世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems

Common understanding of the causes of land-use and land-cover change is dominated by simplifications which, in turn, underlie many environment-development policies. This article tracks some of the major myths on driving forces of land-cover change and proposes alternative pathways of change that are better supported by case study evidence. Cases reviewed support the conclusion that neither population nor poverty alone constitute the sole and major underlying causes of land-cover change worldwide. Rather, peoples’ responses to economic opportunities, as mediated by institutional factors, drive land-cover changes. Opportunities and

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The causes of land-use and land-cover change: moving beyond the myths

Sustainable Development Goals

Integrated studies of coupled human and natural systems reveal new and complex patterns and processes not evident when studied by social or natural scientists separately. Synthesis of six case studies from around the world shows that couplings between human and natural systems vary across space, time, and organizational units. They also exhibit nonlinear dynamics with thresholds, reciprocal feedback loops, time lags, resilience, heterogeneity, and surprises. Furthermore, past couplings have legacy effects on present conditions and future possibilities.

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Complexity of coupled human and natural systems

Urban Environments and Environmentalisms

The Amazon has a diverse array of social and environmental initiatives that adopt forest-based land-use practices to promote rural development and support local livelihoods. However, they are often insufficiently recognized as transformative pathways to sustainability and the factors that explain their success remain understudied. To address this gap, this paper proposes that local initiatives that pursue three particular pathways are more likely to generate improvements in social-ecological outcomes: (1) maintaining close connections with local grassroots, (2) pursuing diversity in productive activities performed and partnership choices, and (3) developing cross-scale collaborations. To test these ideas we collected and analyzed observations of 157 initiatives in Brazil and Peru, applying a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Our results show that initiatives maintaining groundedness in representing the interests and concerns of local actors while partnering with other organizations at multiple scales are more likely to develop joint solutions to social-ecological problems. Partnerships and support from external organizations may strengthen and enhance local capabilities, providing a platform for negotiating interests and finding common ground. Such diversified pathways demonstrate the power of local actors to transcend their own territories and have broader impacts in sustainability objectives. Our findings highlight the need to make governmental and non-governmental support (e.g., financial, technical, political) available according to local needs to enable local initiatives’ own ways of addressing global environmental change. 

Place-based solutions for global social-ecological dilemmas: An analysis of locally grounded, diversified, and cross-scalar initiatives in the Amazon

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Building resilience with common capital

RESUMO Examinamos narrativas sobre os valores de árvores e florestas nas leis brasileiras desde o século XVI. Progressivamente, um conjunto mais abrangente de valores associados a florestas vem sendo traduzido em regulamentações mais rigorosas e inclusivas. Além de proteger árvores e florestas por seus recursos madeireiros e não madeireiros (contribuições materiais), instrumentos legais adotaram definições e regras mais rígidas reconhecendo suas contribuições reguladoras (conservação dos solos, regulação dos regimes hídricos e mitigação das mudanças climáticas) e não materiais (significados espiritual, cultural e simbólico) para a sociedade. Tais avanços coevoluíram com interesses fundiários e narrativas opostas às florestas e aos povos indígenas e tradicionais. Continuamente, grupos de interesse resgatam narrativas ultrapassadas para retratar florestas como terras improdutivas que obstruem atividades setoriais relacionadas à agricultura, mineração e infraestrutura, gerando conflitos socioambientais e a erosão da governança ambiental. A história revela um passado de contrarreações à degradação florestal resultando em avanços e novas possibilidades de desenvolvimento socioambiental das quais o futuro da Amazônia brasileira depende.

Protegemos quando valorizamos: história da legislação florestal brasileira

Recently two distinctly different conceptualisations of insurance value of biodiversity/ ecosystems have been developed. The ecosystem framing addresses the full resilience value without singling out subjective risk preferences. Conversely, the economic framing focuses exactly on this subjective value of risk aversion, implying that the insurance value is zero for risk neutral persons. Here we analyse the differences conceptually and empirically, and relate this to the broader socio-cultural dimensions of social-ecological resilience. The uncertainty of the Anthropocene blurs the distinction between subjective/objective. We show that the economic framing has been operationalised only in specific cases while the broader literature on resilience, disaster risk reduction, and nature-based solutions tend to address the full value of resilience. Yet, the empirical literature that relates to insurance value of biodiversity is hardly consistent with resilience theory because the slow underlying variables defining resilience are rarely addressed. We suggest how the empirical literature on insurance value can be better aligned with resilience theory. Since the ecosystem framing of insurance value captures the essence of the resilience, we propose using the concept “resilience value” as it may reduce the present ambiguity in terminology and conceptualisation of insurance value of biodiversity. 

Eduardo S. Brondizio

Papers

Urban Environments and Environmentalisms

Place-based solutions for global social-ecological dilemmas: An analysis of locally grounded, diversified, and cross-scalar initiatives in the Amazon

Building resilience with common capital

Protegemos quando valorizamos: história da legislação florestal brasileira

Insurance value of biodiversity in the Anthropocene is the full resilience value