Common property systems,migration, and coastal ecosystems

Common property systems are a critical institution mediating the relationship between population change and environmental outcomes, especially in coastal and marine ecosystems. Evidence from El Salvador; Goa, India; and the Solomon Islands demonstrates how the social structures and institutions stemming from patterns of human migration variably influence environmental out-comes through their effects on common property resource institutions. In each of the case studies, the demographic phenomenon is not population growth or a change in numbers, but an underlying process that affects population size and growth rates: i.e. migration and associated social relations that result from or cause more migration. The following 3 cases studies provide the respective historical and cultural context to show that there is a nonlinear link between population and environment, which when explored reveals the importance of understanding how individuals and communities are embedded in sets of social relations that must be considered when evaluating environmental policies or when determining the causes of environmental degradation.     

Resilience and sustainable development: building adaptive capacity in a world of transformations

Emerging recognition of two fundamental errors underpinning past polices for natural resource issues heralds awareness of the need for a worldwide fundamental change in thinking and in practice of environmental management. The first error has been an implicit assumption that ecosystem responses to human use are linear, predictable and controllable. The second has been an assumption that human and natural systems can be treated independently. However, evidence that has been accumulating in diverse regions all over the world suggests that natural and social systems behave in nonlinear ways, exhibit marked thresholds in their dynamics, and that social-ecological systems act as strongly coupled, complex and evolving integrated systems. This article is a summary of a report prepared on behalf of the Environmental Advisory Council to the Swedish Government, as input to the process of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa in 26 August 4 September 2002. We use the concept of resilience--the capacity to buffer change, learn and develop--as a framework for understanding how to sustain and enhance adaptive capacity in a complex world of rapid transformations. Two useful tools for resilience-building in social-ecological systems are structured scenarios and active adaptive management. These tools require and facilitate a social context with flexible and open institutions and multi-level governance systems that allow for learning and increase adaptive capacity without foreclosing future development options.     

Planetary Stewardship in an Urbanizing World: Beyond City Limits

Cities are rapidly increasing in importance as a major factor shaping the Earth system, and therefore, must take corresponding responsibility. With currently over half the world’s population, cities are supported by resources originating from primarily rural regions often located around the world far distant from the urban loci of use. The sustainability of a city can no longer be considered in isolation from the sustainability of human and natural resources it uses from proximal or distant regions, or the combined resource use and impacts of cities globally. The world’s multiple and complex environmental and social challenges require interconnected solutions and coordinated governance approaches to planetary stewardship. We suggest that a key component of planetary stewardship is a global system of cities that develop sustainable processes and policies in concert with its non-urban areas. The potential for cities to cooperate as a system and with rural connectivity could increase their capacity to effect change and foster stewardship at the planetary scale and also increase their resource security.     

The Arctic in an earth system context: from brake to accelerator of change

Human activities over the past few centuries have profoundly changed the functioning of the earth system as a whole. These changes are particularly evident in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, where environmental change has been pronounced and rapid. Such changes have implications beyond the region, as they can lead to two important feedback processes: the ice-albedo feedback and the terrestrial carbon cycle-climate feedback. These processes play an exceptionally important role in earth system functioning, particularly because they may switch this century from damping the effects of anthropogenic climate change to accelerating them. Rapid environmental change in the high latitudes also has consequences for issues of direct importance to humans, particularly water resources.     

Organizing For Risk Oriented Climate Alteration Research

The ubiquity in effects and complexity of modern environmental issues requires careful consideration of focused research to insure that answers to key policy oriented questions are obtained. Broad-based, unstructured research programs have proven to be inefficient instruments for characterizing risks from environmental stress. Both the expense and the importance of timeliness of information preclude a traditional “bottom-up” approach to research. Instead, a more “top-down” organized approach that links the natural and socioeconomic sciences has advantages to support environmental risk assessment and research prioritization of climate alteration. Early examples of analysis using an integrating framework for risk assessment focus on the need for research on human interactions and the environmental damage function in addition to the basic earth sciences. Nonlinearities in environmental impact of climate change, and uncertainties in the extent of growth of energy efficiencies, are seen to be key unknowns in the risk assessment of climate alternatives. To date, earth science research has not been structured well for environmental risk assessment of the climate change question. The U.S. national research program aimed at risk assessment of climate alteration is examined as an example. The examination suggests that the present conceptual plan falls short of an optimum structure derived from exploitation of an integrating framework, even though it is rich in scientific strength and diversity. To strengthen its public value and accessibility, the research program could account in its planning for prioritized needs defined by an integrating analysis for risk assessment and management.     

Climate Change in the Baltic Sea Region: A Cross-Country Analysis of Institutional Stakeholder Perceptions

Before climate change is considered in long-term coastal management, it is necessary to investigate how institutional stakeholders in coastal management conceptualize climate change, as their awareness will ultimately affect their actions. Using questionnaires in eight Baltic Sea riparian countries, this study examines environmental managers' awareness of climate change. Our results indicate that problems related to global warming are deemed secondary to short-term social and economic issues. Respondents agree that problems caused by global warming will become increasingly important, but pay little attention to adaptation and mitigation strategies. Current environmental problems are expected to continue to be urgent in the future. We conclude that an apparent gap exists between decision making, public concerns, and scientific consensus, resulting in a situation in which the latest evidence rarely influences commonly held opinions.     

Migration,remittances, livelihood trajectories,and social resilience

We argue that all aspects of demographic change, including migration, impact on the social resilience of individuals and communities, as well as on the sustainability of the underlying resource base. Social resilience is the ability to cope with and adapt to environmental and social change mediated through appropriate institutions. We investigate one aspect of the relationship between demographic change, social resilience, and sustainable development in contemporary coastal Vietnam: the effects of migration and remittances on resource-dependent communities in population source areas. We find, using longitudinal data on livelihood sources, that emigration and remittances have offsetting effects on resilience within an evolving social and political context. Emigration is occurring concurrently with, not driving, the expansion of unsustainable coastal aquaculture. Increasing economic inequality also undermines social resilience. At the same time diversification and increasing income levels are beneficial for resilience.     

The sustainable management and protection of forests: analysis of the current position globally

The loss of forest area globally due to change of land use, the importance of forests in the conservation of biodiversity and in carbon and other biogeochemical cycles, together with the threat to forests from pollution and from the impacts of climate change, place forestry policy and practice at the center of global environmental and sustainability strategy. Forests provide important economic, environmental, social, and cultural benefits, so that in forestry, as in other areas of environmental policy and management, there are tensions between economic development and environmental protection. In this article we review the current information on global forest cover and condition, examine the international processes that relate to forest protection and to sustainable forest management, and look at the main forest certification schemes. We consider the link between the international processes and certification schemes and also their combined effectiveness. We conclude that in some regions of the world neither mechanism is achieving forest protection, while in others local or regional implementation is occurring and is having a significant impact. Choice of certification scheme and implementation of management standards are often influenced by a consideration of the associated costs, and there are some major issues over the monitoring of agreed actions and of the criteria and indicators of sustainability. There are currently a number of initiatives seeking to improve the operation of the international forestry framework (e.g., The Montreal Process, the Ministerial Convention of the Protection of Forests in Europe and European Union actions in Europe, the African Timber Organisation and International Tropical Timber Organisation initiative for African tropical forest, and the development of a worldwide voluntary agreement on forestry in the United Nations Forum on Forests). We suggest that there is a need to improve the connections between scientific understanding, policy development, and forestry practice, and also the cooperation between the various international initiatives and processes, so that the international framework is more effective and its influence is extended geographically.     

Earth stewardship: Shaping a sustainable future through interacting policy and norm shifts

Transformation toward a sustainable future requires an earth stewardship approach to shift society from its current goal of increasing material wealth to a vision of sustaining built, natural, human, and social capital—equitably distributed across society, within and among nations. Widespread concern about earth’s current trajectory and support for actions that would foster more sustainable pathways suggests potential social tipping points in public demand for an earth stewardship vision. Here, we draw on empirical studies and theory to show that movement toward a stewardship vision can be facilitated by changes in either policy incentives or social norms. Our novel contribution is to point out that both norms and incentives must change and can do so interactively. This can be facilitated through leverage points and complementarities across policy areas, based on values, system design, and agency. Potential catalysts include novel democratic institutions and engagement of non-governmental actors, such as businesses, civic leaders, and social movements as agents for redistribution of power. Because no single intervention will transform the world, a key challenge is to align actions to be synergistic, persistent, and scalable.     

South-Siberian mountain mires: Perspectives on a potentially vulnerable remote source of biodiversity

Changes in climate, land-use and pollution are having disproportionate impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity of arctic and mountain ecosystems. While these impacts are well-documented for many areas of the Arctic and alpine regions, some isolated and inaccessible mountain areas are poorly studied. Furthermore, even in well-studied regions, assessments of biodiversity and species responses to environmental change are biased towards vascular plants and cryptogams, particularly bryophytes are far less represented. This paper aims to document the environments of the remote and inaccessible Altai-Sayan mountain mires and particularly their bryofloras where threatened species exist and species new to the regional flora are still being found. As these mountain mires are relatively inaccessible, changes in drivers of change and their ecosystem and biodiversity impacts have not been monitored. However, the remoteness of the mires has so far protected them and their species. In this study, we describe the mires, their bryophyte species and the expected impacts of environmental stressors to bring attention to the urgency of documenting change and conserving these pristine ecosystems.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13280-021-01596-w.     

Effects and mechanisms of the combined pollution of lanthanum and acid rain on the root phenotype of soybean seedlings

Rare earth pollution and acid rain pollution are both important environmental issues worldwide. In regions which simultaneously occur, the combined pollution of rare earth and acid rain becomes a new environmental issue, and the relevant research is rarely reported. Accordingly, we investigated the combined effects and mechanisms of lanthanum ion (La³⁺) and acid rain on the root phenotype of soybean seedlings. The combined pollution of low-concentration La³⁺ and acid rain exerted deleterious effects on the phenotype and growth of roots, which were aggravated by the combined pollution of high-concentration La³⁺ and acid rain. The deleterious effects of the combined pollution were stronger than those of single La³⁺ or acid rain pollution. These stronger deleterious effects on the root phenotype and growth of roots were due to the increased disturbance of absorption and utilization of mineral nutrients in roots.     

Impacts of Surface Gold Mining on Land Use Systems in Western Ghana

Land use conflicts are becoming increasingly apparent from local to global scales. Surface gold mining is an extreme source of such a conflict, but mining impacts on local livelihoods often remain unclear. Our goal here was to assess land cover change due to gold surface mining in Western Ghana, one of the world’s leading gold mining regions, and to study how these changes affected land use systems. We used Landsat satellite images from 1986–2002 to map land cover change and field interviews with farmers to understand the livelihood implications of mining-related land cover change. Our results showed that surface mining resulted in deforestation (58%), a substantial loss of farmland (45%) within mining concessions, and widespread spill-over effects as relocated farmers expand farmland into forests. This points to rapidly eroding livelihood foundations, suggesting that the environmental and social costs of Ghana’s gold boom may be much higher than previously thought.     

Chemical speciation and bioavailability of rare earth elements (REEs) in the ecosystem: a review

Rare earths (RE), chemically uniform group of elements due to similar physicochemical behavior, are termed as lanthanides. Natural occurrence depends on the geological circumstances and has been of long interest for geologist as tools for further scientific research into the region of ores, rocks, and oceanic water. The review paper mainly focuses to provide scientific literature about rare earth elements (REEs) with potential environmental and health effects in understanding the research. This is the initial review of RE speciation and bioavailability with current initiative toward development needs and research perceptive. In this paper, we have also discussed mineralogy, extraction, geochemistry, analytical methods of rare earth elements. In this study, REEs with their transformation and vertical distribution in different environments such as fresh and seawater, sediments, soil, weathering, transport, and solubility have been reported with most recent literature along key methods of findings. Speciation and bioavailability have been discussed in detail with special emphasis on soil, plant, and aquatic ecosystems and their impacts on the environment. This review shows that REE gained more importance in last few years due to their detrimental effects on living organisms, so their speciation, bioavailability, and composition are much more important to evaluate their health risks and are discussed thoroughly as well.     

Interactive valuation: the social construction of the value of ecological services

Two different perspectives mark the discourse about the valuation of ecological services: a positivistrealist perspective, emphasising the use of objective scientific procedures to discover true values of ecological services truth is seen as the basis for social change; and a constructivist perspective, emphasising value as emerging from interaction. Value is an agreement and hence effective in social change. This paper examines the implications of the latter for valuation. It first analyses the current dominant practice of environmental valuation in terms of its epistemological assumptions. It then examines how a constructivist perspective colours the expectation of societal effectiveness of environmental valuation. Both themes reflect debated issues in ecological economics (e.g. O'Connor, 1998). 'Double hermeneutics' refers to the capacity to make sense on the basis of the sense-making of others. Environmental valuation in economics attempts a sort of 'triple hermeneutics': economists make sense of how people value the environment, in order to influence the sense-making of policy-makers and the general public. This paper argues that environmental valuation alternatively can be carried out as a constructivist procedure that reduces triple to single hermeneutics. Environmental valuation aims at societal change through internalisation of the costs of ecological services. Knowledge of the 'real' costs is expected to influence behaviour. Our analysis calls for the wider use of an alternative approach 'interactive valuation'. That is, the people whose behaviour incurs environmental costs are assisted to use environmental valuation methods themselves in order experientially to learn to internalise the environmental costs of their activities. It is not the researcher or expert who analyses and learns, so that he/she can transfer the learning to others, but the 'others' themselves who analyse and learn. In practice, this means that scientific valuators are not limited to discovering 'real', objective values, but also engage in developing tools for discovery learning by people themselves. The paper elaborates concrete experiences in the analysis and development of farming systems.     

Multi-decadal Changes in Tundra Environments and Ecosystems: The International Polar Year-Back to the Future Project (IPY-BTF)

Polar and alpine environments are changing rapidly due to increases in temperature, which are amplified in the Arctic, as well as changes in many local factors. The impacts on ecosystems and their function have potential consequences for local residents and the global community. Tundra areas are vast and diverse, and the knowledge of geographical variation in environmental and ecosystem change is limited to relatively few locations, or to remote sensing approaches that are limited mostly to the past few decades. The International Polar Year, IPY, provided a context, stimulus and timely opportunities for re-visiting old research sites and data sets to collate data on past changes, to pass knowledge from old to new generations of researchers and to document environmental characteristics of sites to facilitate detection and attribution of future changes. Consequently, the project “Retrospective and Prospective Vegetation Change in the Polar Regions: Back to the Future,” BTF, was proposed and endorsed as an IPY activity (project #512). With national funding support, teams of researchers re-visited former sites and data sets throughout the Arctic and some alpine regions. These efforts have amounted to a gamut of “BTF” studies that are collectively geographically expansive and disciplinary diverse. A selection of these studies are introduced and presented in the current issue together with a brief synthesis of their findings.     

Global climate change: modelling the potential responses of agro-ecosystems with special reference to crop protection

Pests and diseases reduce yields to lower levels than those that could have been potentially obtained, given the restrictions of climate, nutrients and crop varieties. Climatic change not only affects the potential yield levels, but it may also modify the effects of pests and diseases. Modelling can serve as a tool to integrate these processes, ranging from simple removal of plant material to subtle toxic and hormonal effects. Modelling can help to quantify different modes of action such as on photosynthesis, root activity, assimilate partitioning, morphology, and their interactions. As to climatic change, little is known about pests, diseases and weeds. If climatic change causes a gradual shift of agricultural regions, crops and their associated pests, diseases and weeds will migrate together, though at different rates maybe. To a limited extent, new outbreaks can be foreseen given the changed environmental conditions. Methodology is available, and some interesting results are on record. Specific changes such as an increase in the CO(2) content in the air and in UV radiation are not likely to have large effects. Increasing atmospheric CO(2) reduces crop nitrogen content, which may retard many pests and diseases, and change the composition of the weed flora which accompanies crops. Some cautionary remarks are made to avoid jumping to conclusions.     

Questioning complacency: climate change impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation in Norway

Most European assessments of climate change impacts have been carried out on sectors and ecosystems, providing a narrow understanding of what climate change really means for society. Furthermore, the main focus has been on technological adaptations, with less attention paid to the process of climate change adaptation. In this article, we present and analyze findings from recent studies on climate change impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation in Norway, with the aim of identifying the wider social impacts of climate change. Three main lessons can be drawn. First, the potential thresholds and indirect effects may be more important than the direct, sectoral effects. Second, highly sensitive sectors, regions, and communities combine with differential social vulnerability to create both winners and losers. Third, high national levels of adaptive capacity mask the barriers and constraints to adaptation, particularly among those who are most vulnerable to climate change. Based on these results, we question complacency in Norway and other European countries regarding climate change impacts and adaptation. We argue that greater attention needs to be placed on the social context of climate change impacts and on the processes shaping vulnerability and adaptation.     

The role the Great Barrier Reef plays in resident wellbeing and implications for its management

Improvements in human wellbeing are dependent on improving ecosystems. Such considerations are particularly pertinent for regions of high ecological, but also social and cultural importance that are facing rapid change. One such region is the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Although the GBR has world heritage status for its ‘outstanding universal value’, little is known about resident perceptions of its values. We surveyed 1545 residents, finding that absence of visible rubbish; healthy reef fish, coral cover, and mangroves; and iconic marine species, are considered to be more important to quality of life than the jobs and incomes associated with industry (most respondents were dissatisfied with the benefits they received from industry). Highly educated females placed more importance on environmental non-use values than other respondents; less educated males and those employed in mining found non-market use-values relatively more important. Environmental non-use values emerged as the most important management priority for all.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-014-0554-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Environmental justice and REDD+ safeguards in Laos: Lessons from an authoritarian political regime

Balancing agendas for climate mitigation and environmental justice continues to be one of the key challenges in climate change governance mechanisms, such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+). In this paper we apply the three-dimensional environmental justice framework as a lens to examine the REDD+ process in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Laos) and the REDD+ social safeguards. We focus particularly on challenges to justice faced by marginalized communities living in forest frontier areas under an authoritarian regime. Drawing on policy analysis and open-ended interviews across different policy levels, we explore procedural, distributional, and recognitional justice across the REDD+ policy levels in Laos. We find that REDD+ social safeguards have been applied by both donors and state actors in ways that facilitate external control. We underscore how authoritarian regime control over civil society and ethnic minority groups thwarts justice. We also highlight how this political culture and lack of inclusiveness are used by donors and project managers to implement their projects with little political debate. Further obstacles to justice relate to limitations inherent in the REDD+ instrument, including tight schedules for dealing with highly sensitive socio-political issues under social safeguards. These findings echo other research but go further in questioning the adequacy of safeguards to promote justice under a nationally driven REDD+. We highlight the importance of recognition and political context, including aspects such as power relations, self-determination and self-governance of traditional or customary structures, in shaping justice outcomes.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13280-021-01618-7.     

Fisheries regulatory regimes and resilience to climate change

Climate change is already producing ecological, social, and economic impacts on fisheries, and these effects are expected to increase in frequency and magnitude in the future. Fisheries governance and regulations can alter socio-ecological resilience to climate change impacts via harvest control rules and incentives driving fisher behavior, yet there are no syntheses or conceptual frameworks for examining how institutions and their regulatory approaches can alter fisheries resilience to climate change. We identify nine key climate resilience criteria for fisheries socio-ecological systems (SES), defining resilience as the ability of the coupled system of interacting social and ecological components (i.e., the SES) to absorb change while avoiding transformation into a different undesirable state. We then evaluate the capacity of four fisheries regulatory systems that vary in their degree of property rights, including open access, limited entry, and two types of rights-based management, to increase or inhibit resilience. Our exploratory assessment of evidence in the literature suggests that these regulatory regimes vary widely in their ability to promote resilient fisheries, with rights-based approaches appearing to offer more resilience benefits in many cases, but detailed characteristics of the regulatory instruments are fundamental.