Publication archive

Blenckner, T., Ammar, Y., Müller-Karulis, B., Niiranen, S., Arneborg, L., Li, Q.. 2021. The Risk for Novel and Disappearing Environmental Conditions in the Baltic Sea. Frontiers in Marine Science. http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.745722

Future climate biogeochemical projections indicate large changes in the ocean with environmental conditions not experienced at present referred to as novel, or may even disappear. These climate-induced changes will most likely affect species distribution via changes in growth, behavior, evolution, dispersal, and species interactions. However, the future risk of novel and disappearing environmental conditions in the ocean is po...

Brockhaus, M., Di Gregorio, M., Djoudi, H., Moeliono, M., Pham, T., Wong, G.. 2021. The forest frontier in the Global South: Climate change policies and the promise of development and equity. Ambio. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13280-021-01602-1

Halting forest loss and achieving sustainable development in an equitable manner require state, non-state actors, and entire societies in the Global North and South to tackle deeply established patterns of inequality and power relations embedded in forest frontiers. Forest and climate governance in the Global South can provide an avenue for the transformational change needed—yet, does it? We analyse the politics and power in ...

Frantzeskaki, N., McPhearson, T.. 2021. Mainstream Nature-Based Solutions for Urban Climate Resilience. BioScience. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biab105

Global urbanization over the last century has concentrated people, infrastructure, and economic activity in cities, pushing them to the front lines of damaging impacts of climate change and other social and economic shocks, including COVID-19. Extreme natural disasters in the last 3 years, such as Typhoon Mangkhut (in 2018) in the Philippines, Hurricane Maria (in 2017) and Florence (in 2018) in the United States, the reoccurri...

Kohler, J., Wunderling, N., Donges, J., Vollmer, J.. 2021. Complex networks of interacting stochastic tipping elements: Cooperativity of phase separation in the large-system limit. Physical Review E. http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/physreve.104.044301

Tipping elements in the Earth system have received increased scientific attention over recent years due to their nonlinear behavior and the risks of abrupt state changes. While being stable over a large range of parameters, a tipping element undergoes a drastic shift in its state upon an additional small parameter change when close to its tipping point. Recently, the focus of research broadened towards emergent behavior in net...

Donges, J., Lochner, J., Kitzmann, N., Heitzig, J., Lehmann, S., Wiedermann, M., Vollmer, J.. 2021. Dose–response functions and surrogate models for exploring social contagion in the Copenhagen Networks Study. The European Physical Journal Special Topics. http://dx.doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-021-00279-7

Spreading dynamics and complex contagion processes on networks are important mechanisms underlying the emergence of critical transitions, tipping points and other non-linear phenomena in complex human and natural systems. Increasing amounts of temporal network data are now becoming available to study such spreading processes of behaviours, opinions, ideas, diseases and innovations to test hypotheses regarding their specific pr...

Lade, S., Fetzer, I., Cornell, S., Crona, B.. 2021. A prototype Earth system impact metric that accounts for cross-scale interactions. Environmental Research Letters. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2db1

Human activities are disrupting the Earth system's biophysical processes, which underlie human wellbeing. The planetary boundary framework sets 'safe' global limits on these pressures, but a sub-global assessment of these pressures, their interactions and subsequent systemic effects is needed to enable corporate and public entities to assess the systemic environmental impacts of their decisions. Here, we developed a prototype ...

Constantino, S., Schlüter, M., Weber, E., Wijermans, N.. 2021. Cognition and behavior in context: a framework and theories to explain natural resource use decisions in social-ecological systems. Sustainability Science. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11625-021-00989-w

The complex, context-dependent, and dynamic nature of human behavior is increasingly recognized as both an important cause of sustainability problems and potential leverage for their solution. Human beings are diverse, as are the social, ecological, and institutional settings in which they are embedded. Despite this recognition and extensive knowledge about human decision-making in the behavioral sciences, empirical analysis,...

Wijermans, N., Verhagen, H., Lytter, A.. 2021. An Online Implementation of a Virtual Agent-Based Experiment Tool—An Exploration. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61503-1_29

Social simulation targets social science problems and challenges, of theoretical, empirical and applied nature, using simulation. This implies contributing to the development of theory/explanations of social phenomena or using existing theories and models to understand or predict outcomes of social processes. The different uses of social simulation and the different roles it can play in the research process make it the Swiss a...

Scholz, G., Eberhard, T., Ostrowski, R., Wijermans, N.. 2021. Social Identity in Agent-Based Models — Exploring the State of the Art. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61503-1_6

A key challenge in social simulation is how to represent human behavior, specifically in its social context. The Social Identity approach (SIA) reflects a promising potential as it describes how people behave while being part of a group, how groups interact and how these interactions and ‘appropriate group behaviors’ can change over time. SIA is used in a variety of fields and increasingly implemented in agent-based models. A...

Galaz, V., Centeno, M.A., Callahan, P.W., Causevic, A., Patterson, T. et.al. 2021. Artificial intelligence, systemic risks, and sustainability. Technology in Society Volume 67, November 2021, 101741. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2021.101741

Automated decision making and predictive analytics through artificial intelligence, in combination with rapid progress in technologies such as sensor technology and robotics are likely to change the way individuals, communities, governments and private actors perceive and respond to climate and ecological change. Methods based on various forms of artificial intelligence are already today being applied in a number of research ...