In this exploratory study we use existing in situ qualitative and quantitative data on biophysical and social indicators to compare two contrasting Swedish farming systems (low intensity and high intensity) with regard to ecosystem service supply and demand of a broad suite of services. We show that the value (demand) placed on a service is not necessarily connected to the quantity (supply) of the service, most clearly shown for the services recreation, biodiversity, esthetic experience, identity, and cultural heritage. To better capture this complexity we argue for the need to develop portfolios of indicators for different ecosystem services and to further investigate the different aspects of supply and demand. The study indicates that available data are often ill-suited to answer questions about local delivery of services. If ecosystem services are to be included in policy, planning, and management, census data need to be formatted and scaled appropriately.
To further the understanding of climate change adaptation processes, more attention needs to be paid to the various contextual factors that shape whether and how climate-related knowledge and information is received and acted upon by actors involved. This study sets out to examine the characteristics of forest owners' in Sweden, the information and knowledge-sharing networks they draw upon for decision-making, and their perceptions of climate risks, their forests' resilience, the need for adaptation, and perceived adaptive capacity. By applying the concept of ego-network analysis, the empirical data was generated by a quantitative survey distributed to 3000 private forest owners' in Sweden in 2014 with a response rate of 31%. The results show that there is a positive correlation, even though it is generally weak, between forest owner climate perceptions and (i) network features, i.e. network size and heterogeneity, and (ii) presence of certain alter groups (i.e. network members or actors). Results indicate that forest owners' social networks currently serve only a minimal function of sharing knowledge of climate change and adaptation. Moreover, considering the fairly infrequent contact between respondents and alter groups, the timing of knowledge sharing is important. In conclusion we suggest those actors that forest owners' most frequently communicate with, especially forestry experts providing advisory services (e.g. forest owner associations, companies, and authorities) have a clear role to communicate both the risks of climate change and opportunities for adaptation. Peers are valuable in connecting information about climate risks and adaptation to the actual forest property.
In Brief Agriculture is a key driver of change in the Anthropocene. It is both a critical factor for human well-being and development and a major driver of environmental decline. As the human population expands to more than 9 billion by 2050, we will be compelled to find ways to adequately feed this population while simultaneously decreasing the environmental impact of agriculture, even as global change is creating new circumstances to which agriculture must respond. Many proposals to accomplish this dual goal of increasing agricultural production while reducing its environmental impact are based on increasing the efficiency of agricultural production relative to resource use and relative to unintended outcomes such as water pollution, biodiversity loss, and greenhouse gas emissions. While increasing production efficiency is almost certainly necessary, it is unlikely to be sufficient and may in some instances reduce long-term agricultural resilience, for example, by degrading soil and increasing the fragility of agriculture to pest and disease outbreaks and climate shocks. To encourage an agriculture that is both resilient and sustainable, radically new approaches to agricultural development are needed. These approaches must build on a diversity of solutions operating at nested scales, and they must maintain and enhance the adaptive and transformative capacity needed to respond to disturbances and avoid critical thresholds. Finding such approaches will require that we encourage experimentation, innovation, and learning, even if they sometimes reduce short-term production efficiency in some parts of the world.
The 2030 Agenda includes 17 overarching Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These are integrated in nature, and a principle of indivisibility should guide their implementation. Yet, the 2030 Agenda itself does not provide guidance on what indivisibility means in practice, how the SDGs interact, or on how to assess these interactions. The fast-emerging field of what could be referred to as SDG interaction studies seeks to provide such guidance, but as of yet there is no general agreement on what it means to take an integrated approach to the SDGs. Hence, navigating the diverse research landscape on SDG interactions might prove challenging. This paper aims to decipher the literature on SDG interactions by providing an overview of the current research, based on a sample of 70 peer-reviewed articles. The review explores four themes in SDG interaction research by mapping: (i) policy challenges typically addressed, (ii) ways in which SDG ‘interactions’ have been conceptualized, (iii) data sources used, and (iv) methods of analysis frequently employed. Research gaps are identified, where perspectives largely missing include policy innovation, and integrated monitoring and evaluation. Further, few studies consider actor interactions, account for geographic spill-overs, analyze SDG indicator interactions, employ participatory methods, or take a whole-systems approach to the 2030 Agenda. Failing to address these gaps could lead to inefficient SDG implementation and delay goal attainment. Another contribution of the paper is a reading guide, proposing a way to decipher the literature along the themes emerging from the review, and offering a structure to code future papers.
Background
Low-carbon technologies must be widely adopted at a large scale to address climate change and enhance access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy. The uptake of those technologies is often supported by specific policies developed at a national or regional level and those policies, like the technologies themselves, can diffuse from one place to another. This paper sheds some light on this ‘policy transfer’ and investigates the dynamics, the actors and the processes involved. We illustrate what happens when renewable energy support policies in one country inspire renewable support policies in another country using three case studies in Peru, Thailand and Uganda as examples.
Results
Using an adapted version of the policy transfer framework first elaborated by Dolowitz and Marsh (Polit Stud 44:343–57, 1996; Governance 13:5–23, 2000), we describe the policy transfer process in the three case study countries according to several criteria. We find that policy transfer is not a straightforward process where a ‘borrower’ country simply adopts policies from a ‘lender’ country, but instead a complex process where many actors - national and international – interact to shape the outcome of the process. And while experiences particularly in the EU as well as international developments have influenced the policy transfer in case study countries significantly, domestic issues also play a key role in shaping the transferred policies and in adapting them to local contexts. Moreover, the policy transfer process is not an one-off event, but a continuous process where iterative learning helps the policies to evolve over time.
Conclusions
Policy transfer is a complex matter, involving many stakeholders during a continuous process over time. The Dolowitz and Marsh framework proved useful to analyse policy transfer and the actors involved although questions for further research remain. For instance, against what kind of criteria should the ‘success’ of a policy transfer be measured? Moreover, while comparing three illustrative case studies is a first, useful step, having a larger set of case studies and data might enhance our understanding of the details of the processes involved even further.
Purpose - Scenarios have become a vital methodological approach in business as well as in public policy. When scenarios are used to guide analysis and decision-making, the aim is typically robustness and in this context we argue that two main problems at scenario set level is conservatism, i.e. all scenarios are close to a perceived business-as-usual trajectory and lack of balance in the sense of arbitrarily mixing some conservative and some extreme scenarios. The purpose of this paper is to address these shortcomings by proposing a methodology for generating sets of scenarios which are in a mathematical sense maximally diverse. Design/methodology/approach - In this paper, we develop a systematic methodology, Scenario Diversity Analysis (SDA), which addresses the problems of broad span vs conservatism and imbalance. From a given set of variables with associated states, SDA generates scenario sets where the scenarios are in a quantifiable sense maximally different and therefore best span the whole set of feasible scenarios. Findings - The usefulness of the methodology is exemplified by applying it to sets of storylines of the emissions scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This ex-post analysis shows that the storylines were not maximally diverse and given the challenges ahead with regard to emissions reduction and adaptation planning, we argue that it is important to strive for diversity when developing scenario sets for climate change research. Originality/value - The proposed methodology adds significant novel features to the field of systematic scenario generation, especially with regard to scenario diversity. The methodology also enables the combination of systematics with the distinct future logics of good intuitive logics scenarios.
Humanity faces a major global challenge in achieving wellbeing for all, while simultaneously ensuring that the biophysical processes and ecosystem services that underpin wellbeing are exploited within scientifically informed boundaries of sustainability. We propose a framework for defining the safe and just operating space for humanity that integrates social wellbeing into the original planetary boundaries concept (Rockstrom et al., 2009a,b) for application at regional scales. We argue that such a framework can: (1) increase the policy impact of the boundaries concept as most governance takes place at the regional rather than planetary scale; (2) contribute to the understanding and dissemination of complexity thinking throughout governance and policy-making; (3) act as a powerful metaphor and communication tool for regional equity and sustainability. We demonstrate the approach in two rural Chinese localities where we define the safe and just operating space that lies between an environmental ceiling and a social foundation from analysis of time series drawn from monitored and palaeoecological data, and from social survey statistics respectively. Agricultural intensification has led to poverty reduction, though not eradicated it, but at the expense of environmental degradation. Currently, the environmental ceiling is exceeded for degraded water quality at both localities even though the least well-met social standards are for available piped water and sanitation. The conjunction of these social needs and environmental constraints around the issue of water access and quality illustrates the broader value of the safe and just operating space approach for sustainable development.
This chapter discusses the related concepts of resilience and adaptation. The discussion in the chapter emanates from the on-going EU FP7 emBRACE project which used five case studies across Europe to investigate the role, structure and processes of ‘ community resilience’ in the face of flooding, alpine hazards (avalanche and flash flood), heatwave and earthquake. A sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA) is employed as the mechanism by which the complex mix of components and processes of relevance to community resilience is elucidated to hydrometeorological hazards. The chapter introduces a number of lenses through which it can be seen that resilient people, communities and systems require a much wider and more complex frame in which to understand how resilience is produced, reproduced, maintained or lost, than can be provided within even quite advanced socio-technical risk-management systems.
In low- and middle-income countries, a common component of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) interventions is the goal of empowerment of beneficiaries, particularly poor households. Empowerment is viewed as an important development goal in itself, as well as a way to obtain improved WASH outcomes. However, empowerment is a complex and multi-dimensional concept, and it is often not clear how it is defined in WASH sector programming. This scoping review explores how concepts of empowerment have been used in the WASH sector and delineates relevant empowerment dimensions. Medline, Embase, and Global Health databases were searched for in the peer-reviewed literature published in English. A total of 13 studies were identified. Five major interrelated empowerment dimensions were identified: access to information, participation, capacity building, leadership and accountability, and decision-making. This review provides researchers and practitioners with a greater understanding of dimensions of empowerment that are relevant for strengthening WASH interventions, as well as tracking progress toward gender and social equality outcomes over time. This understanding can help ensure inclusive WASH service delivery to achieve gender-sensitive Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets for universal water and sanitation access.
Access to safe sanitation services is fundamental for healthy and productive lives, but in rural Burkina Faso only around 7% of the population uses improved sanitation. Ecological sanitation (ecosan) systems that allow safe agricultural reuse of nutrients in human waste have been promoted in these areas, as a way to meet sanitation needs while contributing to food security. However, little is known about the success of these interventions in terms of both sustained use of the toilet and safe excreta reuse practices. We assessed the use of ecosan systems in 44 rural communities where such interventions had taken place. Structured interviews and observations conducted at 520 randomly selected concessions (residential properties), suggested a large-scale shift from open defecation to ecosan toilet use. However, only 58% of surveyed concessions reported ever emptying the ecosan toilet vault, which is required for optimal long-term functioning. Concessions that received ecosan training programmes with a greater emphasis on agricultural reuse were more strongly associated with toilet use and emptying than those that whose training focused more on sanitation access and health benefits. The findings suggest that the safe agricultural reuse of nutrients can provide a strong motivation for long-term adoption of improved sanitation among rural smallholders.
Extreme rainfall variability has been one of the major factors to famine and environmental degradation in Ethiopia. The potential for water harvesting in the Upper Blue Nile Basin was assessed using two GIS-based Multicriteria Evaluation methods: (1) a Boolean approach to locate suitable areas for in situ and ex situ systems and (2) a weighted overlay analysis to classify suitable areas into different water harvesting suitability levels. The sensitivity of the results was analyzed to the influence given to different constraining factors. A large part of the basin was suitable for water harvesting: the Boolean analysis showed that 36% of the basin was suitable for in situ and ex situ systems, while the weighted overlay analysis showed that 6-24% of the basin was highly suitable. Rainfall has the highest influence on suitability for water harvesting. Implementing water harvesting in nonagricultural land use types may further increase the benefit. Assessing water harvesting suitability at the larger catchment scale lays the foundation for modeling of water harvesting at mesoscale, which enables analysis of the potential and implications of upscaling of water harvesting practices for building resilience against climatic shocks. A complete water harvesting suitability study requires socioeconomic analysis and stakeholder consultation.
Data scarcity has been a huge problem in modeling the water resources of the Upper Blue Nile basin, Ethiopia. Satellite data and different statistical methods have been used to improve the quality of conventional meteorological data. This study assesses the applicability of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction's Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) climate data in modeling the hydrology of the region. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool was set up to compare the performance of CFSR weather with that of conventional weather in simulating observed streamflow at four river gauging stations in the Lake Tana basin — the upper part of the Upper Blue Nile basin. The conventional weather simulation performed satisfactorily (e.g., NSE ≥ 0.5) for three gauging stations, while the CFSR weather simulation performed satisfactorily for two. The simulations with CFSR and conventional weather yielded minor differences in the water balance components in all but one watershed, where the CFSR weather simulation gave much higher average annual rainfall, resulting in higher water balance components. Both weather simulations gave similar annual crop yields in the four administrative zones. Overall the simulation with the conventional weather performed better than the CFSR weather. However, in data-scarce regions such as remote parts of the Upper Blue Nile basin, CFSR weather could be a valuable option for hydrological predictions where conventional gauges are not available.
Human population growth and resource use, mediated by changes in climate, land use, and water use, increasingly impact biodiversity and ecosystem services provision. However, impacts of these drivers on biodiversity and ecosystem services are rarely analyzed simultaneously and remain largely unknown. An emerging question is how science can improve the understanding of change in biodiversity and ecosystem service delivery and of potential feedback mechanisms of adaptive governance. We analyzed past and future change in drivers in south-central Sweden. We used the analysis to identify main research challenges and outline important research tasks. Since the 19th century, our study area has experienced substantial and interlinked changes; a 1.6 degrees C temperature increase, rapid population growth, urbanization, and massive changes in land use and water use. Considerable future changes are also projected until the mid-21st century. However, little is known about the impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services so far, and this in turn hampers future projections of such effects. Therefore, we urge scientists to explore interdisciplinary approaches designed to investigate change in multiple drivers, underlying mechanisms, and interactions over time, including assessment and analysis of matching-scale data from several disciplines. Such a perspective is needed for science to contribute to adaptive governance by constantly improving the understanding of linked change complexities and their impacts.
Future challenges for the planet includes e.g. population growth, climate change and urbanisation. The combined pressure from these and other processes on water, energy and ecosystem services call for cross-sectoral approaches to increase the resilience of society, with particular aim to reduce hydro-climatic hazards and secure water availability of sufficient quantity and quality. In the global strife to achieve this water resilience, we pinpoint four strategies of pivotal importance. These are: 1) to ensure sustainable utilisation of ecosystems and their services; 2) to ensure that interventions for increased resilience are tailor-made to local conditions; 3) to broaden livelihood opportunities in order to make income-generating activities less dependent on only one sector or resource; and 4) to facilitate interactions between rural and urban areas and processes. Although the challenges mentioned are largely human induced, the power to address these are also within human reach. It is only if we properly facilitate work building on the linkages between humans and the environment that we can enhance water resilience.
The concept of social-ecological systems is useful for understanding the interlinked dynamics of environmental and societal change. The concept has helped facilitate: (1) increased recognition of the dependence of humanity on ecosystems; (2) improved collaboration across disciplines, and between science and society; (3) increased methodological pluralism leading to improved systems understanding; and (4) major policy frameworks considering social-ecological interactions. Despite these advances, the potential of a social-ecological systems perspective to improve sustainability outcomes has not been fully realized. Key priorities are to: (1) better understand and govern social-ecological interactions between regions; (2) pay greater attention to long-term drivers; (3) better understand the interactions among power relations, justice, and ecosystem stewardship; and (4) develop a stronger science-society interface.
The paper analyzes how adaptability (adaptive capacity and adaptations) is constructed in the literature on resilience of social-ecological systems (SES). According to some critics, this literature views adaptability as the capacity of SES to self-organize in an autonomous harmonious consensus-building process, ignoring strategies, conflicting goals, and power issues. We assessed 183 papers, coding two dimensions of adaptability: autonomous vs. intentional and descriptive vs. normative. We found a plurality of framings, where 51% of the papers perceived adaptability as autonomous, but one-third constructed adaptability as intentional processes driven by stakeholders; where social learning and networking are often used as strategies for changing power structures and achieving sustainability transformations. For the other dimension, adaptability was used normatively in 59% of the assessed papers, but one-third used descriptive framings. We found no evidence that the SES literature in general assumes a priori that adaptations are harmonious consensus-building processes. It is, rather, conflicts that are assumed, not spelled out, and assertions of desirable that are often not clarified by reference to policy documents or explicit normative frameworks. We discuss alternative definitions of adaptability and transformability to clarify or avoid the notion of desirability. Complex adaptive systems framing often precludes analysis of agency, but lately self-organization and emergence have been used to study actors with intentions, strategies, and conflicting interests. Transformations and power structures are increasingly being addressed in the SES literature. We conclude that ontological clashes between social science and SES research have resulted in multiple constructive pathways.
Synthesizing realistic clouds is a complex and demanding task, as clouds are characterized by random shapes, complex scattering and turbulent appearances. Existing approaches either employ two-dimensional image matting or three-dimensional physical simulations. This paper proposes a novel sketch-to-image deep learning system using fast sketches to paint and edit volumetric clouds. We composed a dataset of 2000 real cloud images and translated simple strokes into authentic clouds based on a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). Compared to previous cloud simulation methods, our system demonstrates more efficient and straightforward processes to generate authentic clouds for computer graphics, providing a widely accessible sky scene design approach for use by novices, amateurs, and expert artists.
Land is integral to human habitation and livelihoods, providing food and resources, and also serves as a source of identity and cultural meaning. However, the combined impacts of climate change, desertification, land degradation, and food insecurity pose obstacles to resilient development and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This chapter reviews and assesses the literature on risk and uncertainty surrounding land and climate change, policy instruments and decision-making addressing those risks and uncertainties, and governance practices that advance response options with co-benefits identified in Chapter 6, lessen the socio-economic impacts of climate change and reduce trade-offs, and advance sustainable land management.
The planetary boundaries framework proposes quantitative global limits to the anthropogenic perturbation of crucial Earth system processes, and thus marks out a planetary safe operating space for human activities. Yet, decisions regarding resource use and emissions are mostly made at less aggregated scales, by national and sub-national governments, businesses, and other local actors. To operationalize the planetary boundaries concept, the boundaries need to be translated into and aligned with targets that are relevant at these decision-making scales. In this paper, we develop a framework that addresses the biophysical, socio-economic, and ethical dimensions of bridging across scales, to provide a consistently applicable approach for translating the planetary boundaries into national-level fair shares of Earth's safe operating space. We discuss our findings in the context of previous studies and their implications for future analyses and, policymaking. In this way, we link the planetary boundaries framework to widely-applied operational and policy concepts for more robust strong sustainability decision-making.
The aim of this paper is to enhance understanding of how the resilience of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) systems to hazards can be improved. In turn, this aims to inform different strategies for public and private partnerships (PPPs). In a new approach, to acknowledge the multi levelled nature of resilience; risk at the relevant levels are taken into account, (regional/river basin, urban area, and individual). For these levels, we first describe the different components of risk, vulnerability and resilience of the WASH system that influence people׳s exposure to hazards. We illustrate these components using examples from case studies in the literature. Using a social learning lens - a crucial ingredient of resilience - we examine opportunities for reducing risks through improving public–private engagement. These are presented as strategies which could guide investment decisions: As pressures from climate change and development add up, businesses must become aware of the risks involved in operating and investing without considering ecosystem health, both in terms of the services they provide for mitigating floods and droughts, as well as in terms of the development approaches that define how ecosystems are managed (e.g. “making space” for, rather than controlling water). There is a need to develop an institutional culture that strives towards greener and more resilient urban environments with the help of various quality assurance methods. Partnerships must reach the poorer customer base, encourage informal small entrepreneurs, and boost financial mechanisms (e.g. micro-insurance, micro-finance) to support the most vulnerable in society
Identifying trajectories of agricultural development that enable substantial increases in food production is of prime importance for food security and human development in Sub-Saharan Africa in general, and Ethiopia in particular. To ensure long-term welfare for people and landscapes, it is imperative that such agricultural transformations sustain and enhance the natural resource base upon which agriculture depends. To understand the prospects for a sustainable transformation of Ethiopian agriculture we develop a new conceptual framework for sustainability transformations that combines insights from the social-ecological transformations literature with research on socio-technical transitions and institutional entrepreneurship. Using this framework, we analyse the agricultural development trajectory currently envisaged by the government, as expressed in policy narratives and public institutions. We also explore the opportunity context facing non-state actors who promote sustainable intensification (referred to as green niche actors), as well as the strategies they employ to navigate this context and lever change in the direction they perceive as desirable. We find that current policies for agricultural development are primarily dominated by a narrative of Agriculture as an engine for growth, which focuses on the role of external inputs and commercialisation in boosting agricultural production so as to drive economic growth. While another narrative of Natural resource rehabilitation exists in policy, it sees natural resource management as a means of reducing degradation rather than a crucial component of enhanced and sustainable agricultural production, and the policies largely decouple issues of natural resources from issues of agricultural production. Institutional structures in the agricultural sector are found to reflect these discursive patterns. Further, the general institutional context in the country is characterised by strong government domination and rigid structures, which indicates an opaque opportunity context with limited opportunities for niche actors to have an impact. Given these challenging conditions, green niche actors adapt their strategies to fit the existing opportunity context and choose to collaborate closely with the government and the extension system. While this strategy offers the possibility of a direct impact at potentially large scale, it also leads to a range of trade-offs for the green niche actors and ultimately reduces the prospects for a sustainable agricultural transformation. In conclusion, an adaptation of the regime's proposed development trajectory for Ethiopian agriculture is, under current conditions, a more likely scenario than a more fundamental sustainability transformation, although options remain for more transformative action. Through the case of Ethiopian agriculture, this study adds insights into how transformation processes could play out in non-Western contexts where a strong state plays a dominant role, thus broadening the scope of empirical applications of the emerging research field on social-ecological transformations. We also demonstrate how the multilevel perspective from the transition literature and the concepts of opportunity context and situated agency from the literature on institutional entrepreneurship can be fruitfully merged with the social-ecological transformations literature, thereby moving towards a more comprehensive conceptual framework for analysing sustainability transformations.
Stakeholder engagement has become increasingly important in research programs focusing on climate change impact on ecosystem services. Communication between researchers and stakeholders, however, is often impaired by linguistic barriers, different priorities, and time constraints. This article examines the organizational aspects of science–stakeholder interactions, focusing on examples from the Swedish forestry sector. The study highlights the need articulated by the Swedish forestry sector for access to scientific knowledge, and we discuss how to present research findings in formats suitable to serve as decision support. Clear communication about common goals, expectations, resources, and time frames is needed in order to reduce the risk of stakeholder fatigue.
Agricultural water interventions (AWI), e.g. in-situ soil and water conservation strategies, irrigation, and damming of rivers to increase groundwater recharge, have been suggested as important strategies to improve yields in tropical agriculture. Although the biophysical implications of AWIs have been well investigated, the coupling between the biophysical changes and the economic implications thereof is less well understood. In this study we translate the results from a hydrological model, SWAT, on crop yields for different cropping systems with and without agricultural water interventions, to hypothetical farm incomes for a watershed, Kothapally, located in Andhra Pradesh, India. It was found that on average, AWI significantly improved farm incomes by enabling the cultivation of a high value crop during the monsoon season (cotton), supplementary irrigated to bridge dry spells and replacing a traditional crop (sorghum), and also by enhancing the capacity to produce dry season, fully irrigated vegetable crops, in this case exemplified by onion. AWI combined with cotton resulted in more than a doubling of farm incomes compared to traditional sorghum-based systems without AWI during normal and wet years (i.e. for 75% of the years). Interestingly, we observed that the difference between the AWI system and the no intervention system was larger during years of high average rainfall compared to dry years. It was also found that access to irrigation was more important for farm income than crop choice and AWI per se, and thus farms with access irrigation benefitted more from AWI compared to farmers lacking access to irrigation. In conclusion, we suggest that in order to assess equity aspects in terms of farm income generation following the implementation of an AWI project, there is a need for income analyses at the farm level, since income estimates at the watershed level may mask important differences in economic benefits between farms.
This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of ‘lenses’ and ‘tensions’ to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the ‘mess’ of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses.
This report discusses the need to balance short-term water productivity gains, particularly in agriculture, with water flows’ long-term role in maintaining sustainable landscape ecosystem services and supporting human well-being.
Water is under increasing pressure for supporting both various functions in society whilst sustaining healthy ecosystem services in landscapes, and there is a growing need to consider the productivity of how water can be used for multiple benefits. Water productivity is a concept used to assess water use and resource efficiency. However, due to the multiple uses of water by humans and ecosystems, it is not evident that one measure of efficiency can capture the multifaceted and multi-sectoral benefits that water provides. It is important to consider water productivity in terms of the trade-offs between managed agricultural ecosystem services and the surrounding landscape ecosystem services, and think of resource efficiency in those terms.This report outlines 10 key messages on the nexus of water productivity, water flows in landscapes and ecosystem services, and illustrates them with case studies. It is geared to practitioners in the areas of planning and management of agriculture, planning of land-use, forestry, biofuels, and water, and natural resource management. The goal is to encourage practitioners to begin exploring what types of ecosystem services gains and trade-offs exist in their local context, such as watersheds, landscapes, countries, or basins, and how they may be linked to the allocation of water.
The planetary boundary framework presents a ‘planetary dashboard’ of humanity’s globally aggregated performance on a set of environmental issues that endanger the Earth system’s capacity to support humanity. While this framework has been highly influential, a critical shortcoming for its application in sustainability governance is that it currently fails to represent how impacts related to one of the planetary boundaries affect the status of other planetary boundaries. Here, we surveyed and provisionally quantified interactions between the Earth system processes represented by the planetary boundaries and investigated their consequences for sustainability governance. We identified a dense network of interactions between the planetary boundaries. The resulting cascades and feedbacks predominantly amplify human impacts on the Earth system and thereby shrink the safe operating space for future human impacts on the Earth system. Our results show that an integrated understanding of Earth system dynamics is critical to navigating towards a sustainable future.
This article examines the implications of undertaking community-based impact assessment (CBIA) in the Swedish context where Indigenous rights receive little recognition and the institutional planning environment is disenabling. It explores how normative biases built into the permitting process for mines ontologically privilege non-Indigenous ways of defining what constitutes relevant impacts. We show how the CBIA, undertaken by an impacted Sami community together with the authors, attempted to challenge these biases by constructing narratives about future impacts from the perspective of the Indigenous community. We also discuss how the research itself became embroiled in contestations over what constituted legitimate knowledge.
Rockstrom et al. proposed a set of planetary boundaries that delimit a safe operating space for humanity Many of the planetary boundaries that have so far been identified are determined by chemical agents. Other chemical pollution-related planetary boundaries likely exist, but are currently unknown. A chemical posed an unknown planetary boundary threat if it simultaneously fulfills three conditions (1) it has an unknown disruptive effect on a vital Earth system process; (2) the disruptive effect is not discovered until it is a problem at the global scale, and (3) the effect is not readily reversible. In this paper, we outline scenarios in which chemical could fulfill each of the three conditions, then use the scenarios as the basis to define chemical profiles that fit each scenario. The chemical profiles are defined in terms of the nature of the effect of the chemical and the nature of exposure of the environment to the chemical. Priortization of chemicals in commerce against some of the profiles appears feasible, but there are considerable uncertainites and scientific challenges that must be addressed. Most challenging is prioritizing chemicals for the potential to have a currently unknown effect on a vital. Earth system process. We conclude that the most effective strategy currently available to identify chemicals that are planetary boundary threats is prioritization against profiles defined in terms of environmental exposure combined with monitoring and study of the biogeochemical process that underlie vital Earth system processes to identify currently unknown disruptive effects.
The mappings of poverty and food insecurity were carried out for the rural districts of the four riparian countries (Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe) of the Limpopo river basin using the results of national surveys that were conducted between 2003 and 2013. The analysis shows lower range of food insecure persons (0-40%) than poverty stricken persons (0-95%) that is attributable to enhanced government and non-government food safety networks in the basin countries, the dynamic and transitory nature of food insecurity which depends on the timings of the surveys in relation to harvests, markets and food prices, and the limited dimension of food insecurity in relation to poverty which tends to be a more structural and pervasive socio-economic condition. The usefulness of this study in influencing policies and strategies targeted at alleviating poverty and improving rural livelihoods lies with using food insecurity mappings to address short-term socio-economic conditions and poverty mappings to address more structural and long-term deprivations. Using the poverty line of $1.25/day per person (2008-2013) in the basin, Zimbabwe had the highest percentage of 68.7% of its rural population classified as poor, followed by Mozambique with 68.2%, South Africa with 56.1% and Botswana with 20%. While average poverty reduction of 6.4% was observed between 2003 and 2009 in Botswana, its population growth of 20.1% indicated no real poverty reduction. Similar observations are made about Mozambique and Zimbabwe where population growth outstripped poverty reductions. In contrast, both average poverty levels and population increased by 4.3% and 11%, respectively, in South Africa from 2007 to 2010. While areas of high food insecurity and poverty consistently coincide with low water availability, it does not indicate a simple cause-effect relationship between water, poverty and food insecurity. With limited water resources, rural folks in the basin require stronger institutions, increased investments and support to enable them generate sufficient income from their rain-fed farming livelihood to break out of the poverty cycle.
This study investigates whether social learning among large-scale farmers in central Sweden leads to better natural resource management in the agricultural landscape. Three different frames of social learning are first identified: social learning as a fundamental social phenomenon, social learning as collaborative learning, and social learning as deeper learning. This article investigates the role of social learning and other factors through semistructured in-depth interviews. Results show that learning among farmers is inherently social, but that this learning does not necessarily improve natural resource management or lead to better environmental governance. The article discusses when social learning can be expected to influence natural resources management, and finds that without the presence of policy, individual leadership, or facilitation, it is not an important factor. Furthermore, the call for social learning based on results from successful instrumental application risks obscuring findings indicating that both social learning and better natural resource management are conditioned on the same external factors.
Adaptive and multi-level governance is often called for in order to improve the management of complex issues such as the provision of natural resources and ecosystem services. In this case study, we analyse the contemporary multi-level governance system that manages water resources and its ecosystem services in a fresh water lake in Sweden. We assess the relative importance and barriers of three commonly highlighted components of adaptive governance: feeding ecological knowledge into the governance system, use of ecological knowledge to continuously adapt the governance system, and self-organisation by flexible institutions acting across multiple levels. Findings reveal that the trickiest aspect of adaptive governance capacity to institutionalise is the iterative nature of feedbacks and learning over time, and that barriers to the spread of knowledge on social-ecological complexity through the governance systems are partly political, partly complexity itself, and partly a more easily resolved lack of coordination. We call for caution in trusting crisis management to build more long-lasting adaptive capacity, and we conclude that a process of institutionalising adaptive capacity is inherently contingent on political process putting issues on the agenda.
To properly evaluate the prospects for commercially competitive battery electric vehicles (BEV) one must have accurate information on current and predicted cost of battery packs. The literature reveals that costs are coming down, but with large uncertainties on past, current and future costs of the dominating Li-ion technology1, 2, 3. This paper presents an original systematic review, analysing over 80 different estimates reported 2007–2014 to systematically trace the costs of Li-ion battery packs for BEV manufacturers. We show that industry-wide cost estimates declined by approximately 14% annually between 2007 and 2014, from above US$1,000 per kWh to around US$410 per kWh, and that the cost of battery packs used by market-leading BEV manufacturers are even lower, at US$300 per kWh, and has declined by 8% annually. Learning rate, the cost reduction following a cumulative doubling of production, is found to be between 6 and 9%, in line with earlier studies on vehicle battery technology2. We reveal that the costs of Li-ion battery packs continue to decline and that the costs among market leaders are much lower than previously reported. This has significant implications for the assumptions used when modelling future energy and transport systems and permits an optimistic outlook for BEVs contributing to low-carbon transport.
We explored why social-ecological memory (SEM) is a source of inertia and path dependence, as well as a source of renewal and reorganization in social-ecological systems (SESs). We have presented two case studies: the historical case of the Norse settlement on Greenland and an empirical case from contemporary southern Madagascar. The cases illustrate how SEM is linked to specific pathways of development and a particular set of natural resource management practices. We have shown that in each case, a broader diversity of SEM is present in the SESs, but not drawn upon. Instead, SEMs are part of what explains community coherence and the barriers to adoption of more diverse practices. We have elaborated on how specific SEMs are linked to specified resilience, and we have shown that this fits existing notions of resilience, robustness, inertia, and path dependence. We have proposed that to change the dynamics of development pathways that do not produce desired results, it is necessary for managers to shift from specific to general SEM, which would also mirror the shift from specified to general resilience. The challenge lies in the interplay between the specified and the general. In this critical work, it is important to recognize that the valued diversity of SEM necessary for general resilience might actually reside in a different community.
The private sector’s role in climate finance is increasingly subject to political and scientific debate. Yet there is poor empirical evidence of private engagement in adaptation and its potential contribution to the industrialised countries’ mobilisation of USD 100 billion of annual climate finance from 2020 onwards to support developing countries to address climate change. This paper analysed 101 case studies of private sector adaptation under the Private Sector Initiative (PSI) of the UNFCCC Nairobi work programme, and examined these against ten ‘adaptation finance criteria’ that were distilled from UN climate negotiation outcomes. Results show that private adaptation interventions complement public adaptation activities. Yet the ten adaptation finance criteria are not met, which demonstrates that the diplomatic UNFCCC conceptualisation of financing adaptation is dissonant from the private sector reality. For example, while the case studies’ investments are ‘new and additional’ to Official Development Assistance (ODA), their ‘predictability’ remains unclear. And despite some commitment for ‘up-scaling’, plans and associated costs for doing so remain undisclosed. Developed countries’ role in ‘mobilising’ private financial resources under the PSI seems limited. It is unrealistic to expect that the UNFCCC alters existing criteria to suit private initiatives, or that the private sector aligns its initiatives to meet existing criteria. This paper advocates monitoring and reporting only of those private investments that principally finance adaptation. This practical way forward would allow private finance to meet criteria such as predictability, transparency, and mobilisation, but would drastically reduce the amount of private investment that could contribute to reaching the USD 100 billion climate finance target.
This editorial first presents a short history of NDCs: their origin, relevance and process for updating. It then introduces a simple framework of NDC effectiveness to illustrate each paper’s respective contribution in terms oftransparency, coherence and implementability, and summarizes key insights of the eight papers. The final section recommends the next steps.
Over the past 20 years, a cluster of international environmental agreements has developed aiming at reducing the risks associated with production and use of chemicals. The Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM) is the newest addition to this cluster and serves to guide efforts to meet the 2020 goal to use and produce chemicals in a way that minimizes significant adverse effects on human health and the environment. SAICM differs from other chemical and waste agreements on several key points: It is a policy framework that is legally non-binding; it comprises a broad scope of activities; and it allows for active participation of non-governmental stakeholders. A central aim of SAICM is to decrease the gap between developed and developing countries in terms of capacities to manage chemicals safely. This article examines the early implementation of SAICM, based on a national-level case study in Cambodia and interviews with SAICM stakeholders. The results show that SAICM has generated a clear momentum in Cambodia and has led to several implementation projects. Based on the interviews, the overall conclusion is that design features of the SAICM—its broad scope, multi-stakeholder participation and voluntary status—are appropriate for the purpose of improving chemicals management in a developing country like Cambodia. However, these features also bring about difficulties in measuring progress on implementation. The future development of SAICM therefore needs to balance the benefits of its key design features with the need to more effectively and precisely monitor progress toward the 2020 goal.
Snapshot views of environmental policy integration (EPI) practices fail to consider the stability of EPI over time – both as aspiration and performance. This paper reviews the evolution of EPI over more than two decades at the national level in the agriculture and energy sectors in Sweden – an EPI pioneer. We study how the extent of EPI stability can be explained partly by shifting political priorities by governments and partly by underlying governance models (actors and organizational landscape and policy instruments used). Comparing the two sectors, the institutionalization of EPI appears to be stronger in the energy sector. In the agricultural sector, the current reform of the Common Agricultural Policy seems to imply decreasing prominence of EPI – due to shrinking budgets for environmental targets along with greater policy goals complexity. Overall, observed shifts in governance have been mildly conducive to EPI by providing an infrastructure, but further enhancements require clear political priority awarded to the environment.
Flooding is routinely among the most disastrous annual events worldwide with extensive impacts on human wellbeing, economies and ecosystems. Thus, how decisions are made about floods (i.e. flood governance) is extremely important and evidence shows that it is changing, with non-governmental actors (civil society and the private sector) becoming involved in new and sometimes hybrid governance arrangements. This study investigates how stakeholders perceive floods to be governed and how they believe decision-making ought to occur, with the intent of determining to what extent changing governance is evident on the ground and how well (or poorly) it aligns with desired governance arrangements. Flood governance stakeholders were surveyed in five flood-prone geographical areas from Australia, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden. The findings suggest that a reconfiguration of flood governance is underway with relatively little consensus regarding the specific arrangements and mechanisms in place during this transitionary period. Across the five cases, stakeholders indicated that they wanted flood governance to be organized at multiple levels, with strong government involvement and with diverse actor groups, and through mechanisms that match the involvement of these actors, with a lack of desirability for some specific configurations involving the private sector in particular. There was little alignment between stakeholder perceptions of governance currently in place and their desired arrangements, except for government involvement. Future research directions highlight the importance of the inclusion of stakeholder perspectives in assessing flood governance, and following the transition in flood governance over time.
This planetary boundaries framework update finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity. Ocean acidification is close to being breached, while aerosol loading regionally exceeds the boundary. Stratospheric ozone levels have slightly recovered. The transgression level has increased for all boundaries earlier identified as overstepped. As primary production drives Earth system biosphere functions, human appropriation of net primary production is proposed as a control variable for functional biosphere integrity. This boundary is also transgressed. Earth system modeling of different levels of the transgression of the climate and land system change boundaries illustrates that these anthropogenic impacts on Earth system must be considered in a systemic context.