Publications

Sinare, H., Peterson, G., Börjeson, L., Gordon, L.. 2022. Ecosystem services in Sahelian village landscapes 1952–2016: estimating change in a data scarce region. Ecology and Society. doi.org/10.5751/es-13292-270301

Burkina Faso and the wider Sahel region have experienced substantial changes in rainfall, population, and landscape use. These changes have altered ecosystem services, the benefits that people receive from ecosystems, and rural livelihoods. However, it is difficult to assess the magnitude of these changes because of missing and fragmented social, agricultural, and ecological data. We estimated changes in 10 key provisioning ec...

Kuiper, J. J., van Wijk, D., Mooij, W. M., Remme, R. P., Peterson, G. D., Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, S., Mooij, C. J., Leltz, G. M., Pereira, L. M. 2022. Exploring desirable nature futures for Nationaal Park Hollandse Duinen. Ecosystems and People. 10.1080/26395916.2022.2065360

Achieving global sustainability goals requires most people and societies to fundamentally revisit their relationship with nature. New approaches are called for to guide change processes towards sustainable futures that embrace the plurality of people’s desired relationships with nature. This paper presents a novel approach to exploring desirable futures for nature and people that was developed through an application in Nationa...

Kuiper, J. J., Kooi, B. W., Peterson, G. D., Mooij, W. M. Bridging theories for ecosystem stability through structural sensitivity analysis of ecological models in equilibrium. Acta Biotheoretica. https://doi-org.ezproxy.its.uu.se/10.1007/s10441-022-09441-7

Ecologists are challenged by the need to bridge and synthesize different approaches and theories to obtain a coherent understanding of ecosystems in a changing world. Both food web theory and regime shift theory shine light on mechanisms that confer stability to ecosystems, but from different angles. Empirical food web models are developed to analyze how equilibria in real multi-trophic ecosystems are shaped by species interac...

Meacham, M., Norström, A. V., Peterson, G. D., Andersson, E., Bennett, E.M., Biggs, O., Crouzat, E., Cord, A. F., Enfors, E., Felipe-Lucia, M. R., Fischer, J., Hamann, M., Hanspach, J., Hicks, C., Jacobs, S., Lavorel, S., Locatelli, B., Martín-López, B., Plieninger, T., Queiroz, C. 2022. Advancing research on ecosystem service bundles for comparative assessments and synthesis. Ecosystems and People. https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2022.2032356

Social-ecological interactions have been shown to generate interrelated and reoccurring sets of ecosystem services, also known as ecosystem service bundles. Given the potential utility of the bundles concept, along with the recent surge in interest it is timely to reflect on the concept, its current use and potential for the future. Based on our ecosystem service bundle experience, expertise, and ecosystem service bundle analy...

Lam, D., Jiménez-Aceituno, A., Guerrero Lara, L., Sellberg, M., Norström, A., Moore, M., Peterson, G., Olsson, P. 2022. Amplifying actions for food system transformation: insights from the Stockholm region. Sustainability Science. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11625-022-01154-7

Food is essential to people and is one of the main ways in which people are connected to the world’s ecosystems. However, food systems often cause ecosystem degradation and produce ill-health, which has generated increasing calls to transform food systems to be more sustainable. The Swedish food system is currently undergoing substantial change. A varied set of local actors have created alternative sustainability initiatives t...

Sellberg, M., Norrby, J., Nowak, A., Rönnquist, L., Olsson, P., Peterson, G., Alvsilver, A. 2022. Rapid Transition Lab - Navigating transformations in times of crises towards healthy, sustainable and just Swedish and planetary food systems. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Dark Matter Labs, and Vinnova. https://doi.org/10.17045/sthlmuni.21275946.v1

The centrality of food to human flourishing combined with how food is currently a source of many social and environmental problems means that many of the broader sustainability challenges can be addressed by fundamental changes to the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Such changes are central to what has been referred to as food system transformations. Transformations require significant changes in multiple di...

Garcia, C., Savilaakso, S., Verburg, R., Stoudmann, N., Fernbach, P., Sloman, S., Peterson, G., Araújo, M., Bastin, J., Blaser, J., Boutinot, L., Crowther, T., Dessard, H., Dray, A., Francisco, S., Ghazoul, J., Feintrenie, L., Hainzelin, E., Kleinschroth, F., Naimi, B., Novotny, I., Oszwald, J., Pietsch, S., Quétier, F., Robinson, B., Sassen, M., Sist, P., Sunderland, T., Vermeulen, C., Wilmé, L., Wilson, S., Zorondo-Rodríguez, F., Waeber, P.. 2022. Strategy games to improve environmental policymaking. Nature Sustainability. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00881-0

While the scientific community documents environmental degradation and develops scenarios to identify the operational margins of system Earth, less attention is given to how decisions are made that steer the system in one direction or the other. We propose to use strategy games for this purpose, increasing the representation of human agency in scenario development and creating spaces for deliberation between different worldvie...

Laura Pereira, Jan J. Kuiper, Odirilwe Selomane, Ana Paula D. Aguiar, Ghassem R. Asrar, Elena M. Bennett, Reinette Biggs, Katherine Calvin, Steve Hedden, Angel Hsu, Jason Jabbour, Nicholas King, Alexandre C. Köberle, Paul Lucas, Jeanne Nel, Albert V. Norström, Garry Peterson, Nadia Sitas, Christopher Trisos, Detlef P. van Vuuren, Joost Vervoort & James Ward (2021) Advancing a toolkit of diverse futures approaches for global environmental assessments, Ecosystems and People, 17:1, 191-204, DOI: 10.1080/26395916.2021.1901783

Global Environmental Assessments (GEAs) are in a unique position to influence environmental decision-making in the context of sustainability challenges. To do this effectively, however, new methods are needed to respond to the needs of decision-makers for a more integrated, contextualized and goal-seeking evaluation of different policies, geared for action from global to local. While scenarios are an important tool for GEAs t...

Lundquist, C., Hashimoto, S., Denboba, M.A., Peterson, G., Pereira, L. & Armenteras, D. 2021. Operationalizing the Nature Futures Framework to catalyze the development of nature-future scenarios. Sustainability Science 16(6), 1773–1775.

Scenarios and models are powerful tools for exploring the likely future outcomes of alternative social-ecological development pathways and for informing policy decisions. However, one of the key messages made by the Methodological Assessment of Scenarios and Models by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was that existing scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services have important s...

Sumaila, U., Skerritt, D., Schuhbauer, A., Villasante, S., Cisneros-Montemayor, A., Sinan, H., et.al. 2021. WTO must ban harmful fisheries subsidies. Science. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.abm1680

Sustainably managed wild fisheries support food and nutritional security, livelihoods, and cultures. Harmful fisheries subsidies—government payments that incentivize overcapacity and lead to overfishing—undermine these benefits yet are increasing globally. World Trade Organization (WTO) members have a unique opportunity at their ministerial meeting in November to reach an agreement that eliminates harmful subsidies. We—a group...