Selected current projects and research interests
Inequality and the biosphere
The project aims to identify synergies and trade-offs between reducing inequalities (SDG 10) and safeguarding the biosphere (SDGs 14 & 15). To achieve this goal we pursue three specific objectives:
Patterns: To identify and map occurrences of synergies and trade-offs between reducing inequalities and safeguarding the biosphere at different scales.
Processes: To investigate how and why inequalities influence the interactions between actors (from individuals to corporations) and the biosphere, using case studies of the seafood and palm oil industries in Indonesia.
Practice: To educate, engage and empower a variety of actors to identify and implement practical interventions that enhance synergies and minimize trade-offs to achieve sustainable development.
The Inequality and the biosphere project is financed by FORMAS. I am a senior scientific advisor to the project and actively participating in some of the research conducted there. In particular, I am leading some of the project’s synthesis work.
Applying a social ecological systems perspective to study Arctic change
MARAT
This project integrates models, local knowledge, and comparative case studies to assess the resilience of Arctic marine food webs to climate and fishing pressures, and how communities adapt or transform to such changes. In this project we develop a generic Arctic marine food web model with relevant biological features. Two in-depth case studies focus on Nunavut, Canada where we study how indigenous local knowledge and scientific understanding can inform adaptive co-management practices and on Alaska, USA where we explore the tradeoffs among commercial, touristic and subsistence fisheries of salmon and the response of its wild and domesticated populations to climate change. Finally, we develop tools to assess the adaptive and transformative capacities of Arctic communities to changes in their marine environments building on the Arctic Resilience Report.
The project is funded by Belmont Forum in collaboration with Formas.
Winners and losers in the climate casino: Arctic marine resources under climate change
This projects aims to examine climate change impacts on fish, shellfish and their fisheries in the Atlantic and Pacific Arctic shelf seas. We use a systemic approach to track main impacts of climate change through the natural and societal parts of the seas and the economic activities they support. Our interdisciplinary and comparative perspective builds on experiences from case studies to identify common and case-specific challenges, and our results will increase the understanding of climate-related challenges for Arctic marine resources and support integrated ocean management.
The project is funded by the Research Council of Norway.
Resource management with regime shifts
I model multiple aspects of resource management when the resource comes from ecosystems that could undergo abrupt change after passing a threshold. I also use behavioural experiments to investigate how groups of resource users manage their resources. Currently I investigate how to model resource harvesting and pollution release in a spatial context with regime shifts. This modeling work builds further on the work in these two discussion papers with Juan Rocha from Stockholm Resilience Centre:
Cascading regime shifts in pollution recipients and resource systems
Structural controllability and management of cascading regime shifts
Investigating the interactions between water, ecosystems and the economy
I have recently started collaborations with groups of hydrologists to investigate how water, ecosystems and the economy interact. In particular we investigate how these interactions could be modelled in a way that would be useful to study policy interventions.
Finished project: EFICA
I am also currently part of the European Fisheries Inventory in the Central Arctic Ocean (EFICA) Consortium. In that initiative I investigate ways to better inform decisions that have to be taken in a context of high uncertainty, limited information and complex interactions between nature and society, which could generate multiple surprises.
The project is funded by the European Commission.
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