Publications

Baraibar Norberg, M., & Deutsch, L. (2023). The Soybean Through World History: Lessons for Sustainable Agrofood Systems (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822866

This book examines the changing roles and functions of the soybean throughout world history and discusses how this reflects the complex processes of agrofood globalization. The book uses a historical lens to analyze the processes and features that brought us to the current global configuration of the soybean commodity chain. From its origins as a peasant food in ancient China, today the protein-rich soybean is by far the most...

Silvana Juri, Matilda Baraibar, Laurie Beth Clark, Mauricio Cheguhem, Esteban Jobbagy, Jorge Marcone, Néstor Mazzeo, Mariana Meerhoff, Micaela Trimble, Cristina Zurbriggen, Lisa Deutsch. 2022. Food systems transformations in South America: Insights from a transdisciplinary process rooted in Uruguay. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2022.887034

The wicked nature of sustainability challenges facing food systems demands intentional and synergistic actions at multiple scales and sectors. The Southern Cone of Latin America, with its historical legacy of “feeding the world,” presents interesting opportunities for generating insights into potential trajectories and processes for food system transformation. To foster such changes would require the development of col...

Rocha, J. C., M. Baraibar, L. Deutsch, A. de Bremond, J. Oestreicher, F. Rositano, and C. Gelabert. 2019. Toward understanding the dynamics of land change in Latin America: potential utility of a resilience approach for building archetypes of land-systems change. Ecology and Society 24(1):17. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10349-240117

Climate change, financial shocks, and fluctuations in international trade are some of the reasons why resilience is increasingly invoked in discussions about land-use policy. However, resilience assessments come with the challenge of operationalization, upscaling their conclusions while considering the context-specific nature of land-use dynamics and the common lack of long-term data. We revisit the approach of system archetyp...

Lindborg, R., L. J. Gordon, R. Malinga, J. Bengtsson, G. Peterson, R. Bommarco, L. Deutsch, A. Gren, M. Rundlöf, and H. G. Smith. 2017. How spatial scale shapes the generation and management of multiple ecosystemservices. Ecosphere 00(00):e01741. 10.1002/ecs2.1741

The spatial extent of ecological processes has consequences for the generation of ecosystem services related to them. However, management often fails to consider issues of scale when targeting ecological processes underpinning ecosystem services generation. Here, we present a framework for conceptualizing how the amount and spatial scale (here discussed in terms of extent) of management interventions alter interactions among ...

Gordon, L., Bignet, V., Crona, B. et.al. 2017. Rewiring food systems to enhance human health and biosphere stewardship. Environ. Res. Lett. 12 100201

Food lies at the heart of both health and sustainability challenges. We use a social-ecological framework to illustrate how major changes to the volume, nutrition and safety of food systems between 1961 and today impact health and sustainability. These changes have almost halved undernutrition while doubling the proportion who are overweight. They have also resulted in reduced resilience of the biosphere, pushing four out of s...

Gephart, J. A., Troell, M., Henriksson, P.J.G., Beveridg, M.C.M, Verdegem, M., Metian, M., Mateos, L.D. Deutsch. L. 2017. The’seafood gap’ in the food-water nexus literature—issues surrounding freshwater use in seafoodproduction chains, Advances in Water Resources (2017), doi: 10.1016/j.advwatres.2017.03.025

Freshwater use for food production is projected to increase substantially in the coming decades with population growth, changing demographics, and shifting diets. Ensuring joint food-water security has prompted efforts to quantify freshwater use for different food products and production methods. However, few analyses quantify freshwater use for seafood production, and those that do use inconsistent water accounting. This inh...

Crona, B.I., T.M. Daw, W. Swartz, A.V. Norström, M. Nyström, M. Thyresson, C. Folke, J. Hentati-Sundberg, H. Österblom, L. Deutsch, M. Troell. 2015. Masked, diluted and drowned out: How global seafood trade weakens signals from marine ecosystems. Fish and Fisheries DOI: 10.1111/faf.12109

Nearly 40% of seafood is traded internationally and an even bigger proportion is affected by international trade, yet scholarship on marine fisheries has focused on global trends in stocks and catches, or on dynamics of individual fisheries, with limited attention to the link between individual fisheries, global trade and distant consumers. This paper examines the usefulness of fish price as a feedback signal to consumers a...

Steffen, W., W. Broadgate, L. Deutsch, O. Gaffney, C. Ludwig. 2015. The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The great acceleration. The Anthropocene Review 2: 81–98.

The ‘Great Acceleration’ graphs, originally published in 2004 to show socio-economic and Earth System trends from 1750 to 2000, have now been updated to 2010. In the graphs of socio-economic trends, where the data permit, the activity of the wealthy (OECD) countries, those countries with emerging economies, and the rest of the world have now been differentiated. The dominant feature of the socio-economic trends is that the eco...

Troell, M., M. Metian, M. Beveridge, M. Verdegem, L. Deutsch. 2014. Comment on 'Water footprint of marine protein consumption - aquaculture's link to agriculture'. Environmental Research Letters 9:109001 (4pp)

In their article 'Freshwater savings from marine protein consumption' (2014 Environ. Res. Lett. 9 014005), Gephart and her colleagues analyzed how consumption of marine animal protein rather than terrestrial animal protein leads to reduced freshwater allocation. They concluded that future water savings from increased marine fish consumption would be possible. We find the approach interesting and, if they only considered mari...

Westley, F. R., O. Tjornbo, L. Schultz, P. Olsson, C. Folke, B. Crona and Ö. Bodin. 2013. A theory of transformative agency in linked social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society 18(3): 27. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-05072-180327

We reviewed the literature on leadership in linked social-ecological systems and combined it with the literature on institutional entrepreneurship in complex adaptive systems to develop a new theory of transformative agency in linked social-ecological systems. Although there is evidence of the importance of strategic agency in introducing innovation and transforming approaches to management and governance of such systems, ther...