Publication archive

Fushcia-Ann Hoover, Sara Meerow, Zbigniew J. Grabowski & Timon McPhearson (2021) Environmental justice implications of siting criteria in urban green infrastructure planning, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, DOI: 10.1080/1523908X.2021.1945916

Green infrastructure (GI) has become a panacea for cities working to enhance sustainability and resilience. While the rationale for GI primarily focuses on its multifunctionality (e.g. delivering multiple ecosystem services to local communities), uncertainties remain around how, for whom, and to what extent GI delivers these services. Additionally, many scholars increasingly recognize potential disservices of GI, including gen...

Hamel, P., Guerry, A., Polasky, S., Han, B., Douglass, J., Hamann, M., Janke, B., Kuiper, J., Levrel, H., Liu, H., Lonsdorf, E., McDonald, R., Nootenboom, C., Ouyang, Z., Remme, R., Sharp, R., Tardieu, L., Viguié, V., Xu, D., Zheng, H., Daily, G.. 2021. Mapping the benefits of nature in cities with the InVEST software. npj Urban Sustainability. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42949-021-00027-9

Natural infrastructure such as parks, forests, street trees, green roofs, and coastal vegetation is central to sustainable urban management. Despite recent progress, it remains challenging for urban decision-makers to incorporate the benefits of natural infrastructure into urban design and planning. Here, we present an approach to support the greening of cities by quantifying and mapping the diverse benefits of natural infrast...

Orach, K., Schlüter, M.. 2021. Understanding the dynamics of fish politics: The role of diverse actor interactions in transformations towards co-management. Environmental Science & Policy. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2021.06.010

Co-management is often put forward as a way to foster sustainability and improve the adaptive capacity of small-scale fisheries. Transformations towards co-management are enabled by processes that support social change, such as nurturing leadership, collective action and learning, as well as political processes that change legislative frameworks from centralized to decentralized decision-making. However, major policy changes c...

Brondizio, E., Andersson, K., de Castro, F., Futemma, C., Salk, C., Tengö, M., Londres, M., Tourne, D., Gonzalez, T., Molina-Garzón, A., Russo Lopes, G., Siani, S.. 2021. Making place-based sustainability initiatives visible in the Brazilian Amazon. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.03.007

From state-based developmentalism to community-based initiatives to market-based conservation, the Brazilian Amazon has been a laboratory of development interventions for over 50 years. The region is now confronting a devastating COVID-19 pandemic amid renewed environmental pressures and increasing social inequities. While these forces are shaping the present and future of the region, the Amazon has also become an incubator of...

Warszawski, L., Kriegler, E., Lenton, T.M., Gaffney, O., Jacob, D. et.al. 2021. All options, not silver bullets, needed to limit global warming to 1.5 °C: a scenario appraisal. Environ. Res. Lett. 16 064037

Climate science provides strong evidence of the necessity of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, in line with the Paris Climate Agreement. The IPCC 1.5 °C special report (SR1.5) presents 414 emissions scenarios modelled for the report, of which around 50 are classified as '1.5 °C scenarios', with no or low temperature overshoot. These emission scenarios differ in their reliance on individual mitigation levers, including reducti...

Lemos, C., Andrade, P., Rodrigues, R., Hissa, L., Aguiar, A.. 2021. Combining regional to local restoration goals in the Brazilian Atlantic forest. Regional Environmental Change. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10113-021-01792-0

To achieve regional and international large-scale restoration goals with minimum costs, several restoration commitments rely on natural regeneration, a passive and inexpensive strategy. However, natural regeneration potential may vary within the landscape, mainly due to its historical context. In this work, we use spatially explicit restoration scenarios to explore how and where, within a given region, multiple restoration co...

Sumaila, U., Walsh, M., Hoareau, K., Cox, A., Teh, L., Abdallah, P., Akpalu, W., Anna, Z., Benzaken, D., Crona, B., Fitzgerald, T., Heaps, L., Issifu, I., Karousakis, K., Lange, G., Leland, A., Miller, D., Sack, K., Shahnaz, D., Thiele, T., Vestergaard, N., Yagi, N., Zhang, J.. 2021. Financing a sustainable ocean economy. Nature Communications. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23168-y

The ocean, which regulates climate and supports vital ecosystem services, is crucial to our Earth system and livelihoods. Yet, it is threatened by anthropogenic pressures and climate change. A healthy ocean that supports a sustainable ocean economy requires adequate financing vehicles that generate, invest, align, and account for financial capital to achieve sustained ocean health and governance. However, the current finance g...

Woodhead, A., Graham, N., Robinson, J., Norström, A., Bodin, N., Marie, S., Balett, M., Hicks, C.. 2021. Fishers perceptions of ecosystem service change associated with climate‐disturbed coral reefs. People and Nature. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10220

Understanding ecosystem service change necessitates an understanding of the social and ecological dimensions of ecosystem services and how they contribute to the well-being of different people. These empirical research gaps persist across the tropics and in coastal environments, posing a challenge for small island states that depend on ecosystem services associated with near-shore ecosystems like coral reefs. Perception-based...

Wunderling, N., Donges, J., Kurths, J., Winkelmann, R.. 2021. Interacting tipping elements increase risk of climate domino effects under global warming. Earth System Dynamics. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-601-2021

With progressing global warming, there is an increased risk that one or several tipping elements in the climate system might cross a critical threshold, resulting in severe consequences for the global climate, ecosystems and human societies. While the underlying processes are fairly well-understood, it is unclear how their interactions might impact the overall stability of the Earth's climate system. As of yet, this cannot be ...

Lade, S., Wang-Erlandsson, L., Staal, A., Rocha, J.. 2021. Empirical pressure-response relations can benefit assessment of safe operating spaces. Nature Ecology & Evolution. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01481-5

In a recent study, Hillebrand et al. tested ecosystem pressure-response data from multiple meta-analyses for multimodality and changing variance, both indicators of ‘tipping point’ thresholds that lead to discontinuous responses such as regime shifts. They found that such thresholds were difficult to detect and argued that threshold and safe operating space concepts are therefore not suitable for environmental management and ...