivedemocracy.blogspot.com/

42

Consensus may also be emergent

Uninformed individuals promote democratic consensus in animal groups

Iain D. Couzin1, Christos C. Ioannou1, Gven Demirel2, Thilo Gross2, Colin J. Torney1, Andrew Hartnett1, Larissa Conradt3, Simon A. Levin1, Naomi E. Leonard4

1. 2. 3. 4.

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, Ne Jersey 08544, USA Max-Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems, Nthnitzer Str., 01187 Dresden, Germany

John Maynard Smith Building, School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9QG, UK Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA

43

Furthermore, we discount

The future

www.elements4health.com

We discount

The future
The interests of others

www.improvingyourworld.com

How much should we leave to future generations?

www.bpassoc.org.uk

46

Intergenerational equity

www.dot.ca.gov/hq

The problem of intergenerational transfer of resources has strong parallels in evolutionary theory

R.Klopfer

Intergenerational resource transfers with random offspring numbers

Kenneth J. Arrowa and Simon A. Levinb,1
aDepartment

of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6072; and bDepartment of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1003 Contributed by Kenneth J. Arrow, May 26, 2009 (sent for review March 29, 2009)

A problem common to biology and economics is the transfer of resources from parents to children. We consider the issue under the assumption that the number of offspring is unknown and can be represented as a random variable. There are 3 basic assumptions. The rst assumption is that a given body of resources can be divided into consumption (yielding satisfaction) and transfer to children. The second assumption is that the parents welfare includes a concern for the welfare of their children; this is recursive in the sense that the childrens welfares include concern for their children and so forth. However, the welfare of a child from a given consumption is counted somewhat differently (generally less) than that of the parent (the welfare of a child is discounted). The third assumption is that resources transferred may grow (or decline). In economic language, investment, including that in education or nutrition, is productive. Under suitable restrictions, precise formulas for the resulting allocation of resources are found, demonstrating that, depending on the shape of the utility curve, uncertainty regarding the number of offspring may or may not favor increased consumption. The results imply that wealth (stock of resources) will ultimately have a log-normal distribution.
allocation intergenerational transfers life history theory uncertainty

LUTION

ping generations, offspring produced early in life are more valuable than those produced later because those offspring can also begin reproduction earlier. This is analogous to the classic investment problem in economics, in that population growth imposes a discount rate that affects when one should have offspring. The flip side is that early reproduction compromises the parents ability to care for its children, and that increased number of offspring reduces the investment that can be made in each. Again, the best solution generally involves compromise and an intermediate optimum. A particularly clear manifestation of this tradeoff involves the problem of clutch or litter sizehow many offspring should an organism, say a bird, have in a particular litter? (11) Large litters mandate decreased investment in individuals, among other costs, but increase the number of lottery tickets in the evolutionary sweepstakes. This problem has relevance across the taxonomic spectrum, and especially from the production of seed by plants to the litter sizes of elephants and humans. Even for vertebrates, the evolutionary resolution shows great variation: The typical human litter is a single individual, for which parental care is high, whereas fish may produce millions of offspring with low individual probabilities of survival.

ECONOMIC SCIENCES

49

50

www.faculty.faireld.edu/faculty/hodgson
51
Based on Survey of Consumer Finances

Extensions (with Ricky Der and others)

Modify assumptions to try to produce Pareto tail
Number of offspring contingent on wealth
Non-uniform discounting among offspring
Other sources of uncertainty

52

Extensions (with Ricky Der)

Modify assumptions to try to produce Pareto tail
Number of offspring contingent on wealth
Non-uniform discounting among offspring
Other sources of uncertainty
Prosociality to non-relatives

53

Indeed, inter-generational equity is only part of the problem

54

i94.photobucket.com/albums/l96/carlalynne

Also need to consider intragenerational equity

Sao Paolo

55

dericbownds.net

Inequity in the distribution of wealth is increasing

www.epi.org/page

56

Moreover, we live in a global commons, in which

www.centerstage-musicals.com

Moreover, we live in a global commons, in which

www.enn.com/news/enn-stories/2001

This is exaggerated when the individual agents are nations

Environmental Kuznets Curve

Shift industries in developed countries to less polluting ones
Shift pollution and environmental damage to developing nations

60

http://www.marketobservation.com

The challenge.achieving cooperation at the global level

The problem: Free-riders

www.americanpopularculture.com

Prototypical problem: Prisoners dilemma

Cooperate
Cooperate
Defect

Defect

Only stable solution: Nash equilibrium

Cooperation loses

Columbia.edu

William Forster Lloyd (1832)

Aelbert_Cuyp

But cooperation does arise in Natureand in theory

How?
peoplesgeography.les.wordpress.com

The evolution of altruism and cooperation

morningnoonandnight.les.wordpress.com

Delayed publication of Origin of Species for twenty years

Well understood: W.D.Hamilton and the social insects

www.csiro.au

Well, not as well-understood as it used to be

Vol 466j26 August 2010jdoi:10.1038/nature09205

ANALYSIS
The evolution of eusociality
Martin A. Nowak1, Corina E. Tarnita1 & Edward O. Wilson2
Eusociality, in which some individuals reduce their own lifetime reproductive potential to raise the offspring of others, underlies the most advanced forms of social organization and the ecologically dominant role of social insects and humans. For the past four decades kin selection theory, based on the concept of inclusive fitness, has been the major theoretical attempt to explain the evolution of eusociality. Here we show the limitations of this approach. We argue that standard natural selection theory in the context of precise models of population structure represents a simpler and superior approach, allows the evaluation of multiple competing hypotheses, and provides an exact framework for interpreting empirical observations.
or most of the past half century, much of sociobiological theory has focused on the phenomenon called eusociality, where adult members are divided into reproductive and (partially) non-reproductive castes and the latter care for the young. How can genetically prescribed selfless behaviour arise by natural selection, which is seemingly its antithesis? This problem has vexed biologists since Darwin, who in The Origin of Species declared the paradoxin particular displayed by antsto be the most important challenge to his theory. The solution offered by the master naturalist was to regard the sterile worker caste as a wellflavoured vegetable, and the queen as the plant that produced it. Thus, he said, the whole colony is the unit of selection. Modern students of collateral altruism have followed Darwin in continuing to focus on ants, honeybees and other eusocial insects, because the colonies of most of their species are divided unambiguously into different castes. Moreover, eusociality is not a marginal phenomenon in the living world. The biomass of ants alone composes more than half that of all insects and exceeds that of all terrestrial nonhuman

greater than two times the cost to the altruist (R 5 1/2) or eight times in the case of a first cousin (R 5 1/8). Due to its originality and seeming explanatory power, kin selection came to be widely accepted as a cornerstone of sociobiological theory. Yet it was not the concept itself in its abstract form that first earned favour, but the consequence suggested by Hamilton that came to be called the haplodiploid hypothesis. Haplodiploidy is the sexdetermining mechanism in which fertilized eggs become females, and unfertilized eggs males. As a result, sisters are more closely related to one another (R 5 3/4) than daughters are to their mothers (R 5 1/2). Haplodiploidy happens to be the method of sex determination in the Hymenoptera, the order of ants, bees and wasps. Therefore, colonies of altruistic individuals might, due to kin selection, evolve more frequently in hymenopterans than in clades that have diplodiploid sex determination. In the 1960s and 1970s, almost all the clades known to have evolved eusociality were in the Hymenoptera. Thus the haplodiploid hypothesis seemed to be supported, at least at first. The belief that haplo-

69

Relatedness is not the whole answer, or maybe not even the main answer

Reciprocal altruism

www.natureartists.co m

Cooperation is easily explained in small groups, with repeated interactions

blueroof.les.wordpress.com

But how is cooperation sustained in larger groups, like societies?

picdit.les.wordpress.com

And can these principles be extended to the global level?

www.purdue.edu/envirosoft

Other contributors to prosociality

Social norms (and enforcement)
Societies, religions and governments
Other institutions, like WTO or treaties

eoearth.org

E. Fehr

Social norms can sustain and enhance prosocial behavior

75

A theory for the evolution of other-regard integrating proximate and ultimate perspectives
Erol Akay1,2 , Jeremy Van Cleve1,3 , Marcus W. Feldman, and Joan Roughgarden
Department of Biology, 371 Serra Mall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 Edited by Simon A. Levin, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved September 15, 2009 (received for review April 21, 2009)

Although much previous work describes evolutionary mechanisms that promote or stabilize different social behaviors, we still have little understanding of the factors that drive animal behavior proximately. Here we present a modeling approach to answer this question. Our model rests on motivations to achieve objectives as the proximate determinants of behavior. We develop a two-tiered framework by rst modeling the dynamics of a social interaction at the behavioral time scale and then nd the evolutionarily stable objectives that result from the outcomes these dynamics produce. We use this framework to ask whether other-regarding motivations, which result from a kind of nonselsh objective, can evolve when individuals are engaged in a social interaction that entails a conict between their material payoffs. We nd that, at the evolutionarily stable state, individuals can be other-regarding in that they are motivated to increase their partners payoff as well as their own. In contrast to previous theories, we nd that such motivations can evolve because of their direct effect on tness and do not require kin selection or a special group structure. We also derive general conditions for the evolutionary stability of other-regarding motivations. Our conditions indicate that other-regarding motivations are more likely to evolve when social interactions and behavioral objectives are both synergistic.

nimal behavior is determined both by proximate mechanisms that dictate an animals actions in real time and by evolutionary forces that shape these proximate mechanisms. Even though the evolutionary dynamics of social behavior have been extensively studied (14), proximate mechanisms of behavior and how they interface with evolutionary forces remain poorly understood (4). In recent years, some models have integrated a proximate mechanism with an evolutionary analysis (5, 6). Furthermore, an explicitly two-tiered approach with potentially cooperative behavioral dynamics embedded in an evolutionary dynamic has been proposed (7) as necessary to understand the evolution of social behavior. We contribute to this literature by developing a unied framework for modeling the evolution of a specic type of behavioral interaction based on a well-dened proximate mechanism. Our proximate mechanism is based on the notion that animals are motivated to achieve certain objectives. Goal-seeking behavior has been a recurring theme in animal behavior and has been an integral part of earlier ethological thinking (e.g. 8, 9). However, this idea lost its prominence after the emergence of modern behavioral ecology, which focuses mainly on the tness consequences of behavior (see, for example, page 6

payoff of its social partner, the focal individual is said to exhibit an other-regarding preference for its partner (12). We focus on such other-regarding objectives for three reasons. First, the existence of other-regarding preferences has received substantial support recently from laboratory experiments that show a capacity in some nonhuman primates for unsolicited food sharing even when the recipient cannot reciprocate (1315). Second, explanations for the evolution of such preferences are still in dispute (3, 4, 16) and often rely on costly punishment and reproductive differences between groups (12) or on indirect selection on kin (13, 17) instead of on direct selection on the actions of focal individuals. Third, from a conceptual perspective, an other-regarding preference is a simple way in which the behavioral objectives of two interacting individuals can be brought into concordance even when their payoff interests diverge. In this way, we can clearly delineate altruistic motivations driving a specic behavior from the underlying tness consequences of such behavior. We integrate the proximate model of behavioral objectives with an analysis of the selection pressures acting on those objectives and nd two new results. First, we show that other-regarding objectives, and thus motivations, can evolve through direct selection on the tness effects of individual behaviors. Second, we show that synergism in the payoffs from the social interaction and synergism in individuals objectives promote the evolution of other-regarding objectives. These synergisms are directly related to how the benets and costs of different behaviors are turned into payoffs and how individuals convert information about the payoffs from the social interaction into reward sensations. Results interaction in which two individuals share resources with each other. Imagine, for example, two capuchin monkeys, one having been given apples, the other carrots, as in the experiment by de Waal (18). Both individuals need the sugar in the apple and the -carotene in the carrot, so each would do best to exchange some of its holdings. For simplicity, we assume that costs and benets of sharing are the same for both individuals. We label the donation that a focal individual, individual 1(l1), makes to its partner, individual 2(l2), by a1 , and the donation that l2 makes to l1 by a2 . We term a1 and a2 individuals actions and assume that 0 a1 , a2 1. In the dynamical behavioral model below, the actions can be thought of as the rates at which individuals exchange donations. Suppose that the marginal benet a food
The Behavioral Model. We begin by developing a model of a social

The Commons solution (Hardin)

http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins

The maintenance of cooperation in small societies depends on shared and mutually agreed-upon norms

Ostrom

In general, contributions to public goods/ cpr depend upon

Intrinsic prosociality
Reciprocal arrangements and contracts
Norms, laws, taxes and incentives

Examples

www.gma.org

CPR/Public goods affect the value of private investments

www.hillsboroillinois.net

http://www.travel-destination-pictures.com

Yield:

y(x ,Z) = x Z

Dixit and Levin: Prosociality and public goods

82

Dixit-Levin

v1 = u1 + ui
i= 2

Dixit-Levin
Individual utility:

v i = F(x i ,zi ,< z > i ) + k i i k F(x k ,zk ,< z > k )

where is prosociality, and < z > is the public pool,

which benets from local prosociality and leakage
from other groups

84

Extension (with Dan Rubenstein)

http://www.ilri.org/ilrinews/

These arrangements widespread in East Africa

Maasai
Samburu
Turkana
Boran

mashriqq.com/?p=1081

Variety of mechanisms: Repeated game

Summary: Social/behavioral research topics

Discounting and intergenerational equity
Prosociality, public goods and common-pool resources
Dynamics of social norms on networks
Networks, contagion and robustness
Role of leadership in behavioral shifts
Institutions for achieving sustainability

88

Sustainability Research faces  unique challenges

Interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary
Human-environmental systems are complex adaptive systems

89

Ecological systems and socio-economic systems alike are complex adaptive systems

90

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/maya

Adam Smiths Invisible Hand

www.bized.co.uk

91

The invisible hand does not protect society

92

Those lessons are magnied for ecological and environmental systems

93

media-2.web.britannica.com

The CAS perspective means

In both cases, management requires a balance between free-market and regulation
New institutions must be adaptive

Can adaptive features be built in?
Robustness

Trust and cooperation essential

Key to macroscopic goals is in microscopic incentives
Montreal Protocol?

94

Can cooperation be extended to the global level?

Challenge is to integrate

Bottom-up mechanisms, like evolved prosociality
Top-down mechanisms, like rewards and punishments
Collective action
To achieve
Adaptive, polycentric governance and agreements

96

Need new institutions

97

Need new institutions

98

Need new institutions

99

Climate change

Polycentric approach (Ostrom)

pullingback.blogspot.com

100

Emergence of cooperation within groups is often for the benet of conict with other groups

Lariviere

In the global commons, there is no other

Understanding how to achieve international cooperation is at the core of achieving sustainability in dealing with our common enemy: environmental degradation

103

Carole Levin