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1.
Philip M. Fearnside 《Climate Policy》2013,13(1):70-81
Brazil's Amazon rainforest provides an important environmental service with its storage of carbon, thereby reducing global warming. A growing number of projects and proposals intend to reward carbon storage services. Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation is currently a key issue for negotiations on an international agreement that is to take effect in 2013. Various issues require decisions that will have substantial impacts on both the effectiveness of mitigation and the scale of Amazonia's potential role. These decisions include the effects that money generated from payments can have, the spatial scale of mitigation (e.g. projects or countries and sub-national political units), whether to have voluntary or mandatory markets, and whether these reductions will generate carbon credits to offset emissions elsewhere. It is argued that national-level programmes, combined with a national target under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, are the best solution for Brazil in terms of both capturing international funding and stimulating the major cuts in global emissions that are needed to minimize climate risk to the Amazon rainforest. The high likelihood of passing a tipping point for maintaining the Amazon rainforest implies the need for urgency in altering current negotiating positions. 相似文献
2.
Rakhyun E. Kim 《Global Environmental Change》2013,23(5):980-991
The conventional piecemeal approach to environmental treaty-making has resulted in a ‘maze’ of international agreements. However, little is known empirically about its overall structure and evolutionary dynamics. This study reveals and characterizes the evolving structure of the web of international environmental treaty law. The structure was approximated using 1001 cross-references among 747 multilateral environmental agreements concluded from 1857 to 2012. Known network analysis measures were used to answer the following questions: has a complex system of international environmental treaty law emerged? If so when, and what does it look like? What are its topological properties? To what extent is the institutional complex fragmented? The network analysis suggested that multilateral environmental agreements have self-organized into an interlocking system with a complex network structure. Furthermore, the system has defragmented as it coevolved with the increasing complexity and interconnectivity of global environmental challenges. This study demonstrates the need to approach multilateral environmental agreements in the context of a complex networked system, and recommends against assuming the overall institutional structure is fragmented. Proposals for global environmental governance reform should pay attention to this network's emergent polycentric order and complexity and to the implications of these features for the functioning of the multilateral environmental agreement system. 相似文献
3.
Despite recent success in reducing forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon, additional forest conservation efforts, for example, through ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation’ (REDD+), could significantly contribute to global climate-change mitigation. Economic incentives, such as payments for environmental services could promote conservation, but deforestation often occurs on land without crucial tenure-security prerequisites. Improving the enforcement of existing regulatory disincentives thus represents an important element of Brazil's anti-deforestation action plan. However, conservation law enforcement costs and benefits have been much less studied than for conditional payments. We develop a conceptual framework and a spatially explicit model to analyze field-based regulatory enforcement in the Brazilian Amazon. We validate our model, based on historical deforestation and enforcement mission data from 2003 to 2008. By simulating the current conservation law enforcement practice, we analyze the costs of liability establishment and legal coercion for alternative conservation targets, and evaluate corresponding income impacts. Our findings suggest that spatial patterns of both deforestation and inspection costs markedly influence enforcement patterns and their income effects. Field-based enforcement is a highly cost-effective forest conservation instrument from a regulator's point of view, but comes at high opportunity costs for land users. Payments for environmental services could compensate costs, but will increase budget outlays vis-à-vis a command-and-control dominated strategy. Both legal and institutional challenges have to be overcome to make conservation payments work at a larger scale. Decision-makers may have to innovatively combine incentive and disincentive-based policy instruments in order to make tropical forest conservation both financially viable and socially compatible. 相似文献
4.
Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes are proliferating but are challenged by insufficient attention to spatial and temporal inter-dependencies, interactions between different ecosystems and their services, and the need for multi-level governance. To address these challenges, this paper develops a place-based approach to the development and implementation of PES schemes that incorporates multi-level governance, bundling or layering of services across multiple scales, and shared values for ecosystem services. The approach is evaluated and illustrated using case study research to develop an explicitly place-based PES scheme, the Peatland Code, owned and managed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s UK Peatland Programme and designed to pay for restoration of peatland habitats. Buyers preferred bundled schemes with premium pricing of a primary service, contrasting with sellers’ preferences for quantifying and marketing services separately in a layered scheme. There was limited awareness among key business sectors of dependencies on ecosystem services, or the risks and opportunities arising from their management. Companies with financial links to peatlands or a strong environmental sustainability focus were interested in the scheme, particularly in relation to climate regulation, water quality, biodiversity and flood risk mitigation benefits. Visitors were most interested in donating to projects that benefited wildlife and were willing to donate around £2 on-site during a visit. Sellers agreed a deliberated fair price per tonne of CO2 equivalent from £11.18 to £15.65 across four sites in Scotland, with this range primarily driven by spatial variation in habitat degradation. In the Peak District, perceived declines in sheep and grouse productivity arising from ditch blocking led to substantially higher prices, but in other regions ditch blocking was viewed more positively. The Peatland Code was developed in close collaboration with stakeholders at catchment, landscape and national scales, enabling multi-level governance of the management and delivery of ecosystem services across these scales. Place-based PES schemes can mitigate negative trade-offs between ecosystem services, more effectively include cultural ecosystem services and engage with and empower diverse stakeholders in scheme design and governance. 相似文献
5.
Rural and regional hinterlands provide the ecosystem service needs for increasingly urbanised communities across the globe. These inter-related ecosystem services provide key opportunities in securing climate change mitigation and adaptation. Their integrated management in the face of climate change, however, can be confounded by fragmentation within the complex institutional arrangements concerned with natural resource management. This suggests the need for a more systemic approach to continuous improvement in the integrated and adaptive governance of natural resources.This paper explores the theoretical foundations for integrated natural resource management and reviews positive systemic improvements that have been emerging in the Australian context. In setting clear theoretical foundations, the paper explores both functional and structural aspects of natural resource governance systems. Functional considerations include issues of connectivity, knowledge use and capacity within the natural resource decision making environment. Structural considerations refer to the institutions and processes that undertake planning through to implementation, monitoring and evaluation.From this foundation, we review the last decade of emerging initiatives in governance regarding the integration of agriculture and forests across the entire Australian landscape. This includes the shift towards more devolved regional approaches to integrated natural resource management and recent progress towards the use of terrestrial carbon at landscape scale to assist in climate change mitigation and adaptation. These developments, however, have also been tempered by a significant raft of new landscape-scale regulations that have tended to be based on a more centralist philosophy that landowners should be providing ecosystem services for the wider public good without substantive reward.Given this background, we explore a case study of efforts taken to integrate the management of landscape-scale agro-ecological services in the Wet Tropics of tropical Queensland. This is being achieved primarily through the integration of regional natural resource management planning and the development of aggregated terrestrial carbon offset products at a whole of landscape scale via the Degree Celsius initiative. Finally, the paper teases out the barriers and opportunities being experienced, leading to discussion about the global implications for managing climate change, income generation and poverty reduction. 相似文献
6.
Results-based funding (RBF) is a governance concept that is rapidly becoming the mainstream paradigm for international collaborations in the environmental sector. While portrayed as a compromise solution between market-based mechanisms and unconditional donations, the implementation of RBF is revealing new conflicts and contradictions of its own. This paper explores the application of RBF for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) by describing the discursive conflicts between recipient (i.e., Brazil) and donor (i.e., Norway and Germany) countries of the Amazon Fund about what constitutes “results” or “performance.” Although all parties agree that the financial transfers to RBF should be based on past emission reductions in relation to a historical baseline, they hold clashing interpretations about temporal (i.e., past or future) and epistemological (i.e., how to measure) aspects of the results these payments are intended for. Firstly, while Brazil emphasizes that it deserves a reward of USD 21 billion for results achieved between 2006 and 2016, donor countries have indicated an interest in paying only for most recent results as a way to incentivize further reductions. Secondly, while all parties believe that Amazon Fund should support policies to reduce deforestation, donor countries have revealed concerns that the performance of the Amazon Fund projects in generating further reductions has not been measured in a rigorous manner. This suggests that donor countries may consider making changes to current RBF mechanisms or getting involved in new forms of finance. 相似文献
7.
Peter D. Richards Robert J. Myers Scott M. Swinton Robert T. Walker 《Global Environmental Change》2012,22(2):454-462
The advancement of South America's agro-pastoral frontier has been widely linked to losses in biodiversity and tropical forests, with particular impacts on the Brazilian cerrado, the Atlantic Forest, and the Amazon. Here we consider an important, yet largely overlooked, driver of South America's soybean expansion, namely the devaluation of local currencies against the US dollar in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Much interest has emerged in recent years over the environmental implications of soybean production in Brazil, with evidence of both direct incursions into moist tropical forest by soybean producers and of potential indirect effects, via the displacement of existing ranching operations. In this research we utilize historical trends in soybean prices, exchange rates, and cropland dedicated to soybean production in Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil to estimate the impact of currency devaluations on area of production. The results suggest that approximately 80,000 km2, or 31% of the current extent of soybean production in these countries, emerged as a supply area response to the devaluation of local currencies in the late 1990s. The results also indicate that the more recent depreciation of the dollar and appreciation of the Brazilian real have counteracted a recent rise in global soybean prices, in the process sparing an estimated nearly 90,000 km2 from new cropland, 40,000 km2 of this in the Amazon alone. Amidst an increasingly neoliberal economic environment, where barriers to trade are jettisoned in favor of the free flow of commodities, relative currency values will occupy an important role in the future sourcing of both agricultural expansion and environmental degradation. 相似文献
8.
Myanna Lahsen 《Climatic change》2009,97(3-4):339-372
The IPCC and other global environmental assessment processes stress the need for national scientific participation to ensure decision makers’ trust in the associated scientific conclusions and political agendas. The underpinning assumption is that the relationship between scientists and decision makers at the national level is characterized by trust and interpretive synergy. Drawing on ethnographic research in Brazil, this article challenges that assumption through a case study of the policy uptake of divergent scientific interpretations as to whether or not the Amazon is a net carbon sink. It shows that the carbon sink issue became a site for struggles between important Brazilian scientists and decision-makers with central authority over the definition of the country’s official position in international climate negotiations. In a geopolitically charged scientific controversy involving scientific evidence bearing on the Kyoto Protocol, Brazilian decision makers studied revealed critical distance from national scientists advancing evidence that the Amazon is a net carbon sink. As such, the decision-makers’ interpretations were at odds also with dominant framings in the Brazilian media and closer to those of American scientists involved in carbon cycle research in the Amazon. Seeking to explain this disconnect, the paper discusses the divergent policy preferences of key scientists and decision-makers involved, and the correlations of these preferences with interpretations of the available scientific evidence. It identifies the continued impact of a national political tradition of limited participation in decision making and suggests that this tradition—while increasingly challenged by countervailing democratizing trends—is reinforced by key Brazilian decision makers’ constructions of science as a medium through which rich countries maintain political advantage. Reflecting this, key Brazilian decision-makers justified rejecting national scientists’ interpretations of the Amazon as a significant overall carbon sink by suggesting that the scientists’ scientific training and associated foreign interactions bias them in favor of foreign interests, compromising their ability to accurately identify national interests. The paper situates its analysis in terms of theories of the science–policy interface and argues for greater attention to the role of culturally and politically laden understandings of science and the role of science in policy and geopolitics. 相似文献
9.
The release of excessive anthropogenic nitrogen contributes to global climate change, biodiversity loss, and the degradation of ecosystem services. Despite being an urgent global problem, the excess nitrogen is not governed globally. This paper considers possible governance options for dealing with excessive nitrogen through target setting, which is an approach commonly adopted to address global environmental problems. The articulation of the nitrogen problem and the numerous international institutions dealing with it, provide evidence of a nitrogen regime characterised by limited coordination and targets covering sources and impacts only partially. This calls for improving the nitrogen governance in the direction of more integrated approaches at the global scale. In this vein, the paper investigates two opposite governance options – here labelled as ‘holistic’ and ‘origin-based’ – and evaluates them for their capability to define solutions and targets for human-induced nitrogen. From the analysis, it emerges that origin-based solutions can be preferable to holistic solutions as they can be more specific and potentially have greater immediate results. Independent from which governance arrangement is chosen, what matters most is the speed at which an arrangement can deploy solutions to combat (fast-growing) nitrogen pollution. 相似文献
10.
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are increasingly promoted as nature-based solutions to climate, environmental, and business challenges. While participation in PES schemes is mandated in countries such as China, Costa Rica, and Vietnam, it remains unclear how PES schemes emerge in countries devoid of national mandates. This article investigates how actors have attempted institutional change to enable PES, by reinterpreting or adapting national laws, policies, and plans. We present an analytical framework theorising how geographical variations in (1) institutional frameworks, and (2) actor capabilities, dictate which institutions actors attempt to change. We then apply this framework to multi-scalar actors and institutions in Thailand and the Philippines. Our empirics reveal the types of institutional work that actors perform such as advocacy, education, mimicry, and networking, and demonstrate how this creates legal and discursive support, and improves stakeholder awareness and acceptance of PES as an environmental management strategy. Eight formal institutions are shown to have undergone change to enable PES across these countries, including those related to indigenous people, energy production, protected areas, pollution control, carbon offsetting, and decentralised governance. We show institutional change to be a geographical and contextual process that requires actors to match the right types of institutional work, with the right mechanism of institutional change, and a suitable target institution if they are to be successful in effecting change. Yet, we also report failed attempts, and explain how informal cultural norms act as challenges to formal institutional change. Through our comparative analysis of multiple institutions, actors, and national settings, we identify trends and make recommendations with global relevance to PES scholars and practitioners, and that can aid other initiatives that seek to address climate change and promote environmental sustainability. 相似文献
11.
This paper presents the first analysis of the diversity of regulating ecosystem services (ESS)—key variables for global environmental sustainability and change in an urban era—across a globally important part of the urban world, urban Europe. We map the first pan-European pattern of regulating ecosystem services in urban core areas and their associated hinterlands and discuss data against the background of each city's land-use development history and planning culture. Upon selecting more than 300 cities, we used the Urban Atlas database and a straightforward calculation method to map three regulating ecosystem services. The main results of this study show (a) a heterogeneous distribution of regulating ecosystem services across European cities, (b) considerable provisioning differences between core cities and the hinterland, (c) a grouping of European regions according to their potential for urban ecosystem service provisioning and (d) an ecosystem services supply ranking for European cities. Considerable differences in urban ecosystem services were found among northern countries, such as Sweden and Finland, which are rich in supplying ecosystem services compared to the UK and Belgium, which, similar to Spanish and Greek cities, are characteristically low in ecosystem services provision. Our results provide the first overall picture of regulating services in urban EU-Europe and serve to inform decisions on the key aspects of future European policy and strategies involving urban nature, green spaces and health. 相似文献
12.
Small-scale fisheries are becoming a global social and environmental concern. The contribution of marine small-scale fisheries to global food security and coastal livelihoods, coupled with the significant challenges they face, has attracted increasing attention and aid from environmental organizations, philanthropies, and multilateral agencies over recent decades. Our study attends to the understudied role of the World Bank, the largest individual funder shaping present and future sustainability of coastal marine regions, as a key actor shaping global environmental governance paradigms. We asked how funding to the sector has changed over the last 50 years and why, outlining distinct patterns in the flow of small-scale fisheries aid and the underlying intervention models. We contextualize our quantitative analysis of aid patterns over time with qualitative interview data with bank staff, identifying underlying paradigm shifts driven by internal and external factors. More than $2.48 billion was allocated by the World Bank to marine fisheries over the last 50 years, approximately 47% (~$1.17 billion) of which was targeted to marine small-scale fisheries. Three distinct funding periods are identified: rising support to SSF from the 1970s to mid-1980s; a sharp decline in funding in the mid-to-late 1980s and low levels of funding throughout the 1990s; and a steady return to funding SSF in the mid-2000s up to the present. Over time, Bank-funded interventions shifted from pure economic development in the earlier era, to an emphasis on governance and multi-dimensional environmental goals in the recent period. To understand why, we used key-informant interviews to unpack major internal drivers: internal staff changes and presence of key individuals, the decentralization and recentralization of decision-making, and the organization’s shifting emphasis from traditional economic growth to multi-dimensional objectives of poverty reduction, among others. External drivers behind funding and paradigm shifts included pressure from the environmental movement, the rise of sustainable development discourses, key global environmental summits in the 1990s, and rising levels of interest in the fisheries sector by the governments of both donor and recipient countries. Processes of ‘paradigm shifts’ were not swift or singular, rather they were affected by multiple, convergent factors over time. Our findings contribute to the literature on multi-lateral institutions as key actors in environmental governance shaping global development thinking, illustrating the arc of the last half-century of fisheries aid at the Bank while highlighting present dilemmas and future challenges that actors interested in working towards sustainable marine small-scale fisheries face. 相似文献
13.
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation projects currently cover an area approximately twice the size of Germany and challenge traditional concepts of centralization and decentralization in studies of environmental governance. Emerging from the interactions of a complex network of actors, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation demonstrates that transnational governance networks of organizations can become spatially centralized. Using a historical analysis of the development of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, we argue that the evolution of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation policy has been directed primarily from donor countries, especially in North America and Europe. Adopting a social network analysis approach, we present findings from a new dataset of collaboration on 276 Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, avoided deforestation, and sustainable forest management projects that began some on-the-ground operations between 1989 and June 2012, finding that organizations in donor countries have from the beginning been the central actors in the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation network. We conclude that Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation exhibits spatial centralization within transnational governance architectures despite institutional fragmentation, raising important normative questions about participation in transnational forest governance. 相似文献
14.
Understanding potential future influence of environmental, economic, and social drivers on land-use and sustainability is critical for guiding strategic decisions that can help nations adapt to change, anticipate opportunities, and cope with surprises. Using the Land-Use Trade-Offs (LUTO) model, we undertook a comprehensive, detailed, integrated, and quantitative scenario analysis of land-use and sustainability for Australia’s agricultural land from 2013–2050, under interacting global change and domestic policies, and considering key uncertainties. We assessed land use competition between multiple land-uses and assessed the sustainability of economic returns and ecosystem services at high spatial (1.1 km grid cells) and temporal (annual) resolution. We found substantial potential for land-use transition from agriculture to carbon plantings, environmental plantings, and biofuels cropping under certain scenarios, with impacts on the sustainability of economic returns and ecosystem services including food/fibre production, emissions abatement, water resource use, biodiversity services, and energy production. However, the type, magnitude, timing, and location of land-use responses and their impacts were highly dependent on scenario parameter assumptions including global outlook and emissions abatement effort, domestic land-use policy settings, land-use change adoption behaviour, productivity growth, and capacity constraints. With strong global abatement incentives complemented by biodiversity-focussed domestic land-use policy, land-use responses can substantially increase and diversify economic returns to land and produce a much wider range of ecosystem services such as emissions abatement, biodiversity, and energy, without major impacts on agricultural production. However, better governance is needed for managing potentially significant water resource impacts. The results have wide-ranging implications for land-use and sustainability policy and governance at global and domestic scales and can inform strategic thinking and decision-making about land-use and sustainability in Australia. A comprehensive and freely available 26 GB data pack (http://doi.org/10.4225/08/5604A2E8A00CC) provides a unique resource for further research. As similarly nuanced transformational change is also possible elsewhere, our template for comprehensive, integrated, quantitative, and high resolution scenario analysis can support other nations in strategic thinking and decision-making to prepare for an uncertain future. 相似文献
15.
Unpacking governance: Building adaptive capacity to climate change of river basins in Brazil 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Governance and institutions are critical determinants of adaptive capacity and resilience. Yet the make-up and relationships between governance components and mechanisms that may or may not contribute to adaptive capacity remain relatively unexplored empirically. This paper builds on previous research focusing on integrated water resources management in Brazil to ‘unpack’ water governance mechanisms that may shape the adaptive capacity of water systems to climatic change. We construct a river basin index to characterize governance approaches in 18 Brazilian river basins, apply a reliability test to assess the validity of these governance indicators, and use in-depth qualitative data collected in a subsample of the basins to explore the relationship between the governance indicators and adaptive capacity. The analysis suggests a positive relationship between integrated water governance mechanisms and adaptive capacity. In addition, we carry out a cluster analysis to group the basins into types of governance approaches and further unveil potential relationships between the governance variables and overall adaptive capacities. The cluster analysis indicates that tensions and tradeoffs may exist between some of the variables, especially with equality of decision making and knowledge availability; a finding that has implications for decision makers aiming to build adaptive capacity and resilience through governance and institutional means. 相似文献
16.
Many ecosystem services are in decline. Local ecological knowledge and associated practice are essential to sustain and enhance ecosystem services on the ground. Here, we focus on social or collective memory in relation to management practice that sustains ecosystem services, and investigate where and how ecological practices, knowledge and experience are retained and transmitted. We analyze such social–ecological memory of allotment gardens in the Stockholm urban area, Sweden. Allotment gardens support ecosystem services such as pollination, seed dispersal and pest regulation in the broader urban landscape. Surveys and interviews were preformed over a four-year period with several hundreds of gardeners. We found that the allotment gardens function as communities-of-practice, where participation and reification interact and social–ecological memory is a shared source of resilience of the community by being both emergent and persistent. Ecological practices and knowledge in allotment gardens are retained and transmitted by imitation of practices, oral communication and collective rituals and habits, as well as by the physical gardens, artifacts, metaphors and rules-in-use (institutions). Finally, a wider social context provides external support through various forms of media, markets, social networks, collaborative organizations, and legal structures. We exemplify the role of urban gardens in generating ecosystem services in times of crisis and change and conclude that stewards of urban green areas and the social memory that they carry may help counteract further decline of critical ecosystem services. 相似文献
17.
Critical to improving environmental governance is understanding the fit (alignment) between institutional arrangements and key ecological processes. This is particularly true for biodiversity hotpots and ecologically sensitive areas that are subject to significant impacts from human activities. Here, we have developed an innovative approach to quantify ecological-institutional alignment across an environmentally and politically complex large-scale marine social-ecological system. We mapped the trans-boundary networks of marine population dispersal corridors, and intersected these with estimates of cross-country institutional linkages related to marine management and conservation. In integrating large-scale ecological-institutional networks, we identify geopolitical fit and misfit between a region's ecological processes and its governance. We have demonstrated this approach in the Indo-West Pacific region, a global marine biodiversity hotpot in the Indo-West Pacific. We present region-specific institutional and ecological networks, highlight current challenges, and suggest future directions to refine the proposed approach to quantify alignment between ecological processes and governance arrangements. Ultimately, our method has the potential to assist management efforts in prioritizing and strengthening governance to effectively safeguard ecological processes across multiple jurisdictions. 相似文献
18.
One of the most significant impacts of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been the establishment of a participatory process for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+). We analyse the case of Brazil, the country whose land-use emissions from deforestation and forest degradation have declined the most. Through semi-structured interviews with 29 country policy experts – analysed in full text around 7 categories of activities that existing literature identifies as central elements of an effective governance system – we find weak links between the international REDD+ system and what actually happens on the ground inside Brazil. The greatest weaknesses are rooted in the absence of any formal learning system, which prevents higher-level efforts from obtaining useful feedback from lower-level entities responsible for implementation. Analytically our approach is rooted in the idea of ‘experimentalist governance’ in which local policy experiments map the space of what is possible and effective with transformative land policy. These experiments provide information to broader international initiatives on how local implementation shapes the ability and strategy to reach global goals. The Brazilian experience suggests that even when international funding is substantial, local implementation remains a weak link. REDD+ reforms should focus less on the total amount of money being spent and much more on how those funds are used to generate useful local policy experiments and learning.
Key policy insights
A nascent system of experimentalist governance to implement REDD+ is taking shape in Brazil. However, the potential for experimentalism to improve policy reforms within Brazil is far from realized;
Experimentalist problem-solving approaches could have a big impact on REDD+ with stronger incentives to promote experimentation and learning from experience;
Reforms to REDD+ incentive schemes should focus less on the total amount of money being spent and more on whether those funds are actually generating experimental learning and policy improvement – in Brazil and in other countries struggling with similar challenges.
19.
《Global Environmental Change》2006,16(3):253-267
The resilience perspective is increasingly used as an approach for understanding the dynamics of social–ecological systems. This article presents the origin of the resilience perspective and provides an overview of its development to date. With roots in one branch of ecology and the discovery of multiple basins of attraction in ecosystems in the 1960–1970s, it inspired social and environmental scientists to challenge the dominant stable equilibrium view. The resilience approach emphasizes non-linear dynamics, thresholds, uncertainty and surprise, how periods of gradual change interplay with periods of rapid change and how such dynamics interact across temporal and spatial scales. The history was dominated by empirical observations of ecosystem dynamics interpreted in mathematical models, developing into the adaptive management approach for responding to ecosystem change. Serious attempts to integrate the social dimension is currently taking place in resilience work reflected in the large numbers of sciences involved in explorative studies and new discoveries of linked social–ecological systems. Recent advances include understanding of social processes like, social learning and social memory, mental models and knowledge–system integration, visioning and scenario building, leadership, agents and actor groups, social networks, institutional and organizational inertia and change, adaptive capacity, transformability and systems of adaptive governance that allow for management of essential ecosystem services. 相似文献
20.
In Amazonia, our knowledge of the trade-offs and possible thresholds in the relationships among social, economic and environmental parameters remains quite limited and hinders the design of sustainable socio-environmental systems. To fill this gap, we analyzed relationships among landscape metrics, socio-economic patterns, biodiversity and soil-based ecosystem services within a total of 51 farms located at 6 sites of the Colombian and Brazilian Amazon. Farms were representative of an initial set of 274 and they represented colonization ages from 10 to 80 years and a range of public policies found in the region.Cluster analysis separated farms in 7 types of production systems according to 5 main criteria (size of the farm, human capital, incomes, farm products and production intensity) selected from an initial set of 18 criteria. Biodiversity was summarized into a composite index Bd built with data from 8 different groups: trees, shrubs, grasses and forbs, birds, Saturnidae and Sphingidae moths, Drosophilidae, earthworms and ants. Provision of ecosystem services was quantified by a composite indicator of 6 sub-indicators of soil hydrological functions, C storage and chemical fertility. Increasing intensity of production systems was linked to a significant decrease of indicators of natural capital biodiversity (Bd) and soil based ecosystem services (Es) with 20% and 37.3% variance explained, respectively. No relationship was observed between production systems and an indicator of human wellbeing (Sb) based on a set of 5 criteria identified with the farmers. Findings indicate that early colonizers migrate when a certain level of development has been achieved (as a result of their activities) and are replaced by wealthier populations.An overall indicator of sustainability (Su) – that combines production efficiency (Ep), Sb, Bd and Es indices (ranging from 0.1–1.0) – decreases significantly with the landscape intensification (Li) with 18.7% variance directly explained by this relationship. Su was also significantly related to production systems (36.4% variance explained): while this indicator remained relatively stable with a value of 0.5 across the early and intermediate phases following deforestation, it dropped down considerably (0.2) for production systems based on cattle ranching on highly degraded pastures with less than 2% forest cover remaining. Restoration with sylvopastoral systems allowed some farms of this former group to increase sustainability to a value of 0.35 after less than 5 years. Agroforestry systems on sites deforested at the same time maintained values around 0.5, as they allowed the maximum production efficiencies and maintained relatively high values of the Biodiversity (Bd) and Ecosystem services (Es) indexes. This is evidence that beyond the general negative trade-off between human development and natural capital observed in Amazonia, agro ecological options to revert the trend are quite promising. A general methodological approach for the reconstruction of sustainable landscapes in farms of the deforested Amazonian region is proposed as a conclusion. 相似文献