Appendix 4: Managing Human-Environment Systems for
Sustainability
Authors
Colin Clark (University of British Columbia)
Jonathan Dushoff (McMaster University)
Lou Gross (University of Tennessee)
Alan Hastings (University of California, Davis)
David Shmoys (Cornell University)
Mike Steuerwalt (NSF)
Laura Wynter (IBM Research)
Mary Lou Zeeman (Bowdoin College)
Charge to the Group
The planet faces enormous sustainability challenges. With a still-growing human
population and rapidly increasing consumption, society must determine how to meet the
basic needs of people for food, energy, water, and shelter without degrading the planet's
life support infrastructure, its atmosphere and water resources, the climate system, and
species and ecosystems on land and in the oceans on which we and future generations
will rely. For example, given current trajectories, it has been predicted that society will
have to double food production in the next 40 years to keep pace with demand, while
reducing pollution impacts on aquatic ecosystems and reducing the rates of biodiversity
loss associated with land-use change and overfishing. An improvement in well-being
within this ambitious scenario would require improved livelihood opportunities for the
poor and a shift in human behavior among others toward goals that seek well-being
through a less consumptive lifestyle. This would necessitate radical changes in the
management of human-environment systems for sustainability. Under this theme, the
Group is asked to explore potential strategies for managing complex adaptive systems
with real actors, polycentric problems, and multiple scales of interactions, starting with
the need for precise mathematical formulations of these challenges. This requires going
beyond identifying the mathematical challenges to sustainability management of human
systems (e.g., population, consumption, environmental externalities, and commons
problems) to developing a fundamental, mathematically-based understanding of exactly
what management means, what information is required to do good managing, and how
one measures the performance of management systems that aim at sustainability.
Moreover, it requires developing an understanding of how shifts in human behavior can
be achieved in a more effective way. For example, such shifts may arise more readily if
risks associated with various responses can be defined in an appropriate probabilistic
framework and presented so as to most effectively provide general public appreciation of
the trade-offs involved in various management actions.
- Introduction
We challenged ourselves to articulate and identify components of a feasible
research agenda for the mathematical sciences community that deals with sustainability
at the interface of human systems and environmental issues. This includes identifying
areas where new mathematical efforts will assist in describing, modeling, analyzing and