Society and Policy Making from an Integrated Earth Systems Perspective

Tools for managing feedbacks and uncertainty

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Figure 12.26: Simple model of complex human-environment systems showing how human modifications to the natural environment can feedback to human systems.
Credit: On the Cutting Edge - Strong Undergraduate Geoscience Teaching managed by NAGT for the benefit of undergraduate geoscience education CC BY-SA 3.0

As you learned earlier in this module, humans and their environment are part of a complex, coupled system. Policymaking and governance institutions are coupled to the natural system through both human modifications of the environment and the information they gather about how these modifications affect the environment. Decision makers gather information about how their modifications have changed the natural system to evaluate whether the modifications they have made have helped them reach their economic, political, or social goals. In this way, modifications to the natural environment feed back into the human policymaking process.

In earlier units in this course, you learned about both sides of this feedback loop. In Units 1 and 2, you learned several ways in which societies can identify and gather decision-relevant information about natural coastal processes and hazards. These units also stressed the diversity and complexity of coastal systems, describing how they are shaped by local geography and many interacting physical processes that operate from global to local scales, over the course of seconds to centuries. In Unit 3, you learned about ways in which societies can modify their coastal environment in an attempt to manage these coastal processes and to reduce their exposure to coastal hazards.

The modules in this unit explored several tools that policymakers and stakeholders use to manage these feedbacks. In Module 10, you learned how the sensitivity and adaptive capacity dimensions of vulnerability could be used to filter information about coastal hazards in ways that allow policy makers to incorporate economic and social considerations when assessing vulnerability. In Module 11, you learned how the disaster management cycle could be used to guide modification of the human and natural components of the coastal environment to reduce these vulnerabilities. And in this module, you learned how stakeholders with different levels of interest and power can use cost-benefit analysis to assess economic, political, and social costs and benefits of these modifications.

Given the complexity of the coupled human environment system, you should not be surprised to learn that these tools are far from perfect. The uncertainty inherent in the system frequently leads to surprises: attempts to modify the natural environment will not always have the expected effects on natural structures and processes, and even when the environment is changed as intended, the effects of this change may not have the desired effects on the local economy and society. Policy makers must therefore learn to live with these uncertainties. They may be able to prepare for uncertainties – including by using the adaptive management approaches and flexible adaptation pathways discussed earlier in this module – but they cannot eliminate them.