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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 14: Focus Session: Dynamics of Socio-ecological Systems

SOE 14.1: Talk

Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 11:15–11:35, MA 001

Humans in the loop? Open questions for modelling the Anthropocene — •Malte Vogl and Gesine Steudle — Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany

The Anthropocene is characterized by the fact that the sphere of socio-cultural-technical evolution and the sphere of natural processes can no longer be clearly separated. This stresses the importance of understanding the dynamics of socio-ecological systems, e.g. when it comes to forecasting the effects of climate adaptation and mitigation and their social impacts. A future prognosis as well as an explanation of past events (or back-casting) for such coupled systems depends on various feedback mechanisms.

In this contribution we will present food for thought on how to address this challenges with agent-based modelling. In particular we investigate what essential memory mechanisms and feedback loops are necessary to describe niche-construction-like effects, for example due to the build-up of infrastructure. Here, infrastructure is seen not only in a technical context but can also refer to knowledge structures.

We present work in progress on projects ranging from modelling mobility decisions to build-up of historical archives and discuss their similarities.

Keywords: agent-based modeling; memory effects; niche-construction; digtal history; geoanthropology