Participatory approaches are put forward to ensure that governance for the well-being of humans and nature is legitimate and effective, particularly responding to global challenges of ecosystem degradation and climate change. As model areas for sustainable development with explicit goals of participation, the UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves can provide insights on participatory governance arrangements, outcomes of participation, and obstacles for participation. Through a literature review, we found that transparent communication and fair distribution of benefits and trade-offs enhance participation. Early involvement, skilled facilitation, and the capacity to develop shared values among diverse interests improve outcomes. Project-driven participation, deficient capacity to handle conflicting interests, and mechanisms of exclusion hinder participation. Biosphere Reserves (BRs) can leverage already existing actor initiatives, local knowledge, and practices. We identified a need for studies of causal links between participation and BR outcomes, including unpacking the meaning of different modes of participation.

Non-technical summary Achieving sustainability on the ground poses a challenge in decoding globally defined goals, such as sustainable development goals, and aligning them with local perspectives and realities. This decoding necessitates the understanding of the multifaceted dimensions of the sustainability challenges in a given context, including their underlying causes. In case studies from Brazilian drylands, we illustrate how an enhanced multiscale participatory method, combined with systems thinking tools, can shed light on systemic structures that currently entrench unsustainable development trajectories. This method offers insights into co-designing potential pathways toward sustainable futures and unlocking transformative capacities of the local population. Technical summary Translating United Nations global sustainable development goals (SDGs) into actions that address local realities and aspirations is an urgent challenge. It requires new thinking and approaches that foster the discussion about the main challenges to implementing the SDGs at multiple levels. This paper presents a novel multiscale participatory approach that combines the popular Three Horizons diagram with the formalism of causal loop diagrams in systems thinking. We present results from six multi-stakeholder dialogues held across drylands in Brazil with a focus on desired futures aligned with SDGs. Focusing on identifying the root causes and systemic structures of unsustainability, participants identified lock-ins, leverage points, and interventions for how these could be changed. The core lock-ins are the discontinuity of public policies, and the historical land and power concentration reinforced by the current expansion of large-scale agricultural, mining, and energy projects. The proposed interventions are structural and - if implemented - would contribute to achieving SDGs in an integrated manner. The unique approach developed in this study can provide leverage as it bridges the inclusivity of participatory visioning with the change potential of systems thinking tools to tackle root causes and unleash societal transformations. Social media summary We are not achieving SDGs. Understanding root causes of unsustainability is critical to move toward sustainable and just futures.

Despite the growing knowledge that food system solutions should account for interactions and drivers across scales, broader societal debate on how to solve food system challenges is often focused on two dichotomous perspectives and associated solutions: either more localized food systems or greater global coordination of food systems. The debate has found problematic expressions in contemporary challenges, prompting us to revisit the role that resilience thinking can play when faced with complex crises that increase uncertainty. Here we identify four ‘aching points’ facing food systems that are central points of tension in the local–global debate. We apply the seven principles of resilience to these aching points to reframe the solution space to one that embeds resilience into food systems’ management and governance at all scales, supporting transformative change towards sustainable food systems.

Burkina Faso and the wider Sahel region have experienced substantial changes in rainfall, population, and landscape use. These changes have altered ecosystem services, the benefits that people receive from ecosystems, and rural livelihoods. However, it is difficult to assess the magnitude of these changes because of missing and fragmented social, agricultural, and ecological data. We estimated changes in 10 key provisioning ecosystem services in rural Burkina Faso between 1952 and 2016. We used a simple model of plausible social-ecological changes to make a historical extrapolation that bridges these data gaps, and assessed historical changes. Our approach combined the interpretation of historic aerial photographs and satellite images, with field observations and interviews. We applied the approach for six villages in two administrative regions for six points in time. We modeled the use of historic ecosystems by analyzing a range of estimates of changes in the generation of each service and its value to people. We found that cultivated ecosystem services have increased 1.5–23 times over the study period, while the non-cultivated ecosystem services firewood, construction material, and medicine have decreased to 66–20% of their previous values. Per capita production of cultivated ecosystem services has remained relatively stable, while the per capita production of all other ecosystem services has decreased, to 54–11% of their 1952 values. Although alternatives are available for some ecosystem services, such as medicine and construction material, there are currently limited alternatives available for other services, such as firewood. Decline in wild food availability and consumption is likely to reduce the nutritional value of rural people’s food. Our analysis of changes demonstrates that shrubs and trees on fields generate many ecosystem services that are key to rural livelihoods, and that efforts to enhance crop yields should maintain shrubs and trees. Our approach for estimating historical ecosystem services may also be useful to apply in other data scarce regions.

Over the past 50years, a large number of development initiatives have addressed the diverse social and ecological challenges in the Sahel, often focusing on a single entry point or action, resulting in only a limited degree of success. Within the last decade, the international development discourse has evolved to incorporate resilience thinking as a way to address more complex challenges. However, concrete examples as to how to operationalize resilience thinking are lacking. The Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative (GGW), a pan-African program with a strong reforestation focus, is the latest and most ambitious of these development programs to date. The GGW represents an ideal opportunity to apply resilience thinking at a large scale, but in order to do so, it must intelligently gather and centralize pre-existing interdisciplinary knowledge, generate new knowledge, and integrate knowledge systems to appropriately navigate future uncertainties of the diverse social-ecological systems along its path. Herein, after a brief description of large-scale reforestation history in the Sahara and Sahel and the conceptual evolution of the GGW, we propose a transdisciplinary research framework with resilience thinking at its core. It includes analysis of complex social-ecological systems, their temporal and spatial cross-scale interactions, and outcomes focused on the supply of abundant, diverse, equitable, and durable ecosystem services to support livelihoods in the region. If the research areas that comprise the framework were to be properly addressed, they could conceivably guide GGW actions in a way that would contribute to desirable future pathways.

Most current approaches to landscape scale ecosystem service assessments rely on detailed secondary data. This type of data is seldom available in regions with high levels of poverty and strong local dependence on provisioning ecosystem services for livelihoods. We develop a method to extrapolate results from a previously published village scale ecosystem services assessment to a higher administrative level, relevant for land use decision making. The method combines remote sensing (using a hybrid classification method) and interviews with community members. The resulting landscape scale maps show the spatial distribution of five different livelihood benefits (nutritional diversity, income, insurance/saving, material assets and energy, and crops for consumption) that illustrate the strong multi-functionality of the Sahelian landscapes. The maps highlight the importance of a diverse set of sub-units of the landscape in supporting Sahelian livelihoods. We see a large potential in using the resulting type of livelihood benefit maps for guiding future land use decisions in the Sahel.

The establishment of interdisciplinary Master’s and PhD programs in sustainability science is opening up an exciting arena filled with opportunities for early-career scholars to address pressing sustainability challenges. However, embarking upon an interdisciplinary endeavor as an early-career scholar poses a unique set of challenges: to develop an individual scientific identity and a strong and specific methodological skill-set, while at the same time gaining the ability to understand and communicate between different epistemologies. Here, we explore the challenges and opportunities that emerge from a new kind of interdisciplinary journey, which we describe as ‘undisciplinary.’ Undisciplinary describes (1) the space or condition of early-career researchers with early interdisciplinary backgrounds, (2) the process of the journey, and (3) the orientation which aids scholars to address the complex nature of today’s sustainability challenges. The undisciplinary journey is an iterative and reflexive process of balancing methodological groundedness and epistemological agility to engage in rigorous sustainability science. The paper draws upon insights from a collective journey of broad discussion, reflection, and learning, including a survey on educational backgrounds of different generations of sustainability scholars, participatory forum theater, and a panel discussion at the Resilience 2014 conference (Montpellier, France). Based on the results from this diversity of methods, we suggest that there is now a new and distinct generation of sustainability scholars that start their careers with interdisciplinary training, as opposed to only engaging in interdisciplinary research once strong disciplinary foundations have been built. We further identify methodological groundedness and epistemological agility as guiding competencies to become capable sustainability scientists and discuss the implications of an undisciplinary journey in the current institutional context of universities and research centers. In this paper, we propose a simple framework to help early-career sustainability scholars and well-established scientists successfully navigate what can sometimes be an uncomfortable space in education and research, with the ultimate aim of producing and engaging in rigorous and impactful sustainability science.

Most methods to assess ecosystem services have been developed on large scales and depend on secondary data. Such data is scarce in rural areas with widespread poverty. Nevertheless, the population in these areas strongly depends on local ecosystem services for their livelihoods. These regions are in focus for substantial landscape investments that aim to alleviate poverty, but current methods fail to capture the vast range of ecosystem services supporting livelihoods, and can therefore not properly assess potential trade-offs and synergies among services that might arise from the interventions. We present a new method for classifying village landscapes into social-ecological patches (landscape units corresponding to local landscape perceptions), and for assessing provisioning ecosystem services and benefits to livelihoods from these patches. We apply the method, which include a range of participatory activities and satellite image analysis, in six villages across two regions in Burkina Faso. The results show significant and diverse contributions to livelihoods from six out of seven social-ecological patches. The results also show how provisioning ecosystem services, primarily used for subsistence, become more important sources of income during years when crops fail. The method is useful in many data poor regions, and the patch-approach allows for extrapolation across larger spatial scales with similar social-ecological systems.

Rural people in the Sahel derive multiple benefits from local ecosystem services on a daily basis. At the same time, a large proportion of the population lives in multidimensional poverty. The global sustainability challenge is thus manifested in its one extreme here, with a strong need to improve human well-being without degrading the landscapes that people depend on. To address this challenge, knowledge on how local people interact with their landscapes, and how this changes over time, must be improved. An ecosystem services approach, focusing on benefits to people from ecosystem processes, is useful in this context. However, methods for assessing ecosystem services that include local knowledge while addressing a scale relevant for development interventions are lacking.

In this thesis, such methods are developed to study Sahelian landscapes through an ecosystem services lens. The thesis is focused on village landscapes and is based on in-depth fieldwork in six villages in northern Burkina Faso. In these villages, participatory methods were used to identify social-ecological patches (landscape units that correspond with local descriptions of landscapes, characterized by a combination of land use, land cover and topography), the provisioning ecosystem services generated in each social-ecological patch, and the benefits from ecosystem services to livelihoods (Paper I). In Paper II, change in cover of social-ecological patches mapped on aerial photographs and satellite images from the period 1952-2016 was combined with population data and focus group discussions to evaluate change in generation of ecosystem services over time. In Paper III, up-scaling of the village scale assessment to provincial scale was done through the development of a classification method to identify social-ecological patches on medium-resolution satellite images. Paper IV addresses the whole Sudano-Sahelian climate zone of West Africa, to analyze woody vegetation as a key component for ecosystem services generation in the landscape. It is based on a systematic review of which provisioning and regulating ecosystem services are documented from trees and shrubs on agricultural lands in the region.

Social-ecological patches and associated sets of ecosystem services are very similar in all studied villages across the two regions. Most social-ecological patches generate multiple ecosystem services with multiple benefits, illustrating a multifunctional landscape (Paper I). The social-ecological patches and ecosystem services are confirmed at province level in both regions, and the dominant social-ecological patches can be mapped with high accuracy on medium-resolution satellite images (Paper III). The potential generation of cultivated crops has more or less kept up with population growth in the villages, while the potential for other ecosystem services, particularly firewood, has decreased per capita (Paper II). Trees and shrubs contribute with multiple ecosystem services, but their landscape effects, especially on regulating ecosystem services, must be better studied (Paper IV). The thesis provides new insights about the complex and multi-functional landscapes of rural Sahel, nuancing dominating narratives on environmental change in the region. It also provides new methods that include local knowledge in ecosystem services assessments, which can be up-scaled to scales relevant for development interventions, and used to analyze changes in ecosystem services over time.

This booklet presents a popular sience summary of research conducted in six villages in Northern Burkina Faso 2011-2012 within the research project "Adapting to changing climate in drylands: The re-greening in Sahel as a potential success case". The booklet is intended for the participants in the research and local administrations in Burkina Faso, and has been distributed and presented there in January 2016. It is written in the local language mooré. The booklet presents the landscape units - social-ecological patches - identified in the villages, and the set of ecosystem services generated in each social-ecological patch. It also presents the benefits people obtain from the different ecosystem services. The booklet further presents mapping of the social-ecological patches at provincial scale, as well as on-going mapping of how the distribution of patches have changed over time (since 1950) in the villages.