to determine whether there is indeed a regime shift and which drivers have caused it. For example, poverty has been proposed as a driver of dry land degradation, but studies continuously find contradictory evidence. Ecosystem services affected by dry land degradation usually include low biomass productivity, thus reducing provisioning and supporting services for agriculture and water cycling. Polar regions have been the focus on research examining the impacts of climate warming. Regime shifts in polar regions include the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the possible collapse of the thermohaline circulation system. While the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is driven by global warming and threatens worldwide coastlines with an increase of sea level, the collapse of the thermohaline circulation is driven by the increase of fresh water in the North Atlantic which in turn weakens the density driven water transport between the tropics and polar areas. Both regime shifts have serious implications for marine biodiversity, water cycling, security of housing and infrastructure and climate regulation amongst other ecosystem services. Detection of whether a regime shift has occurred Using current well-known statistical methods such as average standard deviates, principal component analysis, or artificial neural networks one can detect whether a regime shift has occurred. Such analyses require long term data series and that the threshold under study has to be crossed. Hence, the answer will depend on the quality of the data; it is event-driven and only allows one to explore past trends. Some scholars have argued based on statistical analysis of time series that certain phenomena do not correspond to regime shifts. Nevertheless, the statistical rejection of the hypothesis that a system has multiple attractors does not imply that the null hypothesis is true. In order to do so one has to prove that the system only has one attractor. In other words, evidence that data does not exhibit multiple regimes does not rule out the possibility a system could shift to an alternative regime in the future. Moreover, in management decision making, it can be risky to assume that a system has only one regime, when plausible alternative regimes have highly negative consequences. On the other hand, a more relevant question than "has a regime shift occurred?" is "is the system prone to regime shifts?". This question is important because, even if they have shown smooth change in the past, their dynamics can potentially become abrupt