06 - Young Scientists Summer Program Lecture - 12 June 2007

Simon Levin

Learning to Live in a Global Commons:
Socioeconomic Challenges for a Sustainable Environment

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Lecture Summary

Ecologists, economists, and other social scientists have much incentive for interaction. First of all, ecological systems and socioeconomic systems are linked in their dynamics, and these linkages are key to coupling environmental protection and economic growth. Beyond this, however, are the obvious similarities in how ecological systems and socioeconomic systems function, and the common theoretical challenges in understanding their dynamics.

This should not be surprising. Socioeconomic systems are, in fact, ecological systems in which the familiar ecological phenomena of exploitation, cooperation, and parasitism all can be identified as key features. Viewed from the opposite perspective, ecological systems are economic systems in which competition for resources is key, and in which an evolutionary process shapes the individual agents to a distribution of specialization of function that leads to the emergence of flows and functionalities at higher levels of organization.

Most fundamentally, ecological and socioeconomic systems alike are complex adaptive systems in which patterns at the macroscopic level emerge from interactions and selection mechanisms mediated at many levels of organization, from individual agents to collectives to whole systems and even above. In such complex adaptive systems, robustness must be understood as emergent from selection processes operating at these many different levels, and the inherent nonlinearities can trigger sudden shifts in regimes that, in the case of the biosphere, can have major consequences for humanity.

This lecture will explore the complex adaptive nature of ecosystems, and the implications for the robustness of ecosystem services on which we depend, and in particular examine the conditions under which cooperative behavior emerges. It will then turn attention to the socioeconomic systems in which environmental management is based, and ask what lessons can be learned from our examination of natural systems, and how we can modify social norms to achieve global cooperation in managing our common future. Of special interest will be issues of intragenerational and intergenerational equity, and the importance of various forms of discounting.

Speaker Biography

Simon A. Levin is the Chair of IIASA's Council and represents the US National Academy of Sciences on the Council. He is also the George M. Moffett Professor of Biology, the Director of the Center for BioComplexity, and was the Founding Director of the Princeton Environmental Institute, all at Princeton University.

After completing his PhD in Mathematics at the University of Maryland, Levin taught and researched at Cornell University until 1992 and since then at Princeton University.

His principal interests are in understanding how macroscopic patterns and processes are maintained at the level of ecosystems and the biosphere, in terms of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that operate primarily at the level of organisms. Much of his work is concerned with the evolution of diversification, the mechanisms sustaining biological diversity in natural systems, and the implications for ecosystem structure and functioning.

Levin is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and American Philosophical Society, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He has received numerous awards, including most recently the 2007 American Institute of Biological Sciences Distinguished Scientist Award, the 2005 Kyoto Prize in Basic Science and the 2004 Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences.

Levin was the founding Editor of the journal Ecological Applications, and has edited numerous journals and book series. He also edited the five-volume Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.

Simon Levin’s CV

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Last updated: 03 Apr 2009