Working with uncertainties: The future of integrating agriculture and biodiversity in the Muttama Creek Catchment Area, Australia.

As land-use change and agricultural intensification are key drivers of today’s biodiversity crisis, farmers are increasingly asked to display how they protect the natural environment on their farms, for example by consumers or financiers. There is also an ongoing discussion in academic circles about the best solution to protecting biodiversity in agriculture. The future of

I know that feeling: The relevance of the relation between values and knowledge for collaborative approaches

As recently more and more knowledge systems and their embedded values gain recognition in sustainability sciences, their importance for achieving more equitable, inclusive decision-making and land management become clearer as well. Sustainability sciences that only focus on underlying values can exclude certain stakeholder groups if knowledge is restricted to forms only valid according to the

Learning to turn tables – Operationalizing the leverage points perspective for empirical research

Besides many efforts to turn the tables on our planet’s path to more sustainability, the deep transformation needed in social-ecological systems so far is still missing. As mostly short-term solutions have been implemented, underlying drivers of unsustainable trajectories stay undetected. Recently, a leverage points perspective (LPP) has come more into focus as a possible approach

Should it stay or should it go? Navigating stability and transformation for managing resilience in coastal governance

As coastal systems are further challenged by increasing local economic activities and environmental drivers like climate change and its impacts, calls for improving the resilience of these systems get louder. While various global agreements such as the Paris Climate Agreement or the Aichi Biodiversity Targets include resilience as one of their goals, they do not

How to ask for the moon? Applying the Social-Ecological System Framework to Lunar Resource Systems

Everyone knows: There are no stupid questions. So, why not ask for the moon? Or more specifically, lunar resources? In their new paper, Kuhn et al. (2022) prepare for this question by working out how to ask for the moon. By applying Social-Ecological System (SES) concepts, they designed a lunar resource database to compare different

Against the current: Obstacles to knowledge co-production for Early-Career Researchers in the Marine Sciences

Knowledge co-production, the collaborative process of different types of expertise cultivating context-specific knowledge, increasingly proves to tackle sustainability issues. Social-ecological systems (SES) like marine and coastal areas face diverse challenges, among them a variety of social injustices that call for participatory approaches. While being increasingly recognized and understood in the science community, knowledge co-production is

Not seeing the forest for the trees: A call for a new slogan for global climate action

Nowadays, one cannot ignore the message of “Plant trees!” when discussing climate change mitigations. Projects like the Trillion Tree Campaign or even the new EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 focus on afforestation as the solution to combat climate change. Temperate and tropical grasslands and savannas are often targets of tree-planting projects, even though these habitats

With flying colors: New study assesses how different land-use types relate to butterfly diversity

The very hungry caterpillar needs food and shelter – and depending on its life-history traits, its requirements can be either decidedly specific or just as generic as the children’s book illustrates: A new study by Wurz et al. (2022) draws off this vast diversity and uses butterflies as a model taxon to assess effects of

Fresh fodder for future findings: Mapping plural values of grasslands and their ecosystem services

So far, ecosystem service research in grasslands has mainly focused on provisioning services and their economic values; however, calls for plural valuation have become more prominent in recent times. In fact, the inclusion of instrumental, relational and intrinsic values in an assessment of ecosystem services can reveal further reasons by which people express the importance

Bring on tomorrow: A new way of looking into the future of ecosystem services in southwestern Ethiopia

While science can do much, its chance to travel into the future is still severely limited. By applying old methods in a new way, Jiren et al. (2022) may have circumvented this issue. Scenario planning, stakeholder analysis and space-for-time substitution may all be well-used methods in various research fields, but employed together they open up