Socio-metabolic Risks and Tipping Points on Islands

Small island states and jurisdictions face enormous sustainability challenges such as isolation from global markets, tenuous resource availability, heavy reliance on imports to meet basic needs, coastal squeeze, and reduced waste absorption capacity. At the same time, the adverse effects of global environmental change such as global warming, extreme events, and outbreaks of pandemics significantly hinder island economies’ progress towards sustainability, and consistently rank them high on various vulnerability indices. This talk introduces the concept of socio-metabolic risk, defined as systemic risk associated with the availability of critical resources, the integrity of material circulation, and the (in)equitable distribution of derived products and societal services in a socio-ecological system. Drawing on years of socio-metabolic research on islands, I will argue that specific configurations and combinations of material stocks and flows and their ‘resistance to change’ contribute to the system’s proliferation of socio-metabolic risk (SMR). For better or for worse, these influence the system’s ability to consistently and effectively deliver societal services necessary for human survival. Governing SMR would mean governing socio-metabolic flows, and easing resource requirements through green(-blue) infrastructure and nature-based solutions (NBS) to provide crucial societal services. Such interventions will need strategies to reconfigure resource-use patterns and associated services that are sustainable as well as socially equitable.