Conceptualization of resilience and regime shifts of land systems

Abstract

While land system changes contribute to climate change, climate change in turn has significant impacts on the functioning and productivity of land systems. Land systems are coupled social-ecological systems (SESs) and characterized by intrinsic complexity entailing non-linear dynamics, self-organization, multi-scale feedback, and emergence. Understanding the dynamic evolution of land systems, driven by the interactions of climate change and human activities, is a pivotal task of land change science and has profound policy implications for the sustainable management of land resources and ecosystem services. Yet, this is notoriously challenging, particularly, when land systems exhibit regime shifts, defined as a persistent, radical, abrupt, and often surprising change to an alternative system state with distinct structure and functions. The concept of regime shifts has been increasingly applied in ecology but has only received little attention in land system science despite the frequent occurrence of abrupt, nonlinear change and surprising changes in land use types and land use intensity. Moreover, empirical modeling of regime shifts of coupled SESs, such as land systems, has proved to be extremely challenging. In this talk, we introduce the concepts, evidence of climate resilience, and regime shifts in land systems (in particular agricultural and forestry land systems), and discuss the implications for agricultural and land use policies.