| 1. |
- Biggs, Duan, et al.
(författare)
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Are We Entering an Era of Concatenated Global Crises?
- 2011
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Ingår i: Ecology & Society. - 1708-3087. ; 16:2, s. 10-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- An increase in the frequency and intensity of environmental crises associated with accelerating human-induced global change is of substantial concern to policy makers. The potential impacts, especially on the poor, are exacerbated in an increasingly connected world that enables the emergence of crises that are coupled in time and space. We discuss two factors that can interact to contribute to such an increased concatenation of crises: (1) the increasing strength of global vs. local drivers of change, so that changes become increasingly synchronized; and (2) unprecedented potential for the propagation of crises, and an enhanced risk of management interventions in one region becoming drivers elsewhere, because of increased connectivity. We discuss the oil-food-financial crisis of 2007 to 2008 as an example of a concatenated crisis with origin and ultimate impacts in far removed parts of the globe. The potential for a future of concatenated shocks requires adaptations in science and governance including (a) an increased tolerance of uncertainty and surprise, (b) strengthening capacity for early detection and response to shocks, and (c) flexibility in response to enable adaptation and learning.
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| 2. |
- Biggs, Reinette (Oonsie), et al.
(författare)
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Strategies for managing complex social-ecological systems in the face of uncertainty : examples from South Africa and beyond
- 2015
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Ingår i: Ecology & Society. - 1708-3087. ; 20:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Improving our ability to manage complex, rapidly changing social-ecological systems is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. This is particularly crucial if large-scale poverty alleviation is to be secured without undermining the capacity of the environment to support future generations. To address this challenge, strategies that enable judicious management of socialecological systems in the face of substantive uncertainty are needed. Several such strategies are emerging from the developing body of work on complexity and resilience. We identify and discuss four strategies, providing practical examples of how each strategy has been applied in innovative ways to manage turbulent social-ecological change in South Africa and the broader region: (1) employ adaptive management or comanagement, (2) engage and integrate different perspectives, (3) facilitate self-organization, and (4) set safe boundaries to avoid system thresholds. Through these examples we aim to contribute a basis for further theoretical development, new teaching examples, and inspiration for developing innovative new management strategies in other regions that can help address the considerable sustainability challenges facing society globally.
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| 3. |
- Biggs, Reinette Oonsie, et al.
(författare)
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The Regime Shifts Database : A Framework for Analyzing Regime Shifts in Social-Ecological Systems
- 2024
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper presents the Regime Shifts Database (RSDB), a new online, open-access database that uses a novel consistent framework to systematically analyze regime shifts based on their impacts, key drivers, underlying feedbacks, and management options. The database currently contains 27 generic types of regime shifts, and over 300 specific case studies of a variety of regime shifts. These regime shifts occur across diverse types of systems and are driven by many different types of processes. Besides impacting provisioning and regulating services, our work shows that regime shifts substantially impact cultural and aesthetic ecosystem services. We found that social-ecological feedbacks are difficult to characterize and more work is needed to develop new tools and approaches to better understand social-ecological regime shifts. We hope that the database will stimulate further research on regime shifts and make available information that can be used in management, planning and assessment.
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| 4. |
- Chapin, III F.S., et al.
(författare)
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Resilience-based stewardship : Strategies for navigating sustainable pathways in a changing world.
- 2009
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Ingår i: Principles of ecosystem stewardship. - New York : Springer Verlag. - 9780387730332 ; , s. 319-337
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Bokkapitel (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- Accelerated global changes in climate, environment, and social–ecological systems demand a transformation in human perceptions of our place in nature and patterns of resource use. The biology and culture of Homo sapiens evolved for about 95% of our species’ history in hunting-and-gathering societies before the emergence of settled agriculture. We have lived in complex societies for about 3%, and in industrial societies using fossil fuels for about 0.1% of our history. The pace of cultural evolution, including governance arrangements and resource-use patterns, appears insufficient to adjust to the rate and magnitude of technological innovations, human population increases, and environmental impacts that have occurred. Many of these changes are accelerating, causing unsustainable exploitation of ecosystems, including many boreal and tropical forests, drylands, and marine fisheries. The net effect has been serious degradation of the planet’s life-support system on which societal development ultimately depends (see Chapters 2 and 14.
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| 5. |
- González-Mon, Blanca, 1993-, et al.
(författare)
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The importance of cross-scale social relationships for dealing with social-ecological change in agricultural supply chains
- 2024
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Ingår i: Journal of Rural Studies. - 0743-0167 .- 1873-1392. ; 105
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Agricultural systems are important for the livelihoods and food security of millions of people. These systems are increasingly interconnected across scales and face challenges in responding to multiple, and coalescing types of environmental, social, and economic change. Most studies on how actors respond to change have focused on farmers and farming communities. In this study, we investigate the connectivity of farming systems to markets, to understand how social relationships across the supply chain influence how actors respond to multiple types of changes. We used a participatory network mapping method to interview actors across a fruit supply chain in the Western Cape, South Africa, that is connected to both global and national markets. We identified droughts, climatic variations, changes related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and other social shifts as the most important changes affecting the production and trade of fruit in this region. We also identified three types of responses to these changes: i) responses concerning the dynamics of trade relationships (e.g., changing or maintaining trade relationships); ii) responses based on changes at the individual level (e.g., changes in farm management); and iii) responses based on social relationships (categorized into four types, namely collaboration, knowledge transfer, financial assistance, and marketing coordination). Within these four types, we found that different types of social networks, that include actors operating at different scales and within and outside of supply chains, mediate responses to change. We also found that networks of collaboration, knowledge exchange and financial assistance show a positive correlation, where actors with an export orientation engage in multiple social relationships that enable responding to changes. However, we found limited participation of local market actors in most of these networks. Further investigating these social networks, and the actors participating in them, is essential to better understand and anticipate how and why agricultural systems respond to multiple types of changes, ultimately influencing their trajectory in an increasingly changing world.
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| 6. |
- González-Mon, Blanca, 1993-, et al.
(författare)
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The role of cross-scale social relationships for responding to changes in agricultural systems
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Agricultural systems are important for the livelihoods and food security of millions of people. At the same time, these systems are increasingly interconnected across scales and face the challenge of responding to multiple, and coalescing types of environmental, social, and economic changes. Previous studies investigated such responses to changes placing the focus on farmers and farming communities. In this study, we investigate the connectivity of farming systems to markets with the aim to understand the role of social relationships across the supply chain to influence responses to multiple types of changes. To this end, we conducted interviews with actors across a fruit supply chain in the Western Cape, South Africa, connected to global and national markets, using a participatory network mapping method. The most important changes mentioned affecting the production and trade of fruit in this region included: droughts, climatic changes, changes related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and other social changes. We identified three types of responses to these changes: i) responses concerning the dynamics of trade relationships (e.g., changing or maintaining trade relationships); ii) responses based on changes at the individual level (e.g., changes in farm management); and iii) responses based on social relationships (collaboration, knowledge transfer, financial assistance, and marketing coordination). Building on these four types of social relationships, we found that different social networks mediate responses to changes. These social networks include actors internal and external to the supply chains operating within and across scales. Networks of collaboration, knowledge exchange, and financial assistance show a positive correlation, where actors with an export orientation engage in multiple social relationships that enable responding to changes. However, we found limited participation of local market actors in these networks, besides their role in responses based on marketing coordination. Exploring these social networks and the actors participating in them could be essential to better understand and anticipate how and why agricultural systems respond to multiple types of changes, ultimately influencing their trajectory in an increasingly changing context.
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| 7. |
- Hamann, Maike, 1982-
(författare)
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Exploring connections in social-ecological systems : The links between biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human well-being in South Africa
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A key challenge of the Anthropocene is to advance human development without undermining critical ecosystem services. Central to this challenge is a better understanding of the interactions and feedbacks between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being, which interact in dynamic and complex social-ecological systems. These relationships have been the focus of much work in the past decades, however more remains to be done to comprehensively identify and quantify them, especially at larger scales. In this thesis, a social-ecological systems approach is adopted to investigate connections between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being in South Africa. The country’s high levels of biological and socio-economic diversity, as well as its emerging economy make South Africa an interesting case for exploring these connections. Using data from a variety of public sources, and at different sub-national scales, the thesis first identifies and analyses a variety of bundles of ecosystem service use. Based on these bundles, three social-ecological system archetypes were identified and mapped in South Africa, namely the green-loop (high overall use of local ecosystem services), transition, and red-loop (low overall use of local ecosystem services) systems. Further analysis explored the social and ecological drivers of these patterns, and found the distribution of systems mainly influenced by social factors including household income, gender of the household head, and land tenure. Second, this thesis uses human well-being indicators to construct, analyse and map multi-dimensional human well-being bundles. These bundles were found to spatially cluster across the landscape, and were analysed for congruence with the ecosystem service use bundles. Discrepancies in the expected overlap of ecosystem service use and human well-being were highlighted and concur with findings elsewhere and the ongoing debate in the literature on the impacts of time-lags, indicator choice and scale of these interactions. Third, biodiversity in South Africa was analysed by employing an indicator of biodiversity intactness (BII) at the population level. The BII was found to have declined by 18.3% since pre-industrial times. Biodiversity loss was linked to the potential supply of ecosystem services, as well as human well-being patterns. A potential threshold at 40% biodiversity loss was detected, beyond which population abundances decline sharply. Finally, the thesis examines multiple perspectives on ecosystem services in sustainability research, including the social-ecological systems perspective, and discusses the complementarity of the different perspectives in furthering a deeper understanding of the connections between people and ecosystems. The social-ecological systems perspective employed throughout the empirical work presented in this thesis contributed towards cross-cutting insights, the testing of new kinds of data and the development of new approaches, all of which represent important steps towards unravelling the connections between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being, and contributing to the key Anthropocene challenge of sustainable development.
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| 8. |
- Hamann, M., et al.
(författare)
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Scenarios of Good Anthropocenes in southern Africa
- 2020
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Ingår i: Futures. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-3287 .- 1873-6378. ; 118
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the rapidly changing and uncertain world of the Anthropocene, positive visions of the future could play a crucial role in catalysing deep social-ecological transformations to help guide humanity towards more sustainable and equitable futures. This paper presents the outcomes from a novel visioning process designed to elicit creative and inspirational future scenarios for southern Africa. The approach based scenario development on seeds of good Anthropocenes, i.e. existing initiatives or technologies that represent current, local-scale innovations for sustainability. A selection of seeds was used to create four distinct, positive visions in a participatory workshop process. Common themes that independently emerged in all four visions were i) decentralized governance and decision-making; ii) a strong emphasis on equity and empathy; iii) high levels of connectedness between people; and iv) a reinforced, respectful relationship with nature. The visions mainly differ in the extent of fusion between people and technology in everyday life, and how much nature plays a role in defining the human experience. The narratives presented here describe worlds that have undergone a more significant paradigm shift towards shared human values and stewardship of resources than is explored in most other ambient narratives for the region. These Good Anthropocene scenarios therefore demonstrate more radical, previously unimagined ways of thinking about sustainability futures on the African continent and beyond.
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| 9. |
- Meacham, Megan, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Advancing research on ecosystem service bundles for comparative assessments and synthesis
- 2022
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Ingår i: Ecosystems and People. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2639-5908 .- 2639-5916. ; 18:1, s. 99-111
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Social-ecological interactions have been shown to generate interrelated and reoccurring sets of ecosystem services, also known as ecosystem service bundles. Given the potential utility of the bundles concept, along with the recent surge in interest it is timely to reflect on the concept, its current use and potential for the future. Based on our ecosystem service bundle experience, expertise, and ecosystem service bundle analyses, we have found critical elements for advancing the utility of ecosystem service bundle concept and deepening its impact in the future. In this paper we 1) examine the different conceptualizations of the ecosystem service bundle concept; 2) show the range of benefits of using a bundles approach; 3) explore key issues for improving research on ecosystem service bundles, including indicators, scale, and drivers and relationships between ecosystem services; and 4) outline priorities for the future by facilitating comparisons of ecosystem service bundle research.
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| 10. |
- Pereira, Laura M., et al.
(författare)
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Food System Transformation : Integrating a Political-Economy and Social-Ecological Approach to Regime Shifts
- 2020
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Ingår i: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. - : MDPI AG. - 1661-7827 .- 1660-4601. ; 17:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Sustainably achieving the goal of global food security is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. The current food system is failing to meet the needs of people, and at the same time, is having far-reaching impacts on the environment and undermining human well-being in other important ways. It is increasingly apparent that a deep transformation in the way we produce and consume food is needed in order to ensure a more just and sustainable future. This paper uses the concept of regime shifts to understand key drivers and innovations underlying past disruptions in the food system and to explore how they may help us think about desirable future changes and how we might leverage them. We combine two perspectives on regime shifts-one derived from natural sciences and the other from social sciences-to propose an interpretation of food regimes that draws on innovation theory. We use this conceptualization to discuss three examples of innovations that we argue helped enable critical regime shifts in the global food system in the past: the Haber-Bosch process of nitrogen fixation, the rise of the supermarket, and the call for more transparency in the food system to reconnect consumers with their food. This paper concludes with an exploration of why this combination of conceptual understandings is important across the Global North/ Global South divide, and proposes a new sustainability regime where transformative change is spearheaded by a variety of social-ecological innovations.
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