2 - Ecological limits of adaptation to climate change

Summary

Introduction

The human domination of Earth's ecosystems imposes ecological limits to the ability of humanity to adapt to climate change. Humanity already uses a substantial proportion of Earth's ecosystem services, and there are limits to the extent that humanity can increase this use further, particularly in the context of climate change. There are two reasons for this: first, human modification of ecosystems is decreasing the supply and undermining the reliability of many of these services, and climatic change is likely to amplify these changes. Second, the simplification of Earth's ecosystems has reduced the ability of ecosystems to self-regulate, which increases the possibilities for abrupt changes in ecological functioning. Abrupt changes are much more difficult to adapt to than gradual changes. In this chapter, I review evidence for regime shifts in agricultural ecosystems, and discuss how climate change could alter these regime shifts. Based on these examples, I argue that adaptation policies should consider and aim to reduce the ecological limits to adaptation by focusing on building ecological resilience in combination with climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Living in the Anthropocene

Climate change is occurring on a planet that is already dominated by humans. Humanity's modification of the Earth is the product of both intentional activities, such as converting wild ecosystems to agricultural ones to increase the supply of food, and unintentional activities, such as the production of climate change via the burning of fossil fuels.