Profile
Project Title:
Weaving the Fabric of Life: socio-ecological networks at the interface of nature and society
Project Summary:
Our individual lifestyles, and the society that supports them, are entirely founded on and embedded within nature. Yet, in industrialised society (where an implicit, and often explicit, sense of superiority over nature historically prevails), decision making of governments, corporations, and consumers conflicts with our ecological support system – causing society to undermine itself. Collapsing the fish stocks that feed us, razing the forests that provide for us, and degrading our clean water and food security. To resolve this self-sabotage in our system, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) emphasises a need to reorient decision making, at all levels, away from ‘society and nature’ thinking and toward a holistic view of our socio-ecological system; as a single, interwoven, continuous ‘Fabric of Life’.
“Protecting a proportion of the planet’s most pristine ecosystems will, by itself, fall far short. Nature must be mainstreamed, incorporated in decisions made for the landscapes in which we live and work every day” - Sandra Diaz. Article; A fabric of life worldview.
We aim to operationalise the Fabric of Life concept into usable tools to both understand our socio-ecological system and promote its restoration. By combining global datasets of nature’s contributions to society with ecological interaction networks, we can construct ‘socio-ecological networks’ to test how biodiversity loss will reverberate through our ecosystem, through cascading extinctions, and ultimately sever the material and non-material benefits that sustain our food, livelihoods, and wellbeing. Questioning, which species are vital weaves in the fabric, and who will be affected by their loss? While, in parallel, exploring how this network-based modeling framework can be transformed into a network-based conceptual framework that can be used to visualise, communicate and actualise a Fabric of Life worldview.
Supervisors:
Marybel Soto Gomez