Conceptualizing a Sustainable Food System in an Automated World: Toward a “Eudaimonian” Future

The industrialized world has entered a new era of widespread automation, and although this may create long-term gains in economic productivity and wealth accumulation, many professions are expected to disappear during the ensuing shift, leading to potentially significant disruptions in labor markets and associated socioeconomic difficulties. Food production, like many other industrial sectors, has also undergone a century of mechanization, having moved toward increasingly large-scale…

Mapping the automation of Twitter communications on climate change, sustainability, and environmental crises — a review of current research.

Online social media such as the microblog Twitter are key digital arenas shaping the public discourse on important societal topics. Automated social media accounts, so-called ‘social bots,’ have emerged as a controversial phenomenon, proven to both disrupt and support online communications on topics such as political elections and public health. To what extent social bots also impact online conversations on climate change, environmental crises, and…

Principles to avoid policy paralysis

Global environmental change challenges are to their nature complex, and complexity seems to be somewhat of a buzzword in contemporary sustainability science. But too much focus on complex interactions can create a hurdle for appropriate policy decisions and even cause an uncertainty paralysis, signified by a failure to act even in the face of looming threats. Fret not, however, in a new article in the…

Feedback Nash Equilibria for Non-linear Differential Games in Pollution Control

Dynamic problems of pollution and resource management with stock externalities often require a differential games framework of analysis. In addition they are represented realistically by non-linear transition equations. However, feedback Nash equilibrium (FBNE) solutions, which are the desired ones in this case, are difficult to obtain in problems with nonlinear- quadratic structure. We develop a method to obtain numerically non-linear FBNE for a class of…

Automated framing of climate change? The role of social bots in the Twitter climate change discourse during the 2019/2020 Australia bushfires

Extreme weather-related events like wildfires have been increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change. Public online conversations that reflect on these events as climate emergencies can create awareness and build support for climate action but are also used to spread misinformation and climate change denial. To what extent automated social media accounts—“social bots”—amplify different perspectives of such events and influence climate change discourses,…

Non-linearity in ecosystem services: temporal and spatial variability in coastal protection

Natural processes tend to vary over time and space, as well as between species. The ecosystem services these natural processes provide are therefore also highly variable. It is often assumed that ecosystem services are provided linearly (unvaryingly, at a steady rate), but natural processes are characterized by thresholds and limiting functions. In this paper, we describe the variability observed in wave attenuation provided by marshes,…

Sustainability, autonomy, and benefits from forest commons

Green Certificate Trading, Renewable Portfolio Standard and Tax Burden Reductions

The article is in Chinese with an English summary: The national-wide issuance and trading of green certificates has been initiated to improve the renewable energy integration and reduce the tax burden in the feed-in tariff scheme. To test the latter effects in green certificate trading, we construct the certificate pricing model to analyze the market equilibrium with or without renewable portfolio standard requirements, and compare…

Untangling social-ecological interactions: A methods portfolio approach to tackling contemporary sustainability challenges in fisheries

Meeting the objectives of sustainable fisheries management requires attention to the complex interactions between humans, institutions and ecosystems that give rise to fishery outcomes. Traditional approaches to studying fisheries often do not fully capture, nor focus on these complex interactions between people and ecosystems. Despite advances in the scope and scale of interactions encompassed by more holistic methods, for example ecosystem-based fisheries management approaches, no…

The Social Costs of Marine Litter along the East China Sea: Evidence from Ten Coastal Scenic Spots of Zhejiang Province, China

Marine litter poses numerous threats to the global environment. To estimate the social costs of marine litter in China, two stated preference methods, namely the contingent valuation model (CVM) and the choice experiment model (CEM), were used in this research. This paper conducted surveys at ten different beaches along the East China Sea in Zhejiang province in October 2017. The results indicate that approximately 74.1%…