Jan

Kuiper

PhD

Researcher

jan.kuiper@su.se

+46 737 078 870

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Profile summary

  • Scenarios
  • Biodiversity
  • Freshwater ecology
  • Regime shifts
  • Ecosystem services
  • Resilience

Jan Kuiper's research focuses on the use of participatory scenarios and models to inform decision-making processes in social-ecological systems, from the local to the global level

Jan Kuiper is a broadly oriented sustainability researcher and educator focused on the governance and transformation of social-ecological systems. At the Centre, he combines research, project leadership, teaching, and PhD supervision. He is a theme leader of the Centre’s Transformative Futures theme and serves as an alternate member of its board.

Kuiper heads several international initiatives, including biospherefutures.net, an open-access database of social-ecological scenario case studies, and the PLURALAKES consortium, which works to integrate plural values into lake governance with case studies in the UK, Netherlands, and Finland. He also co-leads a research project on sand and sustainability, examining the risks and opportunities of the global sand systems.

He coordinates the MSc course Resilience Reflections and Applications, and serves as seminar leader in the BSc course Sustainability Science 1.

Kuiper's background is in aquatic ecology. He completed his doctoral research at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) and Wageningen University, where he studied resilience and regime shifts in shallow lakes.

In close collaboration with water quality managers and other stakeholders, he developed and applied dynamic modelling tools to quantify ecosystem resilience and predict the occurrence of abrupt regime shifts.

Before his PhD studies, he conducted research on the functional role of biodiversity in peatland ecosystems at Utrecht University, contributing to the development of the Global Biodiversity model for policy support (GLOBIO-Aquatic) at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.

Kuiper served as a fellow of the task force on scenarios and models of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) that is mandated to catalyse the development of new scenarios and models of biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people. In that capacity, Kuiper was heavily involved in developing the Nature Futures Framework, a new scenario framework that engages with the plurality of people’s relationships with nature.

Kuiper is further associated with the Natural Capital Project, a partnership of world-leading academic institutes and NGOs that works to integrate the value of nature’s contributions to people into all major decisions, centred at Stanford University.

Awards and achievements

  • MCED Award for Innovative Contributions to Ecological Modelling (1st prize, 2016)
  • Publication Award Netherlands Ecological Research Network (2nd prize, 2016)
  • Publication Award Graduate School for Production Ecology and Resource Conservation (1st prize, 2015)
  • FORMAS Planning grant (2018-02371): The futures we want: exploring diverse, credible and positive scenarios for navigating transformation under the 2030 Agenda

Current funding

  • FORMAS Mobility grant for early-career researchers (2019-01648): To use nature, to protect nature, or to be nature: That is the question
  • FORMAS Research grant for early-career researchers (2021-01006): Sand in the Anthropocene: risks and opportunities for global sustainability
  • FORMAS/ Water4All 2023 Joint Transnational Call “Ecosystem Services” (2024-00994): PLURALAKES – Co-creating pathways to desirable nature futures of temperature lakes

Supervision

Liam Carpenter Urquhart, PhD, main supervisor
Kiran Pereira, PhD, co-supervisor

Key publications

Kuiper JJ, Carpenter-Urquhart LR, Bérbes-Blázquez M, et al (2024). Biosphere Futures: a database of social-ecological scenarios. Ecology and Society 29(1):19. https://doi.org/10.5751/ ES-14795-290119

Cork S, Alexandra C, Alvarez-Romero JG,... Kuiper JJ, et al (2023). Exploring alternative futures in the Anthropocene. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 48:25-54. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-112321-095011

Kuiper JJ, (2023). A plea for more freshwater experts in IPBES. Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems 33:6. https://doi.org/10.1002/aqc.3956

Kuiper JJ, van Wijk D, Mooij WM, et al (2022). Exploring desirable nature futures for Nationaal Park Hollandse Duinen. Ecosystems and People 18:1. https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2022.2065360

Pereira LM, Davies KK, Belder E,... Kuiper JJ, et al (2020) Developing multiscale and integrative nature–people scenarios using the Nature Futures Framework. People and Nature 2:1172-1195. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10146

Publications by Kuiper, Jan

Integrating cross-scale sustainability and ecosystem resilience for adaptative scenario planning in China

Journal / article | 2024

Yafei WANG, Yao HE, Hao ZHOU, Garry Peterson, Jan Kuiper, Liam R Carpenter-Urquhart, Stefan Olin, Yuxuan YE, Shuwei SHEN, Jie Fan, Lennart Olsson, Murray Scown. 2024. Integrating cross-scale sustainability and ecosystem resilience for adaptative scenario planning in China. ESS Open Archive. https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.173499112.24070386/v1

Climate change calls for adaptive strategies to manage landscapes across governance levels, as differing policy frameworks distinctly shape landscape patterns and long-term ecosystem resilience. This study presents a novel adaptive framework that integrates planning objectives, landscape patterns, and ecosystem resilience through iterative feedback loops. The framework aims to achieve the desired scenario, SUS-RES, which balan...

A plea for more freshwater experts in IPBES

Journal / article | 2023

Jan J. Kuiper. 2023. A plea for more freshwater experts in IPBES. Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems. https://doi.org/10.1002/aqc.3956

Biodiversity loss occurs much faster in the world's freshwaters than in the terrestrial or marine realms, yet worries have been expressed that freshwater systems are not given the same priority as ‘land and oceans’ in global environmental governance. The Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is mandated to provide the knowledge basis supporting international environmental agr...

Biosphere Futures: a database of social-ecological scenarios

Journal / article | 2023

Jan Jurjen Kuiper, Liam Carpenter-Urquhart, Marta Berbés-Blázquez, Elisa Oteros Rozas, Linna Fredström, Kinga Psiuk, Codruța Savu, Robert Kautsky, Anne Guerry, Stephen R. Carpenter, Charlyn Green, Megan Meacham, Roy Paco Remme, Federica Ravera, Franziska Wankmüller, Katie K. Arkema, Laura M. Pereira, Garry Peterson. 2023. Biosphere Futures: a database of social-ecological scenarios. OSF. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/v4ukj

Biosphere Futures (biospherefutures.net) is a new online database to collect and discover scenario studies from across the world, with a specific focus on scenarios that explicitly incorporate interdependencies between humans and their supporting ecosystems. It provides access to a globally diverse collection of case studies that includes most ecosystems and regions, enabling exploration of the multifaceted ways in which the f...

Towards a better future for biodiversity and people: Modelling Nature Futures

Journal / article | 2023

Kim, HyeJin, Peterson, Garry D., Cheung, William W. L., Ferrier, Simon, Alkemade, Rob, Arneth, Almut, Kuiper, Jan J., Okayasu, Sana, Pereira, Laura, Acosta, Lilibeth A., Chaplin-Kramer, Rebecca, den Belder, Eefje, Eddy, Tyler D., Johnson, Justin A., Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, Sylvia, Kok, Marcel T. J., Leadley, Paul, Leclere, David, Lundquist, Carolyn J., Rondinini, Carlo, Scholes, Robert J., Schoolenberg, Machteld A., Shin, Yunne-Jai, Stehfest, Elke, Stephenson, Fabrice, Visconti, Piero, van Vuuren, Detlef, Wabnitz, Colette C. C., Alava, Juan Jose, Cuadros-Casanova, Ivon, Davies, Kathryn K., Gasalla, Maria A., Halouani, Ghassen, Harfoot, Mike, Hashimoto, Shizuka, Hickler, Thomas, Hirsch, Tim, Kolomytsev, Grigory, Miller, Brian W., Ohashi, Haruka, Palomo, Maria Gabriela, Popp, Alexander, Remme, Roy Paco, Saito, Osamu, Sumalia, U. Rashid, Willcock, Simon, Pereira, Henrique M.. 2023. Towards a better future for biodiversity and people: Modelling Nature Futures. Global Environmental Change. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.GLOENVCHA.2023.102681

The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) is a heuristic tool for co-creating positive futures for nature and people. It seeks to open up a diversity of futures through mainly three value perspectives on nature – Nature for Nature, Nature for Society, and Nature as Culture. This paper describes how the NFF can be applied in modelling to support decision-making. First, we describe key considerations for the NFF in developing qualitati...