Publications

Juan Rocha, Anne-Sophie Crépin. 2024. Structural controllability and management of cascading regime shifts. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-7515

Abrupt transitions in ecosystems can be interconnected, raising challenges for science and management in identifying sufficient interventions to prevent them or recover from undesirable shifts. Here we use principles of network controllability to explore how difficult it is to manage coupled regime shifts. We find that coupled regime shifts are easier to manage when they share drivers, but can become harder to manage if new fe...

Sarah Whitmee, Rosemary Green, Kristine Belesova, Syreen Hassan, Soledad Cuevas, Peninah Murage, Roberto Picetti, Romain Clercq-Roques, Kris Murray, Jane Falconer, Blanca Anton, Tamzin Reynolds, Hugh Sharma Waddington, Robert C Hughes, Joseph Spadaro, Aimée Aguilar Jaber, Yamina Saheb, Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, Maria Cortés-Puch, Kristie Ebi, Rachel Huxley, Mariana Mazzucato, Tolu Oni, Nicole de Paula, Gong Peng, Aromar Revi, Johan Rockström, Leena Srivastava, Lorraine Whitmarsh, Robert Zougmoré, Joy Phumaphi, Helen Clark, Andy Haines. 2024. Pathways to a healthy net-zero future: report of the Lancet Pathfinder Commission. The Lancet. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(23)02466-2

Deep, rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are needed to limit future global temperature increases to 1·5°C above pre-industrial levels, but current progress is inadequate to achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement and to reduce future risks from climate change. Many actions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions can also deliver near-term health co-benefits, for example from reduced air pollution, consumption of heal...

Can Zhang, Bo Su, Michael Beckmann, Martin Volk. 2024. Emergy-based evaluation of ecosystem services: Progress and perspectives. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2023.114201

This review investigates the potential of the emergy analysis (EMA) as a new perspective and approach to the worldwide used ecosystem services (ESs) framework to quantify and analyse the potential benefits people obtain from ecosystems. Based on bibliometric analysis method, the study systematically investigates the latest developments and issues of application of EMA in ESs in conjunction with thematic analysis. The analysis ...

Azucena Castro, Alejandro Ponce de León, Ana Laura Cantera, Veronica Olofsson, Juan David Reina-Rozo. 2024. Energy sovereignty storytelling: Art practices, community-led transitions, and territorial futures in Latin America. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2024.2309046

In this article, we study forms of storytelling about energy sovereignty retrieved from community-based art and their implications for energy justice formulations in Latin America. Based on the visual and discursive analysis of five contemporary Latin American artistic practices, the article shows that their poetic and political engagements with energy production, consumption, and distribution build what we call “energy sovere...

Veronica Olofsson, Azucena Castro. 2024. Unjust Winds of Change: The Politics and Narratives of Wind Farms in the Brazilian Northeast. Iberoamericana – Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. https://doi.org/10.16993/iberoamericana.638

Renewable energy is recognized as a cornerstone in achieving sustainable development globally, evidenced by international standards such as the UN Agenda 2030 as well as in nations energy policies globally. One of the front runners of the energy transition globally is Brazil, where wind energy has expanded substantially since the early 2000’s. Currently, the state of Bahia in North-Eastern Brazil is seeing the fastest expansio...

Simon West, L. Jamila Haider, Tilman Hertz, Maria Mancilla Garcia, Michele-Lee Moore. 2024. Relational approaches to sustainability transformations: walking together in a world of many worlds. Ecosystems and People. https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2370539

Transformations to sustainability require alternatives to the paradigms, practices, and policies that have generated social-ecological destruction and the Anthropocene. In sustainability science, several conceptual frameworks have been developed for transformations, including social-ecological, multi-level, transformative adaptation, and pathways approaches. There is a growing shift towards recognising transformations as ‘shar...

María Mancilla García, Caroline Abunge, Salomão Olinda Bandeira, Christopher Cheupe, Dadivo José Combane, Tim Daw, Elizabeth Maria Drury O’Neill, Tilman Hertz, Marlino Mubai, Nyawira Muthiga, Taís Sonetti González, Halimu Shauri. 2024. Exploring a process‐relational approach to qualitative research methods for sustainability science. People and Nature. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10667

As sustainability scientists increasingly put forward the relevance of process-relational approaches to make sense of social-ecological phenomena, an inquiry on which methods would fit a process-relational approach is necessary. This paper discusses how a process-relational approach can be applied to traditional qualitative research methods, namely interviews and coding and the tensions associated with it. Process-relational p...

Jan Bebbington, Robert Blasiak, Carlos Larrinaga, Shona Russell, Madlen Sobkowiak, Jean-Baptiste Jouffray, Henrik Österblom. 2024. Shaping nature outcomes in corporate settings. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0325

Transnational companies have substantive impacts on nature: a hallmark of living in the Anthropocene. Understanding these impacts through company provision of information is a precursor to holding them accountable for nature outcomes. The effect of increasing disclosures (of varying quality) is predicated on ‘information governance’, an approach that uses disclosure requirements to drive company behaviour. However, its efficac...

Jerneja Penca, Andrea Barbanti, Christopher Cvitanovic, Amel Hamza-Chaffai, Ahmed Elshazly, Jean-Baptiste Jouffray, Nezha Mejjad, Melita Mokos. 2024. Building competences for researchers working towards ocean sustainability. Marine Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2024.106132

The challenges of achieving just, equitable and sustainable ocean futures require a new type of transdisciplinary and action-oriented science that integrates across disciplines and knowledge systems. Scientists and researchers in academia, industry or government, who contribute to knowledge creation, innovation, and policy development for the ocean, must be empowered with a fresh set of competences. This paper maps the knowled...

Therese Lindahl, John M. Anderies, Anne-Sophie Crépin, Krisztina Jónás, Caroline Schill, Juan Camilo Cárdenas, Carl Folke, Gert Jan Hofstede, Marco A. Janssen, Jean-Denis Mathias, Stephen Polasky. 2024. Titanic lessons for Spaceship Earth to account for human behavior in institutional design. npj Climate Action. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-024-00135-z

Combating environmental degradation requires global cooperation. We here argue that institutional designs for such efforts need to account for human behavior. The voyage of the Titanic serves as an analogous case to learn from, and we use behavioral insights to identify critical aspects of human behavior that serve as barriers or opportunities for addressing the challenges we face. We identify a set of public goods that may he...