From global sustainability research matrix to typology: a tool to analyze coastal and marine social-ecological systems

An attempt is made to develop a coastal and marine social-ecological typology. An explicitly regional focus is taken to explore how a regionally grounded, multi-scale analysis may support multi-level local to global sustainability efforts. A case study from Indonesia exemplifies this approach. Social-ecological sustainability problems, caused by drivers at different earth system levels, lead the way into the proposed typology. A social-ecological system consists of a biogeophysical territory, an identified issue and the associated social agents. It can extend across disciplines as well as across spatial and institutional levels and scales. A global sustainability research matrix, which is based on ecozones and problem types, can thus be constructed and serves as a research-driven multi-level typology. The regional application links directly to stakeholder agendas at the problem level. It is argued that some of the central functions of coastal and marine social-ecological systems are resource provision, livelihood access, and storm and erosion protection, which need special attention in a coastal and marine social-ecological typology, as exemplified in the Indonesian case study used. This contribution is an exploratory research to propose steps toward such a typology. It is extended to the social-ecological subsystems—natural, social, governance—and applied to additional cases. A two-dimensional, hierarchical typology is proposed as a tool to analyze, compare and classify coastal and marine systems. A policy typology is added to assess changes. A governance baseline is assumed to foster normative sustainability goals. A subsystems appraisal typology is meant to evaluate action results. Finally, unresolved methodological questions are discussed.     

Coastal management, climate change adaptation and sustainability in small coastal communities: leatherback turtles and beach loss

Beaches are frequently subjected to erosion and accretion that are influenced by coastal development interventions and natural variations due to storms and changes in river flow. Climate change may also exacerbate beach erosion and accretion. Natural scientists are concerned with the sustainability of species dependent on the beach ecosystem. Policymakers are pre-occupied with the economic sustainability of coastal communities should species decline and prolonged beach loss occur. The aim of this paper is to explore the linkage between science and policy by reporting the findings of a study of coastal change impacts on leatherback turtle nesting and analysing the socio-economic and adaptation implications of these changes for coastal communities. Grande Riviere, Trinidad, was used as a case study. Primary fieldwork investigated unsustainable coastal management practices. A questionnaire was administered to examine livelihoods, including ecotourism based on leatherback turtle nesting, and knowledge and awareness of climate change. One key finding of the study was that the community’s livelihoods were natural resources dependent, and that natural beach dynamics and unsustainable coastal management practices posed major threats to natural resource and economic sustainability. Another key finding was that, despite these impacts, community knowledge and awareness of climate change in general was low, and there was a perception of state responsibility for climate change adaptation. The research findings have global applicability for coastal communities at risk of exposure and that are highly vulnerable to natural resources damage arising from anthropogenic stress and potential climate change. These communities require policy reforms to strengthen current coastal management practices and adaptation responses aimed at ensuring long-term sustainability.     

Assessing coastal vulnerability to climate change: comparing segmentation at global and regional scales

Recent concerns about potential climate-change effects on coastal systems require the application of vulnerability assessment tools in order to define suitable adaptation strategies and improve coastal zone management effectiveness. In fact, while various research efforts were devoted to evaluate coastal vulnerability to climate change on a national to global level, fewer applications were carried out so far to develop more comprehensive and site-specific vulnerability assessments suitable to plan possible adaptation measures at the regional scale. In this respect, specific indicators are needed to address climate-change-related issues for coastal zones and to identify vulnerable areas at the regional level. Two sets of coastal vulnerability indicators were selected, one for regional and one for global studies, respectively, concerning the same features of coastal systems, including topography and slope, geomorphological characteristics, presence and distribution of wetlands and vegetation cover, density of coastal population and number of coastal inhabitants. The proposed set of indicators for the regional scale was chosen taking into account the availability of environmental and territorial data for the whole coastal area of the Veneto region and was based on site-specific datasets characterized by a spatial resolution appropriate for a regional analysis. Moreover, a GIS-based segmentation procedure was applied to divide the coastline into linear segments, homogeneous in terms of vulnerability to climate change and sea-level rise at the regional scale. This approach allowed to divide the Veneto shoreline into 140 segments with an average length of about 1 km, while the global scale approach identified four coastal segments with an average length of about 66 km. The performed comparison indicated how the more detailed approach adopted at the regional scale is essential to understand and manage the complexities of the specific study area. In fact, the 25-m DEM employed at the regional scale provided a more accurate differentiation of the coastal area's elevation and thus of coastal susceptibility to the inundation risks, compared to the 1-km DEM used at the global level. Moreover, at the regional level the use of a 1:20,000 geomorphological map allowed to differentiate the unique landform class detected at the global level (e.g., fluvial plain) in a variety of more detailed coastal typologies (e.g., open coast eroding sandy shores backed by bedrock) characterized by a different sensitivity to climate change and sea-level rise. Accordingly, the information provided by regional indicators can support decision-makers in improving the management of coastal resources by considering the potential impacts of climate change and in the definition of appropriate actions to reduce inundation risks, to avoid the potential loss of valuable wetlands and vegetation and to plan the nourishment of sandy beaches subject to erosion processes.     

Understanding and communicating sustainability: global versus regional perspectives

While there is no single definition of sustainability, most would agree that it implies that a system is to be maintained at a certain level, held within certain limits. Sustainability denies run-away growth, but it also precludes any substantial set backs or cuts. This sustainability path is hard to reconcile with the renewal cycle that can be observed in most living systems developing according to their natural intrinsic mechanisms. Besides, since different human dominated systems are in significantly different states and stages of development, sustaining those states assumes maintaining social disparities in perpetuity. This creates a challenge in communicating the ideas of sustainability in different regions. Systems are parts of hierarchies where systems of higher levels are made of subsystems from lower levels. Renewal in components is an important factor of adaptation and evolution. But then sustainability of a system borrows from sustainability of a supra-system and rests upon lack of sustainability in subsystems. Therefore by sustaining certain systems beyond their renewal cycle, we decrease the sustainability of larger, higher level systems. The only way to resolve this contradiction is to agree that the biosphere as a whole with humans as one of its components is the only system which sustainability we are to seek. Readers should send their comments on this paper to BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue.     

Macroethical systems and sustainability science

The Industrial Revolution and associated economic, demographic, technological and cultural changes have resulted in what many scientists are beginning to refer to as “the Anthropocene” – roughly translated, the Age of Humans. One response to this development is the nascent field of “sustainability science,” a multidisciplinary and systemic attempt to perceive and understand this new era. In doing so, however, methodologies and intellectual frameworks must be developed which extend beyond existing, dominantly reductionist, approaches, and are intended to address emergent characteristics of complex systems that integrate cultural and social systems, the engineered and built environment and natural systems. In the area of ethics, this requires developing a capability for “macroethics,” or ethical systems and processes capable of addressing issues arising from the emergent behavior of the complicated systems that characterize the Anthropocene.     

Closing remarks: novel approaches to complex societal change and sustainability

This paper summarizes some personal impressions of the 7th conference of the International Complex Systems Society, co-organized with “Future Earth”, held in Stockholm on August 24–26, 2017. The main point is that it is urgent and important to consider the sustainability conundrum as long-term, society-driven one, and to place societal dynamics at the core of how we, as a global society, came to this point, how ongoing dynamics are driving us towards a tipping point, and which role the Information and Communication Technology revolution plays in that process. A much wider involvement of the social sciences is essential. This also requires major changes in our thinking about sustainability—we need to develop an approach in which change is the natural state of affairs and societies attempt to impose stability on the dynamics involved. We need to focus on learning from the past, about the present, but above all for the future. And we need to shift from an entity-focused approach to a relational one, which pays more attention to contexts and networks. Other issues raised by such a shift in our thinking are about the role of science, the adoption of complex systems approaches and a few others that the paper points to.     

Learning and local government in coastal South Australia: towards a community of practice framework for adapting to global change

Social learning can be a vital tool in assisting communities to adapt to change. Local governments can be a conduit between the communities they serve and the policy that they are trying to implement. Social learning in this context can be an iterative, often organic process. Based on a case study of coastal planning in South Australia, Australia, this paper presents the results of a qualitative mixed-method approach that documents the aspects of social learning within coastal management and evaluates the various lessons learned by local governments in South Australia. The role of social learning and adaptive governance is discussed. The paper concludes that by deliberatively incorporating the notion of communities of practice into learning frameworks, local governments can more effectively manage their coastal zones in response to global change.     

Learning for change: an educational contribution to sustainability science

Transition to sustainability is a search for ways to improve the social capacity to guide interactions between nature and society toward a more sustainable future and, thus, a process of social learning in its broadest sense. Accordingly, it is not only learning that is at issue but education and educational science, of which the latter is about exploring the preconditions of and opportunities for learning and education—whether individual or social, in formal or informal settings. Analyzing how educational science deals with the challenge of sustainability leads to two complementary approaches: the ‘outside-in’ approach sees the idea of sustainability influencing educational practice and the way the relationship of learning and teaching is reviewed, theoretically as well as within the social context. In an ‘inside-out’ approach, an overview is given of how educational science can contribute to the field of sustainability science. An examination of the literature on education and sustainability shows that, while sustainability features prominently in one form or another across all sectors, only little work can be found dealing with the contributions of educational science within sustainability science. However, as sustainability is a concept that not only influences educational practices but also invites disciplinary contributions to foster inter- and transdisciplinary research within the sustainability discourse, the question remains as to how and to what extent educational science in particular can contribute to sustainability science in terms of an ‘inside-out’ approach. In this paper, we reconstruct the emergence of education for sustainable development as a distinctive field of educational science and introduce and discuss three areas of sustainability research and throw into relief the unique contribution that educational science can make to individual action and behavior change, to organizational change and social learning, and, finally, to inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration.     

Overcoming barriers to sustainability by combining conceptual,visual, and networking systems

Sustainability challenges rarely align with the conventional boundaries of our disciplines, institutions and means of communication. To address these challenges amid real-world complexity, we need to think holistically and collaborate across disciplines. In this paper, we synthesise three themes: (1) more integrated conceptual frameworks; (2) digital visual communication which provides fluid expression of complex ideas and perceptions; and (3) online networks which can empower sustainability initiatives and communicate them across social and institutional barriers at a global scale. Each of these tools can help to overcome persistent barriers to sustainability. When used together, they provide a strategic basis for the design of digital collaboration platforms for addressing sustainability challenges. Using design thinking, we developed a Synergy Map which identifies relationships among a number of barriers to sustainability and conceptual and digital tools which help to address them. The Map identifies the potential for synthesising these tools into effective digital artefacts. We provide several examples and identify characteristics of particular value for overcoming barriers to sustainability. Combining new theoretical developments in sustainability sciences with recent advances in communication and networking technologies offers substantial potential for advancing sustainability on multiple fronts.     

Human well-being, the global emissions debt, and climate change commitment

Energy consumption is fundamentally necessary for human well-being. However, although increasing energy consumption provides substantial improvements in well-being for low and intermediate levels of development, incremental increases in consumption fail to provide improvements for “super-developed” countries that exhibit the highest levels of development and energy consumption. The aim of this note is, therefore, to quantitatively explore the global emissions debt and climate change commitment associated with the gap in energy consumption between the energy-saturated super-developed countries and the rest of the world. Adopting Kates’ identity, I calculate that elevating the current populations in the non-super-developed countries to the energy and carbon intensities of the United States is akin to adding the fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions of more than 15 United States to the global annual total, implying cumulative emissions of almost 4000 GT CO₂ from 2010 through 2050. The inevitability of continued emissions beyond 2050 suggests that the transition of non-super-developed countries to a US-like profile between now and 2050 could, by itself, plausibly result in global warming of 3.2 °C above the late-twentieth century baseline, including an extremely high likelihood that global warming would exceed 1.2 °C. Global warming of this magnitude is likely to cause regional climate change that falls well outside of the baseline variations to which much of the world is presently accustomed, meaning that a US-like energy-development pathway carries substantial climate change commitment for both non-super-developed and super-developed countries, independent of future emissions from the super-developed world. However, the assumption that all countries converge on the minimum energy intensity of the super-developed world and a carbon-free energy system between now and 2050 implies cumulative CO₂ emissions of less than 1000 GT CO₂ between 2010 and 2050, along with a less than 40 % probability of exceeding 1.2 °C of additional global warming. It is, therefore, possible that intensive efforts to develop and deploy global-scale capacity for low-carbon energy consumption could simultaneously ensure human well-being and substantially limit the associated climate change commitment.     

Climate change and coastal vulnerability assessment: scenarios for integrated assessment

Coastal vulnerability assessments still focus mainly on sea-level rise, with less attention paid to other dimensions of climate change. The influence of non-climatic environmental change or socio-economic change is even less considered, and is often completely ignored. Given that the profound coastal changes of the twentieth century are likely to continue through the twenty-first century, this is a major omission, which may overstate the importance of climate change, and may also miss significant interactions of climate change with other non-climate drivers. To better support climate and coastal management policy development, more integrated assessments of climatic change in coastal areas are required, including the significant non-climatic changes. This paper explores the development of relevant climate and non-climate drivers, with an emphasis on the non-climate drivers. While these issues are applicable within any scenario framework, our ideas are illustrated using the widely used SRES scenarios, with both impacts and adaptation being considered. Importantly, scenario development is a process, and the assumptions that are made about future conditions concerning the coast need to be explicit, transparent and open to scientific debate concerning their realism and likelihood. These issues are generic across other sectors.

The Paris Agreement and climate change negotiations: Small Islands,big players

Climate change poses an existential threat to Small Island Developing States (SIDS). They have played a leading role in raising awareness of climate change on the international stage and advocating for strong climate action, notably through the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). Despite their heterogeneity, they succeeded in building a common diplomatic discourse and influencing strategy, and mobilized political leaders as well as talented negotiators and advisors.Small Island States were a crucial group in the negotiating period up to, during the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21), and for the entry into force of the Paris Agreement. SIDS succeeded to secure their special circumstances as vulnerable countries, demonstrated leadership in raising ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to help secure an ambitious long-term temperature goal of limiting global warming to below 1.5 °C, and advanced the complex debate on loss and damage.Small Island States face major challenges to advance their leadership on climate change moving forward: securing immediate actions for those particularly vulnerable countries and increasing their influence within and outside the climate change negotiations. For Small Island states, the 1.5 °C goal should be considered “the visible part of the iceberg” for their diplomacy in a post-Paris context.     

Elites, climate change and agency in a developing society: the Chilean case

Faced with global climate change, local elites are confronted with the main dilemma of a developing country: development requires economic growth, but this effort also requires consideration of environmental factors and sustainable patterns of production and consumption. Based on empirical evidence from qualitative research on businesses and political elites in Chile—a paradigmatic South American middle-income country—this paper explores the extent to which local elites are aware of the severity of challenges posed by global climate change and identify main climate change concerns in their discourse. The degree to which domestic elites are aware of the paradigm shift they must assume toward clean industrial production is a key issue of environmental governance that involves private non-governmental actors. This paper gives clues to a better understanding of what is happening with strategic actors in developing nations and their understanding of their decision-making capacity concerning environmental policy and investments for facing global climate change. The main conclusion of the research is that awareness of climate change in local elites’ discourse is relative. It is not accompanied by a full acceptance of their agency and is not leading to a paradigm shift toward a clean model of development because of domestic elites’ position within globalization processes.