(140d) Role of Controllability for LONG TERM Sustainability

Successful implementation of sustainability ideas in ecosystem management requires a basic understanding of the often nonlinear and nonintuitive relationships among different dimensions of sustainability, particularly the system-wide implications of human actions.  This basic understanding further includes a sense of the time scale of possible future events and the limits of what is and is not likely to be possible. With this understanding, systematic approaches based on control theory can then be used to develop policy guidelines for the system.   Therefore, controllability of the system is very important to determining long term sustainability of system.   In a recent article in nature by Liu et al. [1] presents a new analytical tool to study controllability of complex system.  We apply these tools to a complex system consisting of an integrated ecological-economic social model, which comprises various ecological (natural) and domesticated compartments representing species along with a macroeconomic price setting model [2,3].  This model has been used to study sustainability of the planet under different scenarios like population explosion and per capita consumption.  We argue that controllability of this system is linked with the long term sustainability and present our arguments in the light of various scenarios studied earlier.

Bibliography

1. Liu Y., J. Slotine and B. Albert-La´szlo, “Controllability of complex networks”, 12 may 2011, nature, 473,  167.
2. Shastri Y. , U. Diwekar, H. Cabezas, and J. Williamson “ Is Sustainability Achievable? Exploring the Limits of Sustainability with Model Systems”, (2008), Environmental Science and Technology, 42, 6710.
3. Shastri Y. ,U. Diwekar, and H. Cabezas, “Optimal Control Theory for Sustainable Environmental Management”, (2008),Environmental Science and Technology, 42, 5322.