Limits and thresholds: Setting global, local and regional safe operating spaces

Where ecosystem processes and human livelihoods are intimately linked, within a social-ecological system, feedback mechanisms and thresholds may combine to deliver rapid changes in key processes and conditions. The science of ‘systems’ and the related ‘resilience-thinking’ for management offer the best means to address the challenge of anticipating and managing the unpredictability of global change. Summarising the science that underpins current understanding of limits, thresholds, tipping points, early warning signals and safe operating spaces at global, regional and local scales, this chapter reviews studies from the ESPA Programme and from wider research to highlight the attention already given to these concepts, and the extent to which they have been successfully applied in real-world development situations. While more research is needed to define social-ecological trajectories in terms of the risk of transgressing dangerous limits, the chapter reveals, based on the available evidence, that some developing regions are crossing local thresholds and moving uncontrollably out of ‘safe spaces’ into new and undesirable system configurations where they may lack the ability to support livelihoods or the resilience to withstand changes in climate or social pressures