Suchergebnisse

Reintegrating wolves in human-dominated landscapes constitutes a significant conservation challenge. After decades of studying human-wolf interactions through a conflict lens, there is growing recognition that more nuanced perspectives are needed. However, this recognition has hitherto yielded few practical changes, and few have studied what underpins successful coexistence. Here we show that disproportionate focus on and resource allocation to conflict within conservation programmes risks undermining existing convivial relationships with large carnivores. Using a coexistence lens, we studied human-wolf interactions in Sanabria-La Carballeda in Spain; the region has one of the highest densities of wolves in Europe. We explored the underlying social and ecological conditions that have permitted both wolves and people to persist in the area, studied the mutual impacts, and surveyed how interactions are influenced by broader socio-economic processes. The findings of this novel approach to studying human-wildlife interactions elucidates how areas of functional coexistence have been neglected in policy, leaving them vulnerable to depopulation, low agricultural profitability, and the loss of biocultural diversity. When institutions fail to support functional coexistence, we risk losing the knowledge, the traditions and the trust of those who have sustained Europe's large carnivores, thereby undermining transitions to more convivial human-wildlife interactions in the future.

Climate compatible development (CCD) is gaining traction as a conceptual framework for mainstreaming climate change mitigation and adaptation within development efforts. Understanding whether and how CCD design processes reconcile different stakeholder preferences can reveal how the concept contends with patterns of sociocultural and political oppression that condition patterns of development. We, therefore, explore procedural justice and power within CCD design through a case study analysis of two donor-funded projects in Malawi. Findings show that donor agencies are driving design processes and involving other stakeholders selectively. While considerable overlap existed between stakeholders' "revealed" priorities for CCD, invisible power dynamics encourage the suppression of "true" preferences, reducing the likelihood that CCD will be contextually appropriate and have widespread stakeholder buy in. Visible, hidden, and invisible forms of power create barriers to procedural justice in CCD design. We present five recommendations to help policy makers and practitioners to overcome these barriers.

Over 40% of the earth's land surface are drylands that are home to approximately 2.5 billion people. Livelihood sustainability in drylands is threatened by a complex and interrelated range of social, economic, political, and environmental changes that present significant challenges to researchers, policy makers, and, above all, rural land users. Dynamic ecological and environmental change models suggest that climate change induced drought events may push dryland systems to cross biophysical thresholds, causing a long-term drop in agricultural productivity. Therefore, research is needed to explore how development strategies and other socioeconomic changes help livelihoods become more resilient and robust at a time of growing climatic risk and uncertainty. As a result, the overarching goal of this special feature is to conduct a structured comparison of how livelihood systems in different dryland regions are affected by drought, thereby making methodological, empirical, and theoretical contributions to our understanding of how these types of social-ecological systems may be vulnerable to climate change. In introducing these issues, the purpose of this editorial is to provide an overview of the two main intellectual challenges of this work, namely: (1) how to conceptualize vulnerability to climate change in coupled social-ecological systems; and (2) the methodological challenges of anticipating trends in vulnerability in dynamic environments.

It is well-recognised that to achieve long-term sustainable and resilient land management we need to understand the coupled dynamics of social and ecological systems. Land use change scenarios will often aim to understand (i) the behaviours of land management, influenced by direct and indirect drivers, (ii) the resulting changes in land use and (iii) the environmental implications of these changes. While the literature in this field is extensive, approaches to parameterise coupled systems through integration of empirical social science based models and ecology based models still need further development. We propose an approach to land use dynamics modelling based on the integration of behavioural models derived from choice experiments and spatially explicit systems dynamics modelling. This involves the specification of a choice model to parameterise land use behaviour and the integration with a spatial habitat succession model. We test this approach in an upland socio-ecological system in the United Kingdom. We conduct a choice experiment with land managers in the Peak District National Park. The elicited preferences form the basis for a behavioural model, which is integrated with a habitat succession model to predict the landscape level vegetation impacts. The integrated model allows us to create projections of how land use may change in the future under different environmental and policy scenarios, and the impact this may have on landscape vegetation patterns. We illustrate this by showing future projection of landscape changes related to hypothetical changes to EU level agricultural management incentives. The advantages of this approach are (i) the approach takes into account potential environmental and management feedbacks, an aspect often ignored in choice modelling, (ii) the behavioural rules are revealed from actual and hypothetical choice data, which allow the research to test the empirical evidence for various determinants of choice, (iii) the behavioural choice models generate probabilities of ...

Increasing concerns about global environmental change and food security have focused attention on the need for environmentally sustainable agriculture. This is agriculture that makes efficient use of natural resources and does not degrade the environmental systems that underpin it, or deplete natural capital stocks. We convened a group of 29 'practitioners' and 17 environmental scientists with direct involvement or expertise in the environmental sustainability of agriculture. The practitioners included representatives from UK industry, non-government organizations and government agencies. We collaboratively developed a long list of 264 knowledge needs to help enhance the environmental sustainability of agriculture within the UK or for the UK market. We refined and selected the most important knowledge needs through a three-stage process of voting, discussion and scoring. Scientists and practitioners identified similar priorities. We present the 26 highest priority knowledge needs. Many of them demand integration of knowledge from different disciplines to inform policy and practice. The top five are about sustainability of livestock feed, trade-offs between ecosystem services at farm or landscape scale, phosphorus recycling and metrics to measure sustainability. The outcomes will be used to guide on-going knowledge exchange work, future science policy and funding.