UNDERSTANDING THE CONCEPT OF ROBUSTNESS IN SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS: DEFINITIONS AND EVALUATION

The purpose of this paper is to propose a procedure to evaluate social-ecological systems’ robustness based on a robustness definition that answers to three basic questions: (1) what is the relevant system to be studied?, (2) what are the desired system characteristics to be preserved?, and (3) when does the collapse of one part of a social-ecological system imply that the entire system loses its robustness? The proposed (tentative) definition is the following: a social-ecological system is robust if it is capable of supporting the current trend of population growth at the current levels of per capita use of the natural resources without it is necessary to change its basic rules in use. The system’s robustness degree at a particular time is given by the theoretical distance from actual conditions to its instability tipping point. A tipping point is a threshold condition that, when crossed, shifts the dominance of feedback loops that control the process. Social-ecological systems tend to remain stable as long as the conditions remain below the tipping point. But when conditions cross that point its behavior can become temporally unstable and system's robustness be disrupted. The proposed heuristic procedure to evaluate the robustness of local level SES is to compute the human ecological footprint of the system and t