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Urban Mind: Cultural and Environmental Dynamics The project derives a new concept, the ‘Urban Mind´, from combined humanities and natural science studies of the development of urbanism and climate change in the Middle East.40 scholars in Uppsala University, Stockholm University, the Landscape/seascape lab at Stockholm Resilience Centre and KTH will formulate the concept as part of the IHOPE (Integrated History and future of Peoples on Earth) initiative. The concept will be assessed with a specific case study: Byzantium-Istanbul. The global relevance of the Urban Mind concept will be illustrated with ongoing studies of cognitive aspects of urbanism and climate change in Africa, Eurasia and the Americas.
Urban Social Ecological Systems ProjectThe Urban social-ecological systems and globalization Group, consisting of site based research groups in Bangalore, Cape Town, Canberra, Helsinki, Istanbul, New Delhi, New Orleans, New York City, Phoenix and Stockholm has agreed on a set of common research questions including: - What are the effects of urban development and land use change on biodiversity and ecosystem service delivery? How are different socio economic groups affected by environmental changes in urban regions? - How do existing institutions, jurisdictions and legal systems in the urban areas impact on the delivery of, and access to, ecosystem services such as drinking water, clean air, recreation etc? - What are the mechanisms linking science, policy and practice that could contribute to urban sustainability?
The Dry Spiny Forest of Southern Madagascar: Social Institutions, Resilience and Sustainable Use of Forest ResourcesThe focus of research to investigate the dynamic interaction between people and ecosystems in Androy, southern Madagascar. We have specifically targeted how biodiversity, local management practices and institutions may form a foundation for the capacity of the people living in the region to deal with change and disturbances. The project is developed in close collaboration with Université d´Antananarivo and the Museé d´Art et Archeologie, Antananarivo, Madagascar.
Managing bundles of ecosystem services in agricultural landscapesThe aim of this project is to develop a conceptual framework and new empirical methods for ‘rapid and systematic assessments´ of connections among multiple ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. It´s proposed that different services are interlinked or ‘bundled´ together.The project will be carried out in two agricultural landscapes, one in Sweden and one in South Africa. Both landscapes contain large-scale commercial farming, small-scale farming, and a national park/nature reserve. Methods include expert interviews using participatory techniques of scenario planning, ranking and judgments, synthesizing existing data in databases, statistical analyses of ‘bundle indexes´, and cross-scale analyzes using GIS.
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