Global food systems and multifunctional land & seascapes

Invisible water security: Moisture recycling and water resilience

Keys, P.W., Porkka, M., Wang-Erlandsson, L., Fetzer, I., et.al.

2019 - Journal / article

Water security is key to planetary resilience for human society to flourish in the face of global change. Atmospheric moisture recycling – the process of water evaporating from land, flowing through the atmosphere, and falling out again as precipitation over land – is the invisible mechanism by which water influences resilience, that is the capacity to persist, adapt, and transform. Through land-use change, mainly by agricultu...

Water is a master variable: Solving for resilience in the modern era

Boltz, F., Poff, N.L., Folke, C., Kete, N. et.al.

2019 - Journal / article

Resilience is increasingly recognized as an imperative for any prospect of sustainable development, as it relates to our ability to sustain human well-being and progress under the planetary and societal changes that we face now and into the future. Yet, we are ill-prepared to meet this challenge. We neither fully understand nor manage consistently for resilience of the human and natural systems that we must steward through ext...

Editorial for Special Issue: “Livelihood and Landscape Change in Africa: Future Trajectories for Improved Well-Being under a Changing Climate”

Shackleton, S., Masterson, V., Hebinck, P., Speranza, C., I., Spear, D., Tengö, M.

2019 - Journal / article

Rural people’s livelihoods are intimately linked to the landscapes in which they live and are particularly vulnerable to changes in these landscapes (Suich et al. 2015 [ 1 ]). At the same time changes in livelihood activities may have negative feedbacks on landscapes and the ecosystem services they provide. In much of Africa, rural landscapes are subject to increasing pressures from environmental and socio-economic change. T...

Challenges and opportunities towards improved application of the planetary boundary for land-system change in life cycle assessment of products

Bjørn, A., Sim, S., King, H., Keys, P., Erlandsson, L-W., Cornell, S.E. et.al.

2019 - Journal / article

Life cycle assessment (LCA) can be used to translate the planetary boundaries (PBs) concept to the scale of decisions related to products. Existing PB-LCA methods convert quantified resource use and emissions to changes in the values of PB control variables. However, the control variable for the Land-system change PB, “area of forested land remaining”, is not suitable for use in LCA, since it is expressed at the beginning of a...