Publications

Jean Baptiste Jouffray, John Virdin. 2024. The Blue Acceleration in Human Use of the Ocean. Elgar Encyclopedia of Water Policy, Economics and Management. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781802202946.00066

Therese Lindahl, John M. Anderies, Anne-Sophie Crépin, Krisztina Jónás, Caroline Schill, Juan Camilo Cárdenas, Carl Folke, Gert Jan Hofstede, Marco A. Janssen, Jean-Denis Mathias, Stephen Polasky. 2024. Titanic lessons for Spaceship Earth to account for human behavior in institutional design. npj Climate Action. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-024-00135-z

Combating environmental degradation requires global cooperation. We here argue that institutional designs for such efforts need to account for human behavior. The voyage of the Titanic serves as an analogous case to learn from, and we use behavioral insights to identify critical aspects of human behavior that serve as barriers or opportunities for addressing the challenges we face. We identify a set of public goods that may he...

Anja Klein, Krystin Unverzagt, Rossella Alba, Jonathan F. Donges, Tilman Hertz, Tobias Krueger, Emilie Lindkvist, Romina Martin, Jörg Niewöhner, Hannah Prawitz, Maja Schlüter, Luana Schwarz, Nanda Wijermans. 2024. From situated knowledges to situated modelling: a relational framework for simulation modelling. Ecosystems and People. https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2361706

In this paper we extend the use of a relational approach to simulation modelling, a widely used knowledge practice in sustainability science. Among modellers, there is awareness that model results can only be interpreted in view of the assumptions that inform model construction and analysis, but less systematic questioning of those assumptions. Moreover, current methodological discussions tend to focus on integrating social an...

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...

José Posada-Marín, Juan Salazar, Maria Cristina Rulli, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Fernando Jaramillo. 2024. Upwind moisture supply increases risk to water security. Nature Water. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-024-00291-w

Transboundary assessments of water security typically adopt an ‘upstream’ perspective, focusing on hazards and vulnerabilities occurring within a given hydrological basin. However, as the moisture that provides precipitation in the hydrological basin probably originates ‘upwind’, hazards and vulnerabilities potentially altering the moisture supply can be overlooked. Here we perform a global assessment of risk to water security...

Patrick W. Keys, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Michele-Lee Moore, Agnes Pranindita, Fabian Stenzel, Olli Varis, Rekha Warrier, R. Bin Wong, Paolo D'Odorico, Carl Folke. 2024. The dry sky: future scenarios for humanity's modification of the atmospheric water cycle. Global Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.9

Human societies are changing where and how water flows through the atmosphere. However, these changes in the atmospheric water cycle are not being managed, nor is there any real sense of where these changes might be headed in the future. Thus, we develop a new economic theory of atmospheric water management, and explore this theory using creative story-based scenarios. These scenarios reveal surprising possibilities for the fu...

Woi Sok Oh, Wolfram Barfuss, Jonathan Donges, Simon Levin, Daniel Rubenstein. 2024. Independent or interdependent? Migration timing dynamics and their association with external stressors. Research Square. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-4752717/v1

Human migration is one of the defining topics of our time, but the dynamics of when and how often migration events occur are poorly understood. Often, a single, context-unaware model is assumed without empirical evidence. Spatiotemporal dependencies and heterogeneities cannot be explained by such a viewpoint. These gaps produce misunderstanding of migration, leading to imprecise predictions and ineffective responses. To addres...

Anna Lena, Verena Sandner Le Gall, Jürgen Straub, Tim Niclas Höffler, Judith Bopp, Inken Carstensen-Egwuom, Libertad Chavez-Rodriguez, Cordula Dittmer, Florian Dünckmann, Kathrin Eitel, Christian Elster, Zine-Eddine Hathat, Jonas Hein, Silja Klepp, Daniel F. Lorenz, Romina Martin, Laura Otto, Martin Sarnow, Martin Voss, Rainer Wehrhahn, Sören Weißermel, Cosima Werner. 2024. Give qualitative research the recognition it deserves. Journal of Environmental Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102320

Ratcliffe et al. (2024, JEP 93, Art. 102199) raise concern about the exclusion of purely qualitative research from JEP, as proposed by Schultz and McCunn's editorial stance published in 2022. We support Ratcliffe et al.’s call for equal recognition of qualitative work alongside quantitative work in environmental psychology. Our article aims to contribute to this debate by presenting five additional points that emphasise the im...

Maja Schlüter, Tilman Hertz, Anja Klein, Nanda Wijermans. 2024. Disentangling the entangled in productive ways: modelling SES from a process-relational perspective. SocArXiv Papers. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/hb9ry

Process-relational perspectives have been proposed as new ways of conceptualising, analysing and engaging with social-ecological systems (SES) that are capable of dealing with intertwinedness and complexity. The application of PR perspectives in SES research, however, remains challenging and mostly conceptual. We explore the possibilities and limitations of combining process-relational thought with agent-based modelling as a m...

Rodrigo Martinez Peña, Kirill Orach, Pero Olsson, Maja Schlüter. 2024. Explaining change and stability in social-ecological transformations from a morphogenetic approach. OSF. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/trfxu

Studies on social-ecological transformations have explained change and no-change at systemic level through and overlooked the contribution of agents that keep the system from changing and how their actions respond to their position, which constitutes a critical analytical gap due to the limited success of societies at transforming social-ecological systems. However, when it comes to analysing underlying dynamics, frameworks fo...