University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, IGERT Seminar Series. Thursday March 8, 2012. Earth Stewardship: Sustainability Strategies for a Rapidly Changing Planet, F. Stuart Chapin, III., 12:00 - 1:00 pm, A-211 College of Natural Science.

Abstract: Earth stewardship is an action-oriented framework intended to foster social-ecological sustainability of a rapidly changing planet. Recent developments identify three strategies that make optimal use of current understanding in an environment of inevitable uncertainty and abrupt change: reducing the magnitude of, and exposure and sensitivity to, known stresses; focusing on proactive policies that shape change; and avoiding or escaping unsustainable social-ecological traps. All social-ecological systems are vulnerable to recent and projected changes but have sources of adaptive capacity and resilience that can sustain ecosystem services and human well-being through active ecosystem stewardship. There is urgent need for natural and social scientists to collaborate with practitioners and the public in developing strategies that foster stewardship at all scales. Ecologists can foster earth stewardship at local to global scales through education and outreach that fosters appreciation for and commitment to local and global places, monitoring threats to and progress toward sustainability, improved understanding of threshold behavior of social-ecological systems, and leadership in defining and pursuing sustainability goals. I show from collaborations with Alaska Indigenous residents, who are experiencing substantial climate change, that each of these steps is feasible.

F. Stuart (Terry) Chapin III is a professor of Ecology at the Department of Biology and Wildlife of the Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska. Chapin is an ecosystem ecologist whose research addresses the sustainability of ecosystems and human communities in a rapidly changing planet. This work emphasizes the impacts of climate change on Alaskan ecology, subsistence resources, and indigenous communities, as a basis for developing climate-change adaptation plans. Chapin has also served as principal investigator of the Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program. As director of the graduate educational program in Resilience and Adaptation at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Chapin studied human-fire interactions in the boreal forest. Chapin was named to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004. He was President of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) from August 2010 until 2011. With Mary Power and Steward Pickett, Chapin is leading a Planetary Stewardship initiative whose goal is to reorient society toward a more sustainable relationship with the biosphere.