Publications

Hoek van Dijke, A., Herold, M., Mallick, K., Benedict, I., Machwitz, M., Schlerf, M., Pranindita, A., Theeuwen, J., Bastin, J., Teuling, A. 2022. Shifts in regional water availability due to global tree restoration. Nature Geoscience. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-00935-0

Tree restoration is an effective way to store atmospheric carbon and mitigate climate change. However, large-scale tree-cover expansion has long been known to increase evaporation, leading to reduced local water availability and streamflow. More recent studies suggest that increased precipitation, through enhanced atmospheric moisture recycling, can offset this effect. Here we calculate how 900 million hectares of global tree ...

Wassénius, E., Crona, B. 2022. Adapting risk assessments for a complex future. One Earth. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.12.004

Human activities have progressively eroded the biosphere basis for our societies and introduced various risks. To navigate these risks, or potential undesirable outcomes of the future, we need tools and an understanding of how to assess risk in a complex world. Risk assessments are a powerful tool to address sustainability challenges. However, two issues currently hamper their ability to deal with sustainability risks: the lim...

Banitz, T., T. Hertz, L.-G. Johansson, E. Lindkvist, R. Martínez-Peña, S. Radosavljevic, M. Schlüter, K. Wennberg, P. K. Ylikoski,and V. Grimm. 2022. Visualization of causation in social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society. https://doi.org/10.5751/ ES-13030-270131

In social-ecological systems (SES), where social and ecological processes are intertwined, phenomena are usually complex and involve multiple interdependent causes. Figuring out causal relationships is thus challenging but needed to better understand and then affect or manage such systems. One important and widely used tool to identify and communicate causal relationships is visualization. Here, we present several common visua...

Schlüter, M., Caniglia, G., Orach, K., Bodin, Ö., Magliocca, N., Meyfroidt, P., Reyers, B. 2022. Why care about theories? Innovative ways of theorizing in sustainability science. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2022.101154

The complex nature of sustainability problems and the aim of sustainability science to support emergent processes of transformation require rethinking how we build and make use of theories. We highlight the diversity of ways in which theories, as assemblages of different elements that can serve a variety of purposes, can emerge within inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary processes. Such emerging theories are (i) contextu...

Yamaura, Y., Fletcher, R., Lade, S., Higa, M., Lindenmayer, D. 2022. From nature reserve to mosaic management: Improving matrix survival, not permeability, benefits regional populations under habitat loss and fragmentation. Journal of Applied Ecology. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14122

Although matrix improvement in fragmented landscapes is a promising conservation measure, matrix permeability (willingness of an organism to enter the matrix) and movement survival in the matrix are usually aggregated. Consequently, it is unknown which matrix property needs to be improved. It also remains unclear whether matrix upgrading from dispersal passage to providing reproduction opportunities has large conservation bene...

Malmborg, K., Enfors-Kautsky, E., Schultz, L., Norström, A. 2022. Embracing complexity in landscape management: Learning and impacts of a participatory resilience assessment. Ecosystems and People. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2022.2061596

Landscapes and their management are at the center of many of the sustainability challenges that we face. Landscapes can be described as social-ecological systems shaped by a myriad of human activities and biophysical processes, interacting across space and time. Managing them sustainably requires considering this complexity. Resilience thinking offers ways to address complexity in decision-making. In this paper, we analyse th...

Uusitaloa, L., Blenckner, T., Puntila-Dodda, R., Skyttäa, A. et al. 2022. Integrating diverse model results into decision support for good environmental status and blue growth, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 806, Part 2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.150450.

Sustainable environmental management needs to consider multiple ecological and societal objectives simultaneously while accounting for the many uncertainties arising from natural variability, insufficient knowledge about the system's behaviour leading to diverging model projections, and changing ecosystem. In this paper we demonstrate how a Bayesian network- based decision support model can be used to summarize a large body o...

Kininmonth, S.; Blenckner, T.; Niiranen, S.; Watson, J.; Orio, A.; Casini, M.; Neuenfeldt, S.; Bartolino, V.; Hansson, M. 2022. Is Diversity the Missing Link in Coastal Fisheries Management? Diversity, 14, 90. https://doi.org/10.3390/d14020090

Fisheries management has historically focused on the population elasticity of target fish based primarily on demographic modeling, with the key assumptions of stability in environmental conditions and static trophic relationships. The predictive capacity of this fisheries framework is poor, especially in closed systems where the benthic diversity and boundary effects are important and the stock levels are low. Here, we presen...

West, S., L. J. Haider, S. Stålhammar, and S. Woroniecki. 2020. A relational turn for sustainability science? Relational thinking, leverage points and transformations. Ecosystems and People 16(1):304–325.

In sustainability science, revising the paradigms that separate humans from nature is considered a powerful ‘leverage point’ in pursuit of transformations. The coupled social-ecological and human-environment systems perspectives at the heart of sustainability science have, in many ways, enhanced recognition across academic, civil, policy and business spheres that humans and nature are inextricably connected. However, in retai...

Orach, K., A. Duit, and M. Schlüter. 2020. Sustainable natural resource governance under interest group competition in policy-making. Nature Human Behaviour 4:898–909.

Non-state actors play an increasingly important role in environmental policy. Lobbying by interest groups has been associated with policy stagnation and environmental degradation as well as with sustainable governance. However, little is known about how competition between economic and environmental interests influences the ability of governance systems to avoid undesirable outcomes. We investigate how competing interest grou...