Publications

Florian Schunck, Marc Wiedermann, Jobst Heitzig, Jonathan Donges. 2024. A Dynamic Network Model of Societal Complexity and Resilience Inspired by Tainter’s Theory of Collapse. Entropy. https://doi.org/10.3390/e26020098

In recent years, several global events have severely disrupted economies and social structures, undermining confidence in the resilience of modern societies. Examples include the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought unprecedented health challenges and economic disruptions, and the emergence of geopolitical tensions and conflicts that have further strained international relations and economic stability. While empirical evidence on ...

Kevin Mallinger, Sebastian Raubitzek, Thomas Neubauer, Steven Lade. 2024. Potentials and limitations of complexity research for environmental sciences and modern farming applications. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2024.101429

Open system analysis is prone to the oversimplification of dynamics due to tightly coupled variables and their nonlinear, complex, and often unpredictable behavior. By assessing the combination of different ecosystem variables (structural, chemical, and biological) and their dynamic states in time and space, individual complexity measurements can capture phase changes of ecosystem stability and enhance efficiency, disease dete...

Christian Kammler, Frank Dignum, Nanda Wijermans. 2024. Towards a Social Simulation Interaction Tool for Policy Makers—A New Research Agenda to Enable Usage of More Complex Social Simulations. Springer Link. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57785-7_14

Social simulations can be a powerful tool for policy makers and other decision makers to support them in their decision making process. To be a powerful tool, it is not only important that the agents in the simulation exhibit realistic–human like—behavior, but also that the simulation is empowering the policy maker to use it in a—for them—meaningful way. To tackle this problem, we require interaction tools and visualization ca...

Stefan Daume, Victor Galaz, Petter Bjersér. 2023. Automated Framing of Climate Change? The Role of Social Bots in the Twitter Climate Change Discourse During the 2019/2020 Australia Bushfires. Social Media + Society. Sage Journals. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231168370

Extreme weather-related events like wildfires have been increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change. Public online conversations that reflect on these events as climate emergencies can create awareness and build support for climate action but are also used to spread misinformation and climate change denial. To what extent automated social media accounts—“social bots”—amplify different perspectives of such events...

Victor Galaz, Hannah Metzler, Stefan Daume, Andreas Olsson, Björn Lindström, Arvid Marklund. 2023. AI could create a perfect storm of climate misinformation. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2306.12807

We are in the midst of a transformation of the digital news ecosystem. The expansion of online social networks, the influence of recommender systems, increased automation, and new generative artificial intelligence tools are rapidly changing the speed and the way misinformation about climate change and sustainability issues moves around the world. Policymakers, researchers and the public need to combine forces to address the d...

Maja Schlüter, Tilman Hertz, María Mancilla García, Thomas Banitz, Volker Grimm, Lars-Göran Johansson, Emilie Lindkvist, Rodrigo Martinez Peña, Sonja Radosavljevic, Karl Wennberg, Petri Ylikoski. 2023. Navigating causal reasoning in sustainability science. OSF. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/kn49v

Sustainability researchers aim to generate knowledge about causes of societal problems and possible solutions. Given the multidisciplinary nature of the field and the complexity of the problems, the causal reasoning that underlies these activities may vary significantly across studies and research approaches. Causal reasoning involves many assumptions, e.g. about what aspects of a system matter, what counts as evidence for a c...

Maja Schlüter, Christa Brelsford, Paul J. Ferraro, Kirill Orach, Minghao Qiu, Martin D. Smith. 2023. Unraveling complex causal processes that affect sustainability requires more integration between empirical and modeling approaches. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2215676120

Understanding causation in nature–society systems is fundamental to advancing sustainability science and addressing sustainability problems, such as climate change, pollution, natural resource collapse, and the spread of infectious diseases. To study causation, sustainability scientists rely on modeling or on empirical analyses but rarely combine the two approaches. This lack of integration is problematic because nature–societ...

Anita Lazurko, L. Jamila Haider, Tilman Hertz, Simon West, Daniel D. P. McCarthy, Simon West, Simon West, Simon West. 2023. Operationalizing ambiguity in sustainability science: embracing the elephant in the room. Sustainability Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-023-01446-6

Ambiguity is often recognized as an intrinsic aspect of addressing complex sustainability challenges. Nevertheless, in the practice of transdisciplinary sustainability research, ambiguity is often an ‘elephant in the room’ to be either side-stepped or reduced rather than explicitly mobilized in pursuit of solutions. These responses threaten the salience and legitimacy of sustainability science by masking the pluralism of real-...

Rammelt, Crelis F., Gupta, Joyeeta, Liverman, Diana, Scholtens, Joeri, Ciobanu, Daniel, Abrams, Jesse F., Bai, Xuemei, Gifford, Lauren, Gordon, Christopher, Hurlbert, Margot, Inoue, Cristina Y. A., Jacobson, Lisa, Lade, Steven J., Lenton, Timothy M., McKay, David I. Armstrong, Nakicenovic, Nebojsa, Okereke, Chukwumerije, Otto, Ilona M., Pereira, Laura M., Prodani, Klaudia, Rockstrom, Johan, Stewart-Koster, Ben, Verburg, Peter H., Zimm, Caroline. 2023. Impacts of meeting minimum access on critical earth systems amidst the Great Inequality. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/S41893-022-00995-5

The Sustainable Development Goals aim to improve access to resources and services, reduce environmental degradation, eradicate poverty and reduce inequality. However, the magnitude of the environmental burden that would arise from meeting the needs of the poorest is under debate—especially when compared to much larger burdens from the rich. We show that the ‘Great Acceleration’ of human impacts was characterized by a ‘Great In...

Pérez-Granados, C., Lenzner, B., Golivets, M., Saul, W., Jeschke, J., Essl, F., Peterson, G., Rutting, L., Latombe, G., Adriaens, T., Aldridge, D., Bacher, S., Bernardo-Madrid, R., Brotons, L., Díaz, F., Gallardo, B., Genovesi, P., González-Moreno, P., Kühn, I., Kutleša, P., Leung, B., Liu, C., Pagitz, K., Pastor, T., Pauchard, A., Rabitsch, W., Roy, H., Robertson, P., Seebens, H., Solarz, W., Starfinger, U., Tanner, R., Vilà, M., Roura-Pascual, N.. 2022. European scenarios for future biological invasions. BioRxiv. http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.13.507777

Invasive alien species are one of the major threats to global biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, nature’s contribution to people and human health. While scenarios about potential future developments have been available for other global change drivers for quite some time, we largely lack an understanding of how biological invasions might unfold in the future across spatial scales. Based on previous work on global invasion scen...