Publication Author: Belinda Reyers
Whose conservation, revisited: how a focus on people–nature relationships spotlights new directions for conservation science
Georgina Mace introduced a compelling perspective on the major shifts in conservation science’s framing and purpose from 1960 to 2010. A decade ago, she proposed that the conservation community had begun to move into a new framing of ‘people and nature’ based on changes in perspectives on the relationships between people and nature and new interdisciplinary concepts and methods used in conservation. Progress in using…
The bii4africa dataset of faunal and floral population intactness estimates across Africa’s major land uses
Sub-Saharan Africa is under-represented in global biodiversity datasets, particularly regarding the impact of land use on species’ population abundances. Drawing on recent advances in expert elicitation to ensure data consistency, 200 experts were convened using a modified-Delphi process to estimate ‘intactness scores’: the remaining proportion of an ‘intact’ reference population of a species group in a particular land use, on a scale from 0 (no…
Synergy Solutions for a World in Crisis: Tackling Climate and SDG Action Together
The Southern African Program on Ecosystem Change and Society: An emergent community of practice
Sustainability-focused research networks and communities of practice have emerged as a key response and strategy to build capacity and knowledge to support transformation towards more sustainable, just and equitable futures. This paper synthesises insights from the development of a community of practice on social-ecological systems (SES) research in southern Africa over the past decade, linked to the international Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS)….
SPOTLIGHT 1.4 People-planet relationships in an uncertain, unsettled world
Social-ecological change: insights from the Southern African Program on Ecosystem Change and Society
Social-ecological systems (SES) research has emerged as an important area of sustainability science, informing and supporting pressing issues of transformation towards more sustainable, just and equitable futures. To date, much SES research has been done in or from the Global North, where the challenges and contexts for supporting sustainability transformations are substantially different from the Global South. This paper synthesises emerging insights on SES dynamics…
Navigating the dynamics of people-planet relationships: A social-ecological systems perspective
People-planet interactions and interdependencies connect sectors and scales in complex, changing ways; those changes can be incremental or abrupt, expected or surprising. Climate change, rising inequalities, biodiversity loss, food insecurity and other global problems involve interlinked cross-scale systems driven by feedbacks that connect far-flung localities to one another and link local to global, such that actions in one place often impact far distant places or…
Why care about theories? Innovative ways of theorizing in sustainability science
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) contextualized, constantly changing, and build on…
The contributions of resilience to reshaping sustainable development
We review the past decade’s widespread application of resilience science in sustainable development practice and examine whether and how resilience is reshaping this practice to better engage in complex contexts. We analyse six shifts in practice: from capitals to capacities, from objects to relations, from outcomes to processes, from closed to open systems, from generic interventions to context sensitivity, and from linear to complex causality….