Publications

Bennett, E.M., Biggs, R., Peterson, G.D., Gordon, L.J. 2021. Patchwork Earth: navigating pathways to just, thriving, and sustainable futures. One Earth, Vol. 4, Issue 2, pp 172-176, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.01.004

Achieng, T., Maciejewski, K., Dyer, M. and Biggs, R., 2020. Using a Social-ecological Regime Shift Approach to Understand the Transition from Livestock to Game Farming in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Land, 9(4), p.97.

This study explored the shift in land use from livestock farming to game farming in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, from a social-ecological regime shift perspective. A regime shift can be defined as a large, persistent change in the structure and function of the intertwined social and ecological components of a landscape. This research focused on the Amakhala game reserve as a case study to understand how the shift affected t...

Metelerkamp, L., Biggs, R. and Drimie, S., 2020. Learning for transitions: a niche perspective. Ecology and Society, 25(1).

Roughly eight hundred million youth are projected to enter the African job market by 2050. This presents both an opportunity and a challenge for urgently needed sustainability transitions on the continent, because with appropriate training and skills this youth bulge could be instrumental in driving systemic change. By training the youth in new practices and approaches, they could be central to creating new systems and African...

Lindow, M., Preiser, R. and Biggs, R., 2020. Exploring resilience capacities with food innovators: a narrative approach. Global Sustainability, 3.

We interviewed grassroots food innovators in South Africa to explore the diverse ways in which their narratives expressed different capacities for resilience, such as dealing with surprise and shaping desirable change. We drew on key resilience themes of rootedness, resourcefulness and resistance (the 3Rs) as lenses through which to view their personal stories and efforts to build resilience and reshape the future. We used na...

van der Merwe, S.E., Biggs, R. and Preiser, R., 2020. Sensemaking as an approach for resilience assessment in an Essential Service Organization. Environment Systems and Decisions, 40(1), pp.84-106.

Essential service organizations are interested in approaches to assess and build infrastructure resilience to ensure an uninterrupted supply of services, such as electricity or water. This study applied a sensemaking approach to assess the nature of social resilience in a national essential service organization in South Africa. It used the SenseMaker tool to collect and surface patterns from a set of micro-narratives collected...

Clements, H.S., Biggs, R., Cumming, G.S. 2020. Cross-scale and social-ecological changes constitute main threats to private land conservation in South Africa. Journal of Environmental Management Volume 274, 15 November 2020, 111235, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.111235

Conserving biodiversity in the long term will depend in part on the capacity of Protected Areas (PAs) to cope with cross-scale, social-ecological disturbances and changes, which are becoming more frequent in a highly connected world. Direct threats to biodiversity within PAs and their interactions with broader-scale threats are both likely to vary with PA spatial and management characteristics (e.g., location, dependence on ec...

Pereira, L., Drimie, S., Maciejewski, K., Bon Tonissen, P., Biggs. R. 2020. Food System Transformation: Integrating a Political–Economy and Social–Ecological Approach to Regime Shifts. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2020, 17(4), 1313; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17041313

Sustainably achieving the goal of global food security is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. The current food system is failing to meet the needs of people, and at the same time, is having far-reaching impacts on the environment and undermining human well-being in other important ways. It is increasingly apparent that a deep transformation in the way we produce and consume food is needed in order to ensure a m...

Selomane, O., Reyers, B., Biggs, R., Hamann, M. 2019. Harnessing Insights from Social-Ecological Systems Research for Monitoring Sustainable Development. Sustainability 2019, 11(4), 1190; doi:10.3390/su11041190

The United Nations’ Agenda 2030 marks significant progress towards sustainable development by making explicit the intention to integrate previously separate social, economic and environmental agendas. Despite this intention, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which were adopted to implement the agenda, are fragmented in their formulation and largely sectoral. We contend that while the design of the SDG monitoring is base...

Raudsepp‐Hearne, C., Peterson, G. D., Bennett, E. M., Biggs, R., Norström, A. V.. et.al. 2019. Seeds of good anthropocenes: developing sustainability scenarios for Northern Europe. Sustain Sci (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-00714-8

Scenario development helps people think about a broad variety of possible futures; however, the global environmental change community has thus far developed few positive scenarios for the future of the planet and humanity. Those that have been developed tend to focus on the role of a few common, large-scale external drivers, such as technology or environmental policy, even though pathways of positive change are often driven by...

Selomane, O., B. Reyers, R. Biggs, M. Hamann. 2019. Harnessing Insights from Social-Ecological Systems Research for Monitoring Sustainable Development. Sustainability 11(4):1190.

The United Nations’ Agenda 2030 marks significant progress towards sustainable development by making explicit the intention to integrate previously separate social, economic and environmental agendas. Despite this intention, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which were adopted to implement the agenda, are fragmented in their formulation and largely sectoral. We contend that while the design of the SDG monitoring is base...