John Anderies - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by John Anderies

International Journal of the Commons, 2016

Water alternatives, 2020

In Arizona, the policy debates over the Colorado River Basin Drought Contingency Plans exposed lo... more In Arizona, the policy debates over the Colorado River Basin Drought Contingency Plans exposed longrunning tensions surrounding how we use and value scarce water resources in a desert. These negotiations also highlighted generations-old disputes between indigenous communities’ water rights and Anglo settlers. This paper explores how irrigators respond to, and participate in, the crafting of institutional arrangements while at the same time experiencing increased exposure to climatic and hydrological risk. Our analysis incorporates qualitative interview data, a literature review, archival information from policy reports, and secondary data on water use and agricultural production. Building on the fieldwork with farmers and water experts that we completed before the drought contingency planning efforts began, we describe the status quo and then explore potential future contexts based on shifting incentives and on the constraints that arise during periods of Colorado River water shorta...

Environmental Research Letters, 2020

The world is facing new environmental challenges that may trigger the collapse of some social-eco... more The world is facing new environmental challenges that may trigger the collapse of some social-ecological systems (SES). More extreme weather events may be much more common in the decades to come due to climate change. Although we have an idea of what climatic events to expect in each region, we know less about how SES can cope with these challenges. We study The Peruvian Piura Basin, which has been exposed to harsh environmental events associated with the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) for centuries. The Piura basin was home to the ancient Moche civilization, which collapsed due to a combination of factors, but strong El Niño events likely played a significant role. To analyze the resilience of The Piura Basin to flood events, we used as guidance the Robustness Framework and different propositions from prominent collapse theories to carry out a longitudinal study based on both primary and collected secondary data. We found that the Piura basin is very fragile based on almost al...

Scientific Reports, 2020

Tipping point dynamics are fundamental drivers for sustainable transition pathways of social-ecol... more Tipping point dynamics are fundamental drivers for sustainable transition pathways of social-ecological systems (SES). Current research predominantly analyzes how crossing tipping points causes regime shifts, however, the analysis of potential transition pathways from these social and ecological tipping points is often overlooked. In this paper, we analyze transition pathways and the potential outcomes that these may lead to via a stylized model of a system composed of interacting agents exploiting resources and, by extension, the overall ecosystem. Interactions between the social and the ecological system are based on a perception-exploitation framework. We show that the presence of tipping points in SES may yield counter-intuitive social-ecological transition pathways. For example, the high perception of an alarming ecological state among agents can provide short-term ecological benefits, but can be less effective in the long term, compared to a low-perception condition. This work...

Regional Environmental Change, 2019

Sustainability, 2018

Social conflicts related to biodiversity conservation and adaptation policy to climate change in ... more Social conflicts related to biodiversity conservation and adaptation policy to climate change in coastal areas illustrate the need to reinforce understanding of the “matters of concern” as well as the “matters of fact”. In this paper, we argue that we must rethink adaptation from a new perspective, considering that humans together function as both ecological actors and social actors. Using international examples from the UNESCO world biosphere reserve network, we show that an ontological perspective may provide a simple and compact way to think about coupled infrastructure systems and systematic formalism, allowing for understanding of the relational matrix between actors, institutions and ecosystems. We contend that our formalism responds to three challenges. First, it encompasses the different regional contexts and policies that rely on the same ontology. Second, it provides a method to relate any local adaptation plan to the conservation paradigms that originate from the ecologic...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Oct 2, 2018

We conduct a global comparison of the consumption of energy by human populations throughout the H... more We conduct a global comparison of the consumption of energy by human populations throughout the Holocene and statistically quantify coincident changes in the consumption of energy over space and time-an ecological phenomenon known as synchrony. When populations synchronize, adverse changes in ecosystems and social systems may cascade from society to society. Thus, to develop policies that favor the sustained use of resources, we must understand the processes that cause the synchrony of human populations. To date, it is not clear whether human societies display long-term synchrony or, if they do, the potential causes. Our analysis begins to fill this knowledge gap by quantifying the long-term synchrony of human societies, and we hypothesize that the synchrony of human populations results from () the creation of social ties that couple populations over smaller scales and () much larger scale, globally convergent trajectories of cultural evolution toward more energy-consuming political...