The planetary boundaries framework defines a safe operating space for humanity based on the intrinsic biophysical processes that regulate the stability of the Earth system. Here, we revise and update the planetary boundary framework, with a focus on the underpinning biophysical science, based on targeted input from expert research communities and on more general scientific advances over the past 5 years. Several of the boundaries now have a two-tier approach, reflecting the importance of cross-scale interactions and the regional-level heterogeneity of the processes that underpin the boundaries. Two core boundaries—climate change and biosphere integrity—have been identified, each of which has the potential on its own to drive the Earth system into a new state should they be substantially and persistently transgressed.

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Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet

Protecting the world’s freshwater resources requires diagnosing threats over a broad range of scales, from global to local. Here we present the first worldwide synthesis to jointly consider human and biodiversity perspectives on water security using a spatial framework that quantifies multiple stressors and accounts for downstream impacts. We find that nearly 80% of the world’s population is exposed to high levels of threat to water security. Massive investment in water technology enables rich nations to offset high stressor levels without remedying their underlying causes, whereas less wealthy nations remain vulnerable. A similar lack of precautionary investment jeopardizes biodiversity, with habitats associated with 65% of continental discharge classified as moderately to highly threatened. The cumulative threat framework offers a tool for prioritizing policy and management responses to this crisis, and underscores the necessity of limiting threats at their source instead of through costly remediation of symptoms in order to assure global water security for both humans and freshwater biodiversity.

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Global threats to human water security and river biodiversity

This paper reviews the concept of adaptation of human communities to global changes, especially climate change, in the context of adaptive capacity and vulnerability. It focuses on scholarship that contributes to practical implementation of adaptations at the community scale. In numerous social science fields, adaptations are considered as responses to risks associated with the interaction of environmental hazards and human vulnerability or adaptive capacity. In the climate change field, adaptation analyses have been undertaken for several distinct purposes. Impact assessments assume adaptations to estimate damages to longer term climate scenarios with and without adjustments. Evaluations of specified adaptation options aim to identify preferred measures. Vulnerability indices seek to provide relative vulnerability scores for countries, regions or communities. The main purpose of participatory vulnerability assessments is to identify adaptation strategies that are feasible and practical in communities. The distinctive features of adaptation analyses with this purpose are outlined, and common elements of this approach are described. Practical adaptation initiatives tend to focus on risks that are already problematic, climate is considered together with other environmental and social stresses, and adaptations are mostly integrated or mainstreamed into other resource management, disaster preparedness and sustainable development programs. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Adaptation, adaptive capacity and vulnerability

Over the past few decades, a new form of governance has emerged to replace adversarial and managerial modes of policy making and implementation. Collaborative governance, as it has come to be known, brings public and private stakeholders together in collective forums with public agencies to engage in consensus-oriented decision making. In this article, we conduct a meta-analytical study of the existing literature on collaborative governance with the goal of elaborating a contingency model of collaborative governance. After reviewing 137 cases of collaborative governance across a range of policy sectors, we identify critical variables that will influence whether or not this mode of governance will produce successful collaboration. These variables include the prior history of conflict or cooperation, the incentives for stakeholders to participate, power and resources imbalances, leadership, and institutional design. We also identify a series of factors that are crucial within the collaborative process itself. These factors include face-to-face dialogue, trust building, and the development of commitment and shared understanding. We found that a virtuous cycle of collaboration tends to develop when collaborative forums focus on ‘‘small wins’’ that deepen trust, commitment, and shared understanding. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of our contingency model for practitioners and for future research on collaborative governance. Over the last two decades, a new strategy of governing called ‘‘collaborative governance’’ has developed. This mode of governance brings multiple stakeholders together in common forums with public agencies to engage in consensus-oriented decision making. In this article, we conduct a meta-analytical study of the existing literature on collaborative governance with the goal of elaborating a general model of collaborative governance. The ultimate goal is to develop a contingency approach to collaboration that can highlight conditions under which collaborative governance will be more or less effective as an

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Collaborative governance in theory and practice

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

Water is a key element of the earth system with all its geophysical, biological, and human-social interactions. Freshwater is a prerequisite of human well-being in terms of drinking water and sanitation, food security and health, industrial processes and energy supply, transportation and recreation, and further goods and services delivered by ecosystem integrity and freshwater biodiversity. The sustainable management of water resources in times of global change poses one of the most pressing challenges for public policy in the twenty-first century. Global demand for freshwater has skyrocketed with population expansion, income growth, and technological development. The resulting strains on supply create not only environmental pressures but social tensions as well, given that freshwater resources are unequally distributed among world regions, countries, and social groups. Water scarcity and conflicts over the allocation of water resources are already widespread around the world. One-third of humanity already lives under water stress today, and one-fifth of the world's people do not have access to safe drinking water. Freshwater ecosystems are the most degraded and endangered of the planet's habitats. Under contemporary global change, the inequality of water distribution is increasing, and threats from water extremes like droughts and floods are growing. The importance of securing world water resources is increasingly recognized not only by researchers across the academic disciplines, but also by policymakers and the general public. Yet although a global discourse about water issues has evolved over the last five decades, a clear global governance framework has still not emerged. This omission is the more remarkable when one considers that, unlike governance of many other environmental and resource issues, water management has a very long history. It can be traced back 5,000 years to the ancient civilizations of the Nile, the Indus, the Euphrates, and the Tigris. Nevertheless, global regimes for water have been much slower to emerge than global governance of, for example, climate change and ozone depletion. As ecological, social, and economic interdependence on a planetary scale grows, the need to govern water in global terms becomes all the more urgent. Yet how can global public policy on this issue be promoted when local and national arrangements have become entrenched over a very long period of time? How can new global elements of water management be intertwined with local, national, and regional aspects to create multilevel arrangements that provide effective and legitimate governance of this vital resource? In spite of the clearly evident scientific and political challenges, global water governance has not yet received the research attention it needs. To improve this situation, the Global Water System Project (GWSP) was created in 2005 to, among other things, build capacity and networks among global water governance scholars. The GWSP organized a workshop in June 2006 to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines working on global aspects of water policy. This special issue of Global Governance includes a collection of major articles presented at that workshop. The five articles published here highlight the need for adopting a global perspective on water governance. With regard to theory, the articles consider how to conceive of global water governance. In terms of empirical analysis, the articles provide in-depth analysis of specific global water issues, with particular emphasis on delineating the links between the river basin level and the global level. The case studies span different continents and cover a variety of institutional, cultural, economic, and environmental conditions. Taking the five articles in order, the opening piece by Claudia Pahl-Wostl, Joyeeta Gupta, and Daniel Petry analyzes global governance of water with emphasis on the role of network governance and on the use of governance typologies--in particular, the mobius-web concept developed by James Rosenau. …

Introduction: Global Governance of Water

We present and analyze 10 case studies of participatory river-basin management that were conducted as part of the European HarmoniCOP project. The main theme was social learning, which emphasizes the importance of collaboration, organization, and learning. The case studies show that social learning in river-basin management is not an unrealistic ideal. Resistance to social learning was encountered, but many instances of social learning were found, and several positive results were identified. Moreover, 71 factors fostering or hindering social learning were identified; these could be grouped into eight themes: the role of stakeholder involvement, politics and institutions, opportunities for interaction, motivation and skills of leaders and facilitators, openness and transparency, representativeness, framing and reframing, and adequate resources. Promising topics for further research include the facilitation of the social learning processes, the role of power, and interactions in political and institutional contexts.

Research, part of a Special Feature on Social Learning in Water Resources Management Social Learning in European River-Basin Management: Barriers and Fostering Mechanisms from 10 River Basins

The theoretical framework introduced in Chap. 8 is a necessary but not sufficient condition for developing a profound understanding of transformation towards sustainability. Theoretical propositions should be supported by sound empirical evidence. An appropriate research design needs to capture as much of the complexity of processes in governance systems as possible. This suggests a comparative case-study approach and methodological pluralism. One problem arises: the processes of transformation and change occur over long time scales. Ideally longitudinal studies should be conducted that compare trajectories of change over decades. Alternatively, cases can be compared at different stages of development and transformative change. In order to compare insights from a range of cases and case study designs it is important to have a sound methodology and standardized data collection approaches.

A Methodological Framework for Empirical Analysis

Dieses Policy-Paper ist das wichtigste Ergebnis des ZA-NExUS-Projekts, das wissenschaftlich basierte Optionen fur die kunftige Ausgestaltung der Agrarpolitik aus der Perspektive des Natur- und Umweltschutzes formulieren sollte. Es wurde im Januar 2017 auf einer Pressekonferenz mit der damaligen Bundesministerin Dr. Barbara Hendricks der Offentlichkeit vorgestellt. Ausgehend vom Konzept eines zukunftsfahigen Gesellschaftsvertrags mit der Landwirtschaft wird eine neue Architektur der Agrarpolitik mit folgenden Kernelementen vorgeschlagen: Pramien fur Landschaftsvielfalt und fur Basismasnahmen im Agrarumwelt- und Klimaschutz, regionale Agrarumwelt- und Klimaschutzprogramme, ein Kooperationsprogramm Natur und Landwirtschaft sowie ein effektives Ordnungsrecht. Hinzu kommt ein Innovationsprogramm zur Entwicklung von Mehrwertmarkten fur umweltfreundliche Produkte durch Verbraucherkommunikation, praxisorientierte Forschung und Beratung.

Ein zukunftsfähiger Gesellschaftsvertrag mit der Landwirtschaft: Plädoyer für eine neue Agrarpolitik

In Chapter 3, I defined adaptive capacity as the ability of a governance system to alter processes and to adapt its structural elements in response to current or anticipated changes in the social or natural environment. Transformative capacity was defined as the ability of a governance system to first adapt and if required transform structural elements in response to current or anticipated changes in the social or natural environment.

Claudia Pahl-Wostl

Papers

Introduction: Global Governance of Water

Research, part of a Special Feature on Social Learning in Water Resources Management Social Learning in European River-Basin Management: Barriers and Fostering Mechanisms from 10 River Basins

A Methodological Framework for Empirical Analysis

Ein zukunftsfähiger Gesellschaftsvertrag mit der Landwirtschaft: Plädoyer für eine neue Agrarpolitik

The Role of Institutions, Actors and Social Networks in Societal Change