New paper in Global Environmental Change by postdoctoral researcher Daniel Müller et.al.
Regime shifts limit the predictability of land-system change
This paper is a product from the I-REDD+ project. In essence, it challenges the widely held view that land-system changes can be reliably predicted in dynamic tropical landscapes.
We demonstrate how sudden events and gradual changes in underlying drivers caused rapid, surprising and widespread land-system changes in a range of case studies in Southeast Asia. We argue that many of these changes in land systems qualify as regime shifts that were often difficult to anticipate. Therefore, the presence of regime shifts compromises the validity of predictions of future land-system changes. We discuss the implications of regime shifts for long-term initiatives such as REDD that must ensure that carbon investments achieve additionality in emission reductions (the "R" in REDD...). REDD, just like many other schemes of payments for ecosystem services (PES), must therefore account for the substantial knightian uncertainties inherent in future predictions of land-system change.