Socio-ecological systems are shaped by dynamic interactions between environmental processes and human and institutional decision-making. These interactions are central for understanding natural hazards and risks, where societal interventions aimed at managing natural systems may generate intended and unintended outcomes, which themselves shape future possibilities for action. Together, these interactions can generate complex patterns of vulnerability and risk, but also create capacities for adaptation and resilience. Understanding such dynamics requires modelling approaches capable of representing feedbacks and interactions across scales, non-linear processes, and emergent outcomes.
This session invites contributions that use modelling and simulation to investigate the dynamics of risk, vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation in socio-ecological systems. We particularly welcome approaches that explicitly integrate social and environmental processes, including agent-based modelling, system dynamics, hybrid and coupled models, participatory modelling, network approaches, and other computational or simulation-based methods.
The session focuses on how individual and collective decision-making, institutions, and biophysical processes interact over time and across scales. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, natural hazards and disaster risk, land-use dynamics and competition, adaptation and recovery, environmental change, and the emergence of systemic risks and resilience trajectories.
The session particularly welcomes contributions addressing mountain regions and other spatially constrained socio-ecological systems, where competing demands for land and resources, environmental change, and hazard processes interact in complex ways. However, contributions from other geographical and socio-ecological contexts are equally encouraged.
We aim to bring together researchers from the geosciences, social sciences, social ecology, ecology, geography, risk research, and related fields to discuss how modelling can improve our understanding of complex socio-ecological dynamics and support the analysis of future pathways towards more resilient and sustainable socio-ecological systems.