Change is inevitable… but!

Avoiding disastrous climate change is possible but not inevitable.

W hat the world does or does not do about climate change will have profound implications. If the world fails to act, we may cross a climate tipping point, with disastrous consequences all around. No country by itself can prevent this, but a substantial number of countries working together can avert disaster. Collectively, we know what we need to do. However, can we agree on what each of us shou...

Change is inevitable--change is constant.

Adapting environmental management to uncertain but inevitable change.

Implementation of adaptation actions to protect biodiversity is limited by uncertainty about the future. One reason for this is the fear of making the wrong decisions caused by the myriad future scenarios presented to decision-makers. We propose an adaptive management (AM) method for optimally managing a population under uncertain and changing habitat conditions. Our approach incorporates multi...

The imperceptible but inevitable emergence of crises

This short paper argues that economies cannot be simply viewed as the sum of well behaved but isolated individual decision makers. Even if we accept the notion of an equilibrium state, thinking about the economy as a global dynamic system, it may be true that there are several such equilibrium states. It may be the case that small changes in the parameters of the system result in a switch from ...

Epigenetic reaction norms: possible but not inevitable

I found the analyses and recommendations in Lea et al. (2017) mostly interesting, competent and sound but wish that more guidance had been given for future research. Which empirical results would advance knowledge most at this point, and why those priorities rather than others? That question is not clearly answered. Neither did the authors ask, what empirical puzzles could be solved by the rese...