Publications

Carolin Seiferth, Maria Tengoe, Erik Andersson. 2024. Designing for collective action: a knowledge co-production process to address water governance challenges on the island of Öland, Sweden. Sustainability Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-024-01531-4

Enabling diverse actors to address interlinked sustainability issues is important and challenging. This paper focuses on how to design a dialogue-based knowledge co-production process to nurture collective action. Using the conceptualization of systems, target, and operational knowledge as the guiding framework, we designed and combined different complementary activities to invite actors to look at a wicked problem through mul...

Kejing Zhou, Fanhua Kong, Haiwei Yin, Georgia Destouni, Michael E. Meadows, Erik Andersson, Liding Chen, Bin Chen, Zhenya Li, Jie Su. 2024. Urban flood risk management needs nature-based solutions: a coupled social-ecological system perspective. npj Urban Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-024-00162-z

A growing number of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) has been advocated for urban flood risk management (FRM). However, whether NbS for FRM (NbS-FRM) achieves both social and ecological co-benefits remains largely unknown. We here propose and use a conceptual framework with a coupled social-ecological perspective to explore and identify such “win-win” potential in NbS-FRM. Through a scoping-review we find that ecological FRM measu...

Steward T. A. Pickett, Niki Frantzeskaki, Erik Andersson, Aliyu Salisu Barau, Daniel L. Childers, Fushcia-Ann Hoover, Ariel E. Lugo, Timon McPhearson, Harini Nagendra, Selina Schepers, Ayyoob Sharifi. 2024. Shifting forward: Urban ecology in perspective . Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-024-02007-6

The world has become urban; cities increasingly shape our worldviews, relation to other species, and the large-scale, long-term decisions we make. Cities are nature, but they need to align better with other ecosystems to avoid accelerating climate change and loss of biodiversity. We need a science to guide urban development across the diverse realities of global cities. This need can be met, in part, by shifts in urban ecol...

CC Chang, BB Lin, XQ Feng, Erik Andersson, J Gardner, T Astell-Burt. 2024. A lower connection to nature is related to lower mental health benefits from nature contact. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-56968-5

Increasing evidence demonstrates the psychological benefits of nature contact. However, the evidence is often established at the population level, and the individual differences in the psychological benefits gained from nature are considered negligible variations. In this study, we performed a cross-sectional online survey in Brisbane and Sydney, Australia, from April 15th and May 15th, 2021 around one year after the first cov...

Matías Barceló, Maria Tengö, Javier A. Simonetti, Stefan Gelcich. 2024. Exploring links between local knowledge, values and livelihoods in land-sea interface: insights on emerging tradeoffs and change in Southern Chile. Ecosystems and People. https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2329562

Local knowledge and values of coastal communities offer insights into the intricate human-nature relationships in the land-sea interface. Considering a diversity of values unveils how people perceive nature, encompassing both tangible and intangible dimensions, and this understanding is part of how they navigate dynamic environmental challenges by embracing livelihood diversification spanning land-sea activities. Better unders...

Tobian, A., Gerten, D., Fetzer, I., Schaphoff, S., Andersen, L.S., Cornell, S., Rockström, J.. 2024. Climate change critically affects the status of the land-system change planetary boundary. Environmental Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad40c2

The planetary boundaries framework defines a safe operating space for humanity. To date, these boundaries have mostly been investigated separately, and it is unclear whether breaching one boundary can lead to the transgression of another. By employing a dynamic global vegetation model, we systematically simulate the strength and direction of the effects of different transgression levels of the climate change boundary (using cl...

Chuixiang Yi, Vasilis Dakos, Paul D L Ritchie, Jana Sillmann, Juan C Rocha, Manjana Milkoreit, Courtney Quinn. 2024. Earth system resilience and tipping behavior. Environmental Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad5741

Anthropogenic climate change, marked by unprecedented extremes, is an immediate concern. The Earth's limited ability to adapt to abrupt changes within our societal timeframe has raised global alarm. Resilience, the capacity to withstand and recover from disturbances, diminishes as disturbances intensify. For avoiding potential catastrophic changes, it is crucial to identify tipping points, where a change in part of a system be...

Rika Preiser, Tanja Hichert, Reinette Biggs, Julia van Velden, Nyasha Magadzire, Garry Peterson, Laura Pereira, Keziah Mayer, Karina Benessaiah. 2024. Transformative foresight for diverse futures: the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes initiative. Development Policy Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/dpr.12791

Foresight methods are increasingly recognized as essential for decision-making in complex environments, particularly within development and research settings. As foresight methods continue to gain prominence for decision-making, their application in these settings grows. Funders and policy-makers can benefit from the experience of transformative foresight practitioners and researchers who are skilled in designing novel ways to...

Francesco Fuso Nerini, Mariana Mazzucato, Johan Rockström, Harro van Asselt, Jim W. Hall, Stelvia Matos, Åsa Persson, Benjamin Sovacool, Ricardo Vinuesa, Jeffrey Sachs. 2024. Extending the Sustainable Development Goals to 2050 — a road map. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01754-6

In this comment in Nature , the authors call on UN member states, in the run-up to the UN Summit of the Future in September, to adapt and extend the SDG framework to 2050. This will entail setting interim targets for 2030 and 2040 and final targets for 2050 that align with science and maintain high, yet achievable, national and global ambitions. To support those discussions, here they highlight six priorities that they cons...

Christine Kaufhold, Matteo Willeit, Stefanie Talento, Andrey Ganopolski, Johan Rockström. 2024. Data set for the study "Uncertainties in climate sensitivity and future carbon emissions permit for a hothouse climate ahead". Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11187708

In light of uncertainties regarding climate sensitivity and future greenhouse gas emissions, we explore the plausibility of sustained global warming over the next millennium higher than what is usually expected. Using an Earth system model with interactive CO2 and CH4, we performed simulations for the next millennium under extended SSP1-2.6, SSP4-3.4 and SSP2-4.5 scenarios. These scenarios are associated with peak global warmi...