Publications

Anne Charlotte Bunge, Michael Clark, Line J. Gordon. 2025. “Fika in the Anthropocene”: leveraging food systems transformations through food cultures. Sustainability Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-025-01680-0

The role of food cultures in food systems transformations is gaining prominence in scholarly discourse. However, several food cultures rely on products with substantial environmental and socio-economic impacts and risks, raising questions about their potential role in transformation processes toward more sustainable food systems. One such example constitutes the Swedish Fika , the daily practice of having coffee and pastries...

Daniel Itzamna Avila-Ortega, Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Sarah Cornell, Daniel Moran, Gustav Engstrom. 2025. Accounting for biodiversity impacts of consumption and production: current gaps and frontiers. EcoEvoRxiv. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2J33R

The way humans produce and consume material goods continues to be a primary driving force on biodiversity decline. Despite significant advances in quantifying biodiversity footprints, important differences exist across types of approaches and indicators. These include, what aspects of biodiversity are measured and how they are reported. In this scoping review, we provide an overview of biodiversity impact metrics developed to ...

Silvana Juri, Andrea Marais-Potgieter, Therezah Achieng, Ignacio Gianelli, Mulako Kabisa, Batlhalifi Nkgothoe, Joyce Ojino, Sènankpon Tcheton, Liam Carpenter-Urquhart, Laura M Pereira. 2025. Transforming towards what? A review of futures-thinking applied in the quest for navigating sustainability transformations. Environmental Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/adcbc4

There is a growing call for transformations to remain within safe and just Earth system boundaries. Coherent visions of desired futures can help motivate and orient such transformations towards Sustainability, but the nature of these transformed futures is not well understood. This gap has inspired a growing body of research on 'preferable' or 'desirable' futures, which can help to unpack what endpoints such transformations to...

E. Keith Smith, Marc Wiedermann, Jonathan F. Donges, Jobst Heitzig, Ricarda Winkelmann. 2025. A global threshold model of enabling conditions for social tipping in pro-environmental behaviours – the role of sea level rise anticipation and climate change concern. Earth System Dynamics. https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-16-545-2025

Effective climate change mitigation necessitates swift societal transformations. Positive social tipping processes, where small triggers initiate qualitative systemic shifts, are potential key mechanisms towards instigating the desired emissions mitigation. A necessary foundation for societal tipping processes is the creation of enabling conditions. Here, we assess future sea level rise estimates and social survey data within ...

Maja Schlüter, Tilman Hertz, Anja Klein, Nanda Wijermans. 2025. Disentangling the entangled in productive ways: modelling social–ecological systems from a process-relational perspective. Sustainability Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-025-01648-0

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 largely conceptual. We explore the possibilities of combining process-relational thought with agent-based modelling as a methodology for ...

Maja Schlüter, Nanda Wijermans, Blanca González-Mon, Emilie Lindkvist, Kirill Orach, Hannah Prawitz, Romina Martin, Rodrigo Martínez-Peña, Kara E. Pellowe, Udita Sanga. 2025. Navigating the space between empirics and theory – Empirically stylized modelling for theorising social-ecological phenomena. Environmental Modelling & Software. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106444

The potential of agent-based modelling (ABM) for developing theory has been recognized, yet methodologies are lacking. Building theories of social-ecological systems is challenging because of complex causality, context-dependence, and social-ecological interdependencies. We propose an approach that addresses these challenges through combining case-based empirical research with ABM in a collaborative modelling process. In-depth...

Amin Rastandeh, Sara Borgström, Erik Andersson, Kristin Malmcrona Friberg, Anja Moum Rieser. 2025. Understanding the recreation-conservation nexus in peri-urban landscapes: challenges, opportunities, and knowledge gaps. Nature-Based Solutions. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nbsj.2025.100232

Peri-urban landscapes are the meeting point of a wide range of human activities, power dynamics, and social-ecological processes in the Anthropocene. Multiple interests, as well as differences in governance regimes and decision-making processes increase the complexity of peri‑urban landscapes. With this complexity as a background, we place our focus on the interactions between two highly desirable human activities in peri‑urba...

Vitor Hirata Sanches, Rubi Quiñones, Jonathan Vivas, Joseph H. A. Guillaume, Takuya Iwanaga, Jan Kwakkel, Allyson E. Quinlan, Juan Rocha, Anne-Sophie Crépin, Vasilis Dakos, Jonathan Donges, Steven J. Lade. 2025. Integrating Diversity and Agency into Social-Ecological Resilience Metrics. OSF. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/2g3jp_v1

Resilience is an increasingly popular concept in research and practice, but quantitative resilience analyses are often disconnected from resilience theory. For example, previous studies argue that diversity, a key attribute for building resilience, and agency, essential for understanding local adaptation and transformation, are critical to understanding resilience. Despite significant progress in integrating them into qualitat...

Patrik Thollander, Mariana Andrei, Noor Jalo, Patrik Rohdin, Jenny Palm, Anna Sannö, Johan Colding, Stephan Barthel, Gazi Salah Uddin, Bruna Maria Xavier. 2025. Advances in the social construction of energy management and energy efficiency in industry. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-59284-2

Energy efficiency is essential for climate change mitigation. Energy management, shaped by both technical artefacts and social constructions, can overcome barriers and achieve greater emission reductions than technology-focused approaches alone. Nine social constructions of energy management emphasize the need for a broader view that includes operations, processes, and knowledge creation and diffusion. By adopting these strate...

Michael Wolosin, Johan Rockström, Christiana Figueres, M. Sanjayan, Tim Beringer, Bronson Griscom, David Hole. 2025. Accelerated nature-based mitigation can re-open the window to 1.5°C. Research Square. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6164097/v1

Cutting carbon emissions in half every decade through 2050 has become a benchmark for global, national and corporate target-setting that delivers the Paris goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. However, with a rapidly shrinking remaining carbon budget, here we show that halving fossil emissions every decade alongside scaling negative emissions technologies (NETs) to balance remaining fossil CO2 ...