Livestream, Wed 9 AM Stockholm time: Food security & biodiversity conservation

By Joern Fischer

Tomorrow morning at 9 AM, we’ll be live streaming a session from Resilience 2017. The live stream will be on youtube, namely here. After the event, the session should still be there as a video. We hope we’ll get the technology to cooperate with us!

Reconciling food security and biodiversity conservation in farming landscapes

C1/C2 (250), 09:00 – 10:30, Chair/s: Jan Hanspach, Joern Fischer

Providing food security and safeguarding biodiversity are two of the most prominent challenges facing humanity in the 21st century and it unclear how they possibly could be reconciled in the future. As the topic is complex and the discussion around it is often biased by disciplinary backgrounds, we propose a session where we bring together researchers from different disciplines and with different perspectives in order to transcend conceptual barriers. The presenters will be asked to address specifically how to transcend these barriers in order to reconcile food security and biodiversity conservation in farming landscapes.

Speakers and Abstracts

Rewiring food systems to enhance human health and biosphere stewardship
Line Gordon, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm, Sweden

Integrating biodiversity in agriculture
Teja Tscharntke, Agroecology, Göttingen University, Göttingen, Germany, Göttingen, Germany

Perspectives on biodiversity in Ethiopian heterogeneous agricultural landscapes
Kristoffer Hylander, Department of Ecology, Environment and Plant Science, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

Indirect contributions of forests to dietary diversity in Southern Ethiopia
Roseline Remans ^{1, 4}, Frédéric Baudron ², Jean-Yves Duriaux ², Terry Sunderland ^3, 1 Bioversity International; Ghent University; Wageningen University & Research, Koekelberg, Belgium, ² International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Harare, Zimbabwe, ³ Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Bogor, Indonesia, ⁴ Bioversity International, Heverlee, Belgium

Can We Successfully Be Ecological Without Being Deeply Social? (Answer: No.)

M. Jahi Chappell, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University, Coventry, United Kingdom, Washington State University, Pullman, United States

 

Resilience 2017: Care, knowledge and agency as a basic for ecosystem stewardship

Session summary

Johan Enqvist first summarized work in progress, outlining the findings of a systematic literature review. Based on a preliminary review, four themes (ethics, motivation, action, outcomes) were identified. These themes were then examined in more detail in approximately 1000 different papers.

Research on stewardship has increased over the last 27 years, especially with respect to “action” and “outcomes” – and these, in turn, were mostly published in natural science articles. In contrast, “ethics” initially took up approximately a third of the existing literature, but accounts for a substantially smaller fraction of current research on stewardship. Given such disparity in focus within the theme of stewardship, how can the different themes – outcomes, actions, motivation, ethics – be bridged?

Johan proposed to do this via care, knowledge and agency – at the intersection of care and knowledge, we find “ethics”; at the intersection of care and agency, we find “motivation”; and at the intersection of agency and knowledge, we find “outcomes”. Action sits at the intersection of all three key dimensions. These three dimensions to stewardship – care, agency and knowledge – thus appear to capture key aspects of stewardship literature, and manage to capture the different emphases that different researchers place on different components of stewardship. Interestingly, with respect to social-ecological work, “care”, in particular has not received as much attention as knowledge and agency.

Following this opening talk, Raphaël Mathevet continued with an ecological solidarity perspective. Ecological solidarity has in fact been enshrined in French law since 2016. It recognizes interdependence between humans and other species, and considers landscape units and watersheds, species area requirements, complementarity of different land covers, movements, metapopulation dynamics, and changes in species distributions. These ecological “needs”, in turn, are “connected” with human values and actions via the concept of “solidarity”. Ecological solidarity, in comprising human and ecological elements, thus seeks to provide guidelines or a vision for ecological stewardship, including considerations of political economy. Departure from traditional management can be “reformist vs. radical”, and “prosaic versus imaginative”. Crossing these two axes then results in four types of stewardship approach: sustainability stewardship, transformative stewardship, reformist stewardship, and adaptive stewardship. Each of these, in turn, exhibit different characteristics, strengths and weaknesses.

Rosemary Hill continued this session, drawing on her experience of working with indigenous Australians. She asked whether Johan’s framework could be applied to indigenous Australia, and how or to what extent. First, she showed that agency and care are very strong in Australian indigenous people. She continued with positive examples of “outcomes”. Examining the drivers of what constitutes success factors driving the success of indigenous land stewardship, Ro highlighted that motivation and ethics were often key factors. Having gleaned over some limitations of Johan’s framework, Ro concluded with a few suggestions for how the stewardship framework could be improved: (1) by improving reciprocity between earth and us, i.e. it’s not one-way; (2) economies need to come into it; and (3) legacy issues and barriers need to be more clearly included.

The final speaker in this session was Terry Chapin. Terry specifically focused on scaling the notion of “care”. The evolutionary instincts of people, in the first instance, support competition and greed. But at the same time, “care” is just as evident in many species – typically, it stops at the barriers of family or local community. The notion of stewardship then, requires us to scale up notions of care. In evolutionary terms, the notion of care is most useful at the small group level. But what about higher levels? Here, there may need to be interactions between ethical and instrumental motivations – where instrumental actions motivate short-term behaviour, while ethics motivate longer-term behaviours.

At the global scale, especially, ethical arguments become critically important. Many actors are notable at this scale – the UN, religious groups, NGOs, corporations and science-based organisations. Terry also reflected on the role of fear: will fear always stop us from action? Or can it help foster action in some instances?

In summary, Terry suggested that instrumental and care-based actions may need to be mixed. This is because people are, fundamentally, motivated by both competition and care. Local action can work, drawing on both care and selfishness. But at the global scale, competition based elements are less helpful – here, it really appears to be care that is more important in order to enact ecological stewardship.

Resilience 2017: Opening plenary

Today, “Resilience 2017” started with a joint presentation by Carl Folke and Katrina Brown. I was intrigued by the idea of a joint presentation – outlining what has been achieved in resilience science so far, and what some of the future frontiers might be.

Resilience, Calle explained, was a highly dynamic concept, capturing the ability to live with change – both gradual and rapid. Related to this then are the notions of adaptability versus transformation; where you either keep things going the way they are, or change things fundamentally.

Calle argued that transformation was increasingly necessary so that we come in tune with the Earth System and remain within planetary boundaries. While on the one hand there are many challenges – with increasing variance or “flickering” sending us warning signals that things might change in major ways in the near future – Carl emphasized that there were also important opportunities. Most of these, in turn, relate to social change; changing social norms, values, institutions and mindsets.

Kate then picked up these ideas, and reflected on how social aspects had increasingly entered resilience thinking. Kate’s presentation focused on 4 + 2 times the letter “P”.

She started with a focus on people. People, she argued were the critical, active agents in social-ecological systems. That said, poverty was one of the big barriers to people’s agency. Kate also highlighted that resilience thinking has prominently entered (and is sometimes becoming mainstream) in development arenas – providing opportunities to bring more dynamic perspectives into development scholarship and practice. Power and politics were the next issue Kate picked up. In this context, social resistance comes up as an important notion – that is, people working to disrupt status quo systems, thus representing an opportunity for social change. The fourth “P” relates to place. Indeed, place is central to understanding resilience; it relates to people’s rootedness in physical locations, with implications for their mobility and management of natural resources.

Both Calle and Kate then highlighted some of their key points. Calle’s were:

1. Humanity is part of the biosphsere – we’re not just lined but intertwined
2. Our situation is about global social-ecological change – not just climate change
3. We need to think about the future of people as part of Earth – not just the environment
4. A resilient biosphere is the basis for development, wellbeing, and health
5. Transformation to global sustainability is necessary, possible, and desirable

Two key frontiers that Kate pointed out were first “perspective taking: empathy”. What does it mean to be human? To be part of a social-ecological system? Could empathy building with the non-human world help us live more sustainably with non-human species, and with “others” in our own species?

Kate’s final point was “practice” – the actual putting into place resilience research and its findings. This, in turn, raised a whole lot of difficult questions for how we ought to engage with the world as researchers; and how we need to question quite deeply our ways of dealing with others, reflecting on our methods, but even on our emotions. Research, Kate argued, needed to be done differently, so we can better support the transition to sustainability; but also acknowledging more fully our roles as researchers in the process.

Calle finally concluded by calling for a New Renaissance – a growing, but deep recognition that we need to wake up to the fact that we need to live differently with and on the planet that supports us. On this basis, biosphere stewardship, was a necessary approach to remain within planetary boundaries, while working to improve human wellbeing.

Our research at Resilience 2017

By Joern Fischer

Next week much of our research group will be attending “Resilience 2017” in Stockholm, a major international conference on social-ecological systems. We’ll be live-streaming a session on food security and biodiversity conservation (stay tuned here for details, and check our twitter account!), and several researchers from our group will be presenting interim findings.

If you’re interested in attending any of the talks by our group, here is an overview, including links to the Abstracts.

Monday 21 August 2017

Session on Governance and social-ecological fit; Multi-level governance and biosphere stewardship; Room 26 (50); 14:00 – 14:40
This will include: Harmonizing food security and biodiversity governance: A multi-level governance analysis with the case study in Ethiopia, Tolera Senbeto Jiren, Ine Dorresteijn, Arvid Bergsten, Neil Collier, Julia Leventon, Joern Fischer. ABSTRACT.

Session on Transformative agency Part I, Social-ecological transformations for sustainability, C1/C2 (250); 14:00 – 15:30
This will include: Inside-out sustainability: The role of inner transformation for system change. Rebecca Freeth, Christopher Ives, Joern Fischer. ABSTRACT.

Session on Ecosystem Services Mapping, Tradeoffs and Synergies: Approaches and methods for understanding social-ecological system dynamics; Room 35/36 (72); 16:00 – 16:40
This will include: From trade-offs to synergies in food security and biodiversity conservation. Jan Hanspach, David Abson, Neil Collier, Ine Dorresteijn, Jannik Schultner, Joern Fischer. ABSTRACT.

Session on Ecosystem services and stewardship: Multi-level governance and biosphere stewardship; C3 (180); 16:00 – 16:40
This will include: Local peoples’ woody plant species use, access and conservation in rural landscapes: a case study from southwest Ethiopia. Girma Shumi Dugo, Jannik Schultner, Jan Hanspach, Kristoffer Hylander, Feyera Senbeta, Joern Fischer. ABSTRACT.

Tuesday 22 August 2017

Session on Governance and social-ecological fit: Multi-level governance and biosphere stewardship; Room 24/25 (70); 11:00 – 11:40
This will include: A multilevel network model of institutional fit between an actor network and multiple cross-sector issues. Arvid Bergsten, Tolera Senbeto, Julia Leventon, Joern Fischer. ABSTRACT.

Session on Pathways and leverage points for transformative change: Social-ecological transformations for sustainability; C4 (125); 11:50 – 12:30
This will include: Leverage points for sustainability transformation in human–nature connections. Maraja Riechers, Agnes Balazsi, Tibor Hartel, Joern Fischer. ABSTRACT.

Session on Resilience and Wellbeing: Cross-cutting perspectives on resilience; Room 33 (30); 15:30 – 16:10
This will include: Environmental degradation erodes household capital assets and undermines resilience and food security. Aisa Manlosa, Ine Dorresteijn, Jannik Schultner, Joern Fischer. ABSTRACT.

Wednesday 23 August

Contributed session on Reconciling food security and biodiversity conservation in farming landscapes; C1/C2 (250); 09:00 – 10:30; Chair/s: Jan Hanspach, Joern Fischer.
Speakers will include Teja Tscharntke, Roseline Remans, Jahi Chappell, Kristoffer Hylander and Line Gordon. This session will be live streamed. Stay tuned on this blog and on our twitter account for details! Session summary and Abstracts can be found here.

Additional talks by colleagues from Leuphana University

MONDAY: In the session Drivers and outcomes of altered landscapes; Connectivity and cross-scale dynamics in the Anthropocene; Room 27 (60); 14:00 – 14:40, you will hear:
Exploring sustainable biophysical human-nature connectedness at regional scales. Christian Dorninger, Henrik von Wehrden, David J. Abson.

MONDAY: In the session Food, Agriculture and Resilience: Cross-cutting perspectives on resilience; Room 24/25 (70); 14:50 – 15:30, you will hear:
Is food security and sovereignty influenced by informal labor sharing among smallholders? Arvid Bergsten.

MONDAY: In the session Communities and resilience practices: Cross-cutting perspectives on resilience; C1/C2 (250); 16:00 – 17:30, you will hear:
Effects of the “back to the land” movement for rural sustainability a case study from Spain. Elisa Oteros-Rozas, Álvaro Fuentes, Berta Martín-López, Claudia Bieling, Daniel López, Federica Ravera, Francisco Martin-Azcárate, Irene Iniesta-Arandia.

WEDNESDAY: In the session Integrating gender and feminist research into global environmental change: Theory, Methods, and Practice; Contributed session – Approaches and methods for understanding social-ecological system dynamics; Room 21 (30); 11:00 – 12:30, you will hear:
The diversity of gendered adaptation strategies to climate change of Indian farmers: a bottom-up feminist intersectional approach. Federica Ravera, Berta Martín-López, Unai Pascual, Adam Drucker

Paper recommendation: Local food sovereignty for global food security

By Joern Fischer

I’d like to recommend a new paper by my colleagues Julia Leventon and Josefine Laudan.

Leventon, J. and Laudan, J. (2017). Local food sovereignty for global food security? Highlighting interplay challenges. Geoforum 85, 23-26. (LINK)

In a nutshell, the paper addresses some largely under-recognised challenges related to food sovereignty. For example, if every location or community is sovereign, then might it not be possible that one locality negatively influences another? And how does the focus on “local” sovereignty relate to national initiatives? Can a series of local initiatives be meaningfully scaled up to nations? And then, might it not be possible that different nations affect one another negatively through their strategies of national sovereignty?

These kinds of questions are tricky, and to some (me included) it feels that the food sovereignty narrative has avoided them a bit to date.

Julia and Josefine, in their new paper, suggest to tackle questions such as these through using a framework of institutional interplay. As examples (as shown in the figure below), one might ask, how do different local food sovereignty institutions within one country influence one another? How do local scale food sovereignty institutions interact with national level institutions? How do institutions related to food sovereignty relate to one another across countries?

The answers won’t always be straightforward, and I don’t see this new paper as the final solution — but rather, it’s a refreshing perspective and a suggestion for how to tackle some of the institutional complexity that inevitably arises when working across multiple scales and governance levels, especially when “sovereignty” is held as a central goal of different (interacting) institutions.

Understanding systems through a social-ecological “landscape interface”

By Joern Fischer

Throughout the world, we witness rapid change in traditional rural landscapes. As part of the synthesis efforts of our work in Southern Transylvania, Andra Horcea-Milcu just published what is one of my favourite papers from the entire project (PDF). The paper describes two new concepts: that of the “landscape interface”, and that of the “value change debt” (or in short “value debt”). I’ll describe these concepts below, hoping the paper will be of interest to many others working on changing social-ecological systems.

Rural social-ecological systems – apart from those in frontier landscapes – are typically characterized by the gradual co-evolution of social and ecological features. These, in turn, tend to shape and in turn be reinforced by value systems that somehow “fit” the social and ecological characteristics of the landscape.

In the context of such landscapes, the landscape interface can then be understood as the central meeting point, or intersection, of social and ecological phenomena. It is where the lived experiences of people come together with biophysical realities; where these two entities shape one another. The landscape interface is shaped by the local value system, and upholds it through particular understandings of how to use the land, and how the landscape works in response to human activities. The landscape interface thus is a critical space in which sustainable land use practices can evolve and be upheld.

What happens when people spend less time in the landscape, and stop using it in traditional ways? Essentially, the landscape interface loses its prominent role in upholding sustainable land use practices. External changes take place – for example, people from elsewhere move into the region, or new land use practices are adopted that have not co-evolved with local culture or experience.

What is fascinating to observe in Southern Transylvania, is that at first glance, the landscape is relatively resilient to external change. However, upon close investigation, this resilience may in fact be a lag effect… In ecology, people speak of extinction debts when species are still present, but declining such that they will eventually go extinct. Analogous to this, land use practices in Transylvania appear to be partly upheld by a value debt. Many smallholder farmers still act according to the value systems they inherited from the past, even though the external world has changed. And thus, certain practices persist, for the benefit of sustainability – but are declining, and at risk of being lost.

When an extinction debt is identified by conservation biologists, this may come as a shock because it looks like yet another species is doomed. But it is also an opportunity: as long as the species is still there, it is possible to work with the remaining individuals, and perhaps recover its population numbers.

The value debt is similar: it is an opportunity to engage with local people facing rapid and massive landscape change at a time when they are still connected to nature; at a time when the landscape interface is still strong enough to provide a foundation for a sustainable future. The point here is not that the past will be restored: but not all has been lost thanks to the memory in the social sub-system. The value debt thus is both a warning signal and an opportunity to engage before it’s too late.

The paper (PDF) provides many additional details, especially with respect to Transylvania. We hope the concepts provided here will also be of use to better understand and work with changing human-environment interactions elsewhere.

Rethinking for sustainability: a prelude

By Dr Liz Clarke and David P. M. Lam, Leuphana University Lüneburg

At the heart of our efforts to make the shift to a sustainable world is the process of rethinking. Rethinking what is important to us, how we should live, what makes us happy, what ‘nature’ means to us, of questioning the very foundations of our assumptions, beliefs, values, and rules, all of which make up the fabric of how we understand the world. And what is sustainability if not an idea, an aspiration, a way of rethinking?

A few weeks ago, we facilitated a workshop in Sighisoara, under the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains and within sight of the towers and rooftops of the ancient birthplace of the legendary Count Dracul (or Vlad the Impaler as he was known to his fearful Transylvanian countrymen and women).

With participants from various Non-Governmental Organisations in Southern Transylvania we did some of this rethinking. All of these participants are engaged in change – change for sustainability, better livelihoods, and a better future. They are focusing on a wide range of projects – from protecting communal grazing rights, preserving the unique Transylvanian hay meadows, preserving biodiversity, restoring heritage buildings, promoting sustainable tourism, improving livelihoods, to creating sustainable businesses.

Over the past few years, they have developed an inspiring common future vision: Balance Brings Beauty. This vision incorporates sustainable livelihoods, where tradition and nature are both valued, as well as aesthetics and wellbeing, which draws visitors to Transylvania in droves.

We sat in a hotel surrounded by some of the most committed and motivated people in the province, and we asked them to look deep within at their foundational thinking to understand what drives them to dedicate so much of their energies to this vision.

The answers were not surprising but very salient. Driving all of them was their passion, their ideas and their belief in a better future. They talked about the importance of empowerment and self-esteem, of the uniqueness of their culture and natural environment, the value of history and tradition, of happiness, fun and love. One participant said, “Without this uniqueness, I will lose my interest and love”. Improving the local economy was mentioned but as a means to an end – to create happier, safer, and more secure lives.

This positions the people of Southern Transylvania as firmly connected and integrated with this unique landscape and also with each other. What did we learn from the workshop? The journey to Balance Brings Beauty is a long one – there are many more years ahead. But rethinking is a collective and collaborative process, and happens when a group of engaged and passionate people come together to share their passion, ideas, and love for their culture and natural environment.

 

Paper recommendation: The undisciplinary journey

By Joern Fischer

The following paper just came out:

L. J. Haider, L.J., Hentati-Sundberg, J., Giusti, M., Goodness, J., Hamann, M., Masterson, V. A., Meacham, M., Merrie, A., Ospina, D., Schill, C., Sinare, H. (2017). The undisciplinary journey: early-career perspectives in sustainability science. Sustainability Science. PDF available here.

This paper should be particularly interesting to early-career researchers working in interdisciplinary environments, or themselves being “interdisciplinarians”. It should also be of interest to more established scientists who train more junior researchers in such areas, especially in sustainability science.

In a nutshell, the paper is built on the premise that a new generation of sustainability scholars is emerging. These scholars often are interdisciplinary in their orientation from the outset. This makes them different from many of the currently “senior” (i.e. older) sustainability scientists, the vast majority of whom were trained in a specific discipline, and then started to reach out to other disciplines.

But what if you start off without ever having had a strong affinity for a single traditional discipline? This is increasingly common for young sustainability scholars, and it leaves them with certain typical challenges — which are what this paper is about. For example, how do you balance depth and breadth? How can you make sure you are taken seriously by your peers, or by more senior scientists? How can you navigate institutional environments that are largely based on disciplines?

To navigate a journey of being “undisciplinary”, the paper provides a compass — a simple conceptual model that can be used to think about how to develop into a good sustainability scientist. A “good” scientist, in this sense, needs two key attributes: agility to move between different ways of thinking, and a good methodological foundation.

Agility to move between different ways of thinking is needed because sustainability is such a broad challenge — to solve problems related to forest degradation, for example, you might have to understand issues of governance, social justice, and ecology. Each of these, in turn, will have a different epistemological foundation; what counts as valid knowledge for an ecologist comes about in a different way from the knowledge deemed valid by a political scientist.

A good methodological foundation is needed because, although sustainability science is an extremely broad field, this can’t be an excuse to not base one’s insights on solid methods. This can be challenging, because the range of potentially relevant methods is vast — but to be a “good” sustainability scientist, it pays to have some clearly identifiable methodological strengths, or at least a solid methodological foundation.

The link to the paper is given above. As I said, I think it’s a nice reflection, as well as really good food for thought for scholars who either are, or are working with, the “next generation” of sustainability scientists. Well worth a read!

A blessing in disguise? Why Trump’s pull-out of the Paris Agreement may open up a window of opportunity

SUSTAINABILITY GOVERNANCE

Following his campaign promise and a period of intense speculation, on Thursday June 1, the President of the United States announced his intention to withdraw from the 2015 Climate Accord previously ratified by his predecessor, Barack Obama, claiming it undermines U.S. competitiveness and jobs, and would have a negligible impact on the world’s climate. Inevitably, the series of events were quickly compared to another defining moment in history, when, in 1997, the newly instated United States Government of George W. Bush failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol negotiated under the Clinton-Gore presidency.

World leaders were quick to condemn the unilateral decision, with the Secretary General of the United Nations calling it a “major disappointment for global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote global security”, and the leaders of France, Germany and Italy almost immediate issuing a joint statement reaffirming their strong commitment to implement the agreement.

Trump’s decision…

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Making oceans plastic free – reducing plastic bag use in Indonesia

BY JAN HANSPACH

Plastic is one of the blessing of our time – it’s cheap, it’s versatile and it’s made to last. Unfortunately, its durability is turning it more and more into a curse. Per year more then 300 million tones of new plastic are produced and only a tiny part is being recycled or properly disposed of. Plastic nowadays can virtually be found everywhere in the world from the arctic to the deep sea. Especially in the oceans, plastic is accumulating (80% coming from terrestrial sources) with unforeseeable effects on marine species and ecosystems.

Made to last – plastic garbage is everywhere and quite often it ends up in the ocean. The numbers are estimated percentages of waste items collected Bali’s biggest beach clean-up in history where more than 12.000 volunteers collected 40 tons of waste. (Credit: Making Oceans Plastic Free).

Well, this is known to most of us, but doing something about it often is tedious and takes energy and courage. A good friend of mine, Paritosha Kobbe, together with some other people, now has started an initiative with the ambitious vision of “Making oceans plastic free” and the more tangible goal of reducing plastic bag usage in Indonesia. Indonesia is the second largest producer of marine plastic garbage (China is on the infamous first place here) and plastic bags constitute a large share of it (see the waste pie chart above). Pari and his friends designed a reusable bag made from recycled plastic and today they started their crowdfunding campaign to bring this into production, raise environmental awareness and to make people in Indonesia to use fewer plastic bags. Here is a short video describing their project:

If you like, you can support the initiative through crowd-funding:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tasini-the-key-to-break-the-plastic-bag-habit

More information on the project (including press material, contacts and nice pictures) can be found here:

https://makingoceansplasticfree.com/press-kit/

Good luck with this… and maybe soon the idea will be exported to China as well!