News > Applied Panarchy: Applications and Diffusion across Disciplines

From the publishers website: https://islandpress.org/books/applied-panarchy

Panarchy was coined by combining the Greek god of nature (Pan) with the Greek word arkos for rules. Thus, panarchy is "nature's rules" and provides a framework to understand change in social-ecological systems and for managing complex environmental issues. Panarchy represents a means for managing the issues that emerge from the interaction between people and nature. That interaction sometimes generates surprises, often the result of slow changes that can accumulate and unexpectedly shift a linked system of humans and nature into a qualitatively different regime (e.g., coral reef systems shifting from coral-dominated to algal-dominated). That regime may be not only impoverished, but also effectively irreversible. Thus, understanding how such change occurs, within and across scales, is critical to achieving a sustainable society. Applied Panarchy explores how these concepts have diffused to relevant academic disciplines in environmental, social and ecological sciences, as well as applied fields of law, policy, economics, engineering, and resource management. Such understanding has influenced the practice, governance and management of our planet and has critical importance moving forward in the Anthropocene.