Natural resource governance in the face of climate change represents one of the seminal challenges of the Anthropocene. A number of innovative approaches have been developed in, among others, the fields of ecology, governance, and sustainability sciences for managing uncertainty and scarcity through a coordinated approach to natural resource governance. However, the absence of an enabling legal and regulatory framework has been identified in the literature as one of the primary barriers constraining the formal operationalization of these governance approaches. In this paper, we show how these approaches provide tools for analyzing procedural mandates across governmental levels and sectors in the natural resource governance space. We also find that there has been inadequate consideration of the potential in existing laws and regulations for cross-sectoral and multi-level coordination of natural resource governance. On this basis, we develop and apply a protocol that draws on the traditional legal method of doctrinal analysis to demonstrate how to identify existing, untapped legal capacity to promote coordinated governance of natural resources through an in-depth case study of water resources in South Africa. We then show how these untapped capacities within existing legal structures may be operationalized to improve natural resource governance. Further, this protocol is portable to other countries, provinces (states), and localities around the world.

COVID-19 posed threats for health and well-being directly, but it also revealed and exacerbated social-ecological inequalities, worsening hunger and poverty for millions. For those focused on transforming complex and problematic system dynamics, the question was whether such devastation could create a formative moment in which transformative change could become possible. Our study examines the experiences of change agents in six African countries engaged in efforts to create or support transformative change processes. To better understand the relationship between crisis, agency, and transformation, we explored how they navigated their changed conditions and the responses to COVID-19. We document three impacts: economic impacts, hunger, and gender-based violence and we examine how they (re)shaped the opportunity contexts for change. Finally, we identify four kinds of uncertainties that emerged as a result of policy responses, including uncertainty about the: (1) robustness of preparing a system to sustain a transformative trajectory, (2) sequencing and scaling of changes within and across systems, (3) hesitancy and exhaustion effects, and (4) long-term effects of surveillance, and we describe the associated change agent strategies. We suggest these uncertainties represent new theoretical ground for future transformations research.

To halt further destruction of the biosphere, most people and societies around the globe need to transform their relationships with nature. The internationally agreed vision under the Convention of Biological Diversity-Living in harmony with nature-is that "By 2050, biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaining ecosystem services, sustaining a healthy planet and delivering benefits essential for all people". In this context, there are a variety of debates between alternative perspectives on how to achieve this vision. Yet, scenarios and models that are able to explore these debates in the context of "living in harmony with nature" have not been widely developed. To address this gap, the Nature Futures Framework has been developed to catalyse the development of new scenarios and models that embrace a plurality of perspectives on desirable futures for nature and people. In this paper, members of the IPBES task force on scenarios and models provide an example of how the Nature Futures Framework can be implemented for the development of illustrative narratives representing a diversity of desirable nature futures: information that can be used to assess and develop scenarios and models whilst acknowledging the underpinning value perspectives on nature. Here, the term reflects the multiple ways in which desired nature futures can be captured by these narratives. In addition, to explore the interdependence between narratives, and therefore their potential to be translated into scenarios and models, the six narratives developed here were assessed around three areas of the transformative change debate, specifically, (1) land sparing vs. land sharing, (2) Half Earth vs. Whole Earth conservation, and (3) green growth vs. post-growth economic development. The paper concludes with an assessment of how the Nature Futures Framework could be used to assist in developing and articulating transformative pathways towards desirable nature futures.

This paper responds to recent calls to address the indivisible nature of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) framework and the related knowledge gap on how SDG targets interlink with each other. It examines how SDG targets interact in the context of a specific technology, point of care (PoC) microfluidics, and how this relates to the concept of responsible innovation (RI). The novel SDG interlinkages methodology developed here involves several steps to filter the relevant interlinkages and a focus group of experts for discussing these interlinkages. The main findings indicate that several social synergies occur when deploying PoC microfluidics, but that the environmental trade-offs may jeopardize the total progress toward the SDGs. More specifically, the environmental sacrifices (use of plastics and lack of recyclability) resulted in the product being cheaper and, thus, better accessible. This work suggests that attention should be given (and prioritized) to the use of renewable and recyclable materials without jeopardizing the accessibility of the product. This should minimize the identified trade-offs. These findings inform how analyzing SDG interlinkages relates to the responsibilities and dimensions of RI in several ways. First, analyzing SDG interlinkages helps to execute the governance responsibility by using the RI dimensions (anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness). Second, analyzing SDG interlinkages gives insights into if and how a technology relates to the do-good and avoid-harm responsibility. This is important to assess the responsiveness of the technology to ensure that the technology can become truly sustainable and leaves no one behind.

Along with climate change, population growth, and overexploitation of natural resources, urbanisation is among the major global challenges of our time. It is a nexus where many of the world's grand challenges intersect, and thus key to sustainable development. The widespread understanding of urbanisation as a successive and unidirectional transformation of landscapes and societies from a rural to an urban state is increasingly questioned. Examples from around the globe show that 'the rural' and 'the urban' are not only highly interdependent, but actually coexist and often merge in the same space or livelihood strategy. Our concept of provides an integrated theoretical framework which overcomes the rural-urban divide and can be operationalised for empirical research. is the next stringent step following the gradual widening of previous concepts from urban-centred approaches through the emphasis on urban peripheries to attempts of abolishing any distinction of a rural environment and acknowledging the highly dynamic nature of globalising urbanisation. Building on complex systems theory and assemblage thinking, our concept explores complementary aspects of the distinct epistemic worldviews dominating the natural and social sciences. Within this theoretical frame, we derive four analytical dimensions as entry points for empirical research: , , , and . Two examples illustrate how these dimensions apply, interact, and together lead to a comprehensive, insightful understanding of phenomena. Such understanding can be an effective starting point for assessing potential contributions of to long-term global sustainability.

Conservation and restoration projects often fail to engage local communities during the planning and implementation stage. In addition, when considering urban boundary ecosystems, there exists a wide range of stakeholders that must be involved in the planning process to ensure social equity in land management outcomes. Traditional methods for assessing future landscape change scenarios have been critiqued for their inability to adequately incorporate the diverse range of stakeholder values. This paper presents a multicriteria mapping study, incorporating a novel application of the Nature Futures Framework, to assess nature recovery scenarios on Brighton and Hove's Downland Estate-an urban boundary landscape surrounding the city of Brighton and Hove in Sussex, South East England. We focus on two key research outcomes. First, we assess the perceived performance of alternative nature recovery options across Nature Future value perspectives and between contrasting stakeholder groups. Second, by mapping stakeholder values from our multicriteria mapping study, we demonstrate that the Nature Futures Framework provides a robust framework within which to assess the diverse values stakeholders hold for land use change. We propose that utilizing the Nature Futures Framework, in combination with the multicriteria mapping interview technique, can form a valuable tool to elicit stakeholder values that may have been hidden, or underrepresented in traditional assessment methods, and to compare the perceived performance of alternative nature recovery scenarios between stakeholder groups.

China produces nearly half of the world's coal and more than half of the global coal-fired electricity. Its CO emissions are higher than the combined volumes of the next three world regions-the US, Europe, and India. China has announced a net-zero commitment by 2060. This timeline creates enormous pressure to maintain energy security while phasing down coal use. Despite the localized nature of China's coal production with nearly 80% of its thermal coal industry concentrated in four provinces, the dependencies are complex and extensive. Large-scale changes to energy systems will result in a range of social, cultural, and economic disruptions across China's urban, rural, and remote regions. This paper examines experiences with coal transitions in other jurisdictions and considers implications for China. We examine the drivers, successes, and failures of coal phase-down in Germany, Poland, Australia, the UK, and the US. Despite significant differences in scale and complexity, these experiences offer important insights for China as it works to meet its climate commitments.

This paper aims at exploring the economy-wide impacts of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 in Thailand. This study developed a recursive dynamic Asia-Pacific Integrated Model/Computable General Equilibrium (AIM/CGE) model of Thailand for the assessment. The macroeconomic impacts of Thailand's net-zero GHG emission targets by 2050 are analyzed relative to its 2-degree pathway. Results indicate that Thailand should put more effort in GHG mitigation actions to achieve the emissions peak by 2025 and net-zero GHG emissions by 2050. Improvement in energy efficiency; increasing electrification; expanding renewable energy utilization; deploying green hydrogen; bioenergy; carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS); and behavioral changes are the key identified pillars of decarbonization to drive Thailand towards the pathways of net-zero emissions by 2050. Results show that there is a possibility of attaining net-zero GHG emissions by 2050 at the expense of an economic loss for Thailand. The gross domestic product (GDP) loss would be as high as 8.5% in 2050 to attain net-zero emissions. Lower productivity from the energy intensive industries such as petroleum refineries, coal and lignite mining, manufacturing industries, and transport are the key contributing sectors to the GDP losses. The price of carbon mitigation would shoot up to reach USD 734 per tCOeq in 2050 from USD 14 per tCOeq in 2025 to attain net-zero emissions in 2050.

In recent years, a number of different strands within heterodox economic thinking have successfully provided more empirically robust and sociologically informed analyses of how money gets created. However, there is a tendency within these analyses to discuss the different money creation theories and institutional practices in isolation, inhibiting a broader audience from grasping the whole institutional picture. By integrating contemporary heterodox theories and the latest empirical evidence, this article therefore attempts to develop a "landscape" view of modern money creation that visualizes and explains the different ways that modern money is created. It suggests that, while it is ultimately only commercial banks that can "create" new bank deposits in customers' accounts, this may be initiated by one of institutional mechanisms: by customers "borrowing new money into existence" when commercial banks make loans; by central banks creating new money when they purchase assets such as government bonds from investors; and by the government "spending new money into existence". The article also reflects on how a clearer institutional understanding of these processes may be helpful in improving our overall capacity to think about how money creation may better serve current urgent social and environmental needs, especially in the post-COVID-19 context.

River deltas globally are highly exposed and vulnerable to natural hazards and are often over-exploited landforms. The Global Delta Risk Index (GDRI) was developed to assess multi-hazard risk in river deltas and support decision-making in risk reduction interventions in delta regions. Disasters have significant impacts on the progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, despite the strong interlinkage between disaster risk reduction and sustainable development, global frameworks are still developed in isolation and actions to address them are delegated to different institutions. Greater alignment between frameworks would both simplify monitoring progress towards disaster risk reduction and sustainable development and increase capacity to address data gaps in relation to indicator-based assessments for both processes. This research aims at aligning the GDRI indicators with the SDGs and the Sendai Framework for Disaster and Risk Reduction (SFDRR). While the GDRI has a modular indicator library, the most relevant indicators for this research were selected through a delta-specific impact chain designed in consultation with experts, communities and stakeholders in three delta regions: the Red River and Mekong deltas in Vietnam and the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) delta in Bangladesh and India. We analyse how effectively the 143 indicators for the GDRI match (or not) the SDG and SFDRR global frameworks. We demonstrate the interconnections of the different drivers of risk to better inform risk management and in turn support delta-level interventions towards improved sustainability and resilience of these Asian mega-deltas.

Food insecurity and diet-related diseases do not only have detrimental effects to human health, but are also underpinned by food systems that are environmentally unsustainable and culturally disconnected. Ensuring access to a healthy, affordable, and sustainable diet is one of the greatest challenges facing many low- and middle-income countries such as South Africa. These challenges in accessing a diverse diet often persist despite biocultural richness. For example, South Africa is globally recognised for its rich biodiversity, an ecologically unrivalled coastline, and a rich body of traditional knowledge amongst wild-food users. In this paper, we explore the potential that coastal wild foods as neglected and underutilised species (NUS) can play in local food systems in South Africa's Western Cape Province. Following a previously established transformation lab (T-Lab) method, here we report the observations and outcomes emerging from a two-day workshop held in May 2019 with a group of 40 actors involved in the local food system in diverse ways. Farmers, small-scale fishers, indigenous knowledge holders, representatives from non-profit organisations, chefs, bartenders, academics, activists, conservationists, and government officials were brought together with the aim of strengthening an emerging coalition of coastal wild food actors. Findings highlighted the existence of a fledgling economy for coastal wild foods, driven by high-end chefs. The T-Lab was essentially a tool of knowledge co-production around food system transformation and helped to surface deeply embedded issues on land, race, history, and culture that warrant engagement if a better food system is to emerge. In a country that is drought prone and vulnerable to climate change, a more resilient and sustainable food system is a necessity. But defining alternative governance systems to shift towards a healthier, more sustainable, and more equitable food system will require concerted effort across all stakeholders.

The bioeconomy seeks to replace fossil fuels with biomass in various products and industrial sectors. The dominant political bioeconomy project focuses on economic growth and aims to increase biomass demand in the EU. This can exacerbate global land use competition and pressures on ecosystems. However, this project does not consider reducing resource use to tackle biophysical limits. Technological innovations are the means for ensuring sustainability. Few social scientific studies have investigated how actors reproduce or question the dominant bioeconomy project. We contribute to this research gap by using critical policy analysis. We explore how actors address biophysical limits and assert their positions and strategies in policy conflicts stemming from the EU bioeconomy strategy. We thereby identified two central conflicts: regulating bio-based plastics and the cascading use of biomass. Our analysis included position papers, policy documents, and expert interviews. We grouped the actors based on their positions and strategies into three political bioeconomy projects. Thus, in addition to the dominant growth-oriented project, we identified a circular and sufficiency-oriented one. Our analysis indicates that these alternative projects influenced bio-based plastics and bioenergy policies to acknowledge biophysical limits. EU policy even provides measures to reduce plastic use. Nevertheless, the Renewable Energy Directive's approach to cascading use reflects a compromise with the growth-oriented project that might not cap using primary biomass for energy. Overall, we demonstrate that there are potential alliances in promoting alternatives to the dominant bioeconomy project. Setting clear limits is constrained by powerful interests advocating for a growth-oriented bioeconomy.

This article analyzes the global impacts of extractivism on human-nature bonds. To do so, we rely on socio-ecological conflict data from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice. Over 1800 cases involving resistance to the destruction of nature, cultures, cosmologies, worldviews, ancestral origins, and sacred places are analyzed using log-linear regression compared to 1600 cases that do not report such loss. The impact is especially visible when mineral ores, plantation products, and crude oil are extracted. The results indicate that affected groups are Indigenous peoples, farmers, peasants, pastoralists, and religious groups. In conflict outcomes, 79% of cases with refusal of compensation indicate impacts on human-nature bonds. Furthermore, in those cases where assassinations of activists occurred, 68% have observed impacts on human-nature bonds. Protecting human-nature bonds is a critical component for achieving social, economic, and environmental sustainability and justice against extractivism embedded in colonial relations playing against such bonds and environmental protectors.

Global challenges, such as climate change, persistent poverty, and food insecurity are complex problems. These societal, environmental, and economic challenges cross scientific disciplines, communities, and geographies, requiring interdisciplinary, North-South solutions. Nevertheless, prevailing sustainability science responses are Western-centric. Some seminal studies have attempted to understand and engage with diverse knowledge systems. These include decolonial and Indigenous methodologies, such as "Two-Eyed Seeing", which emphasizes the importance of using both Western and Indigenous knowledge to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the world, and participatory action research, which highlights the importance of involving participants in the research process and promoting social change through collaborative effort. However, apart from in-country research collaborations with traditional Indigenous knowledge, most North-South studies overlook the role or influence of Western-centric views and therefore fail to recognize and incorporate diverse worldviews and knowledge systems. This may, in part, reflect the tendency to categorize research into disciplinary silos, but more likely is the unintentional, yet prevalent, view that Western science is "objective and neutral." As more scholars from multiple disciplines and geographies focus on interdisciplinary North-South research, it is critical that researchers reflect on dominant research approaches and knowledge production. Studies can co-construct, reproduce, or control the forms of knowledge generated-whether intentional or unintentional. This paper presents an organizing framework to help researchers navigate, understand, and engage with diverse forms of knowledge in undertaking North-South research. The framework draws on empirical observations from the authors' interdisciplinary research and from empirical cross-cultural literature. It comprises three contextual levels of influence, featuring guiding principles and subsequent practical actions researchers can use to navigate the complexities of knowledge co-construction in North-South research.

Ambiguity is often recognized as an intrinsic aspect of addressing complex sustainability challenges. Nevertheless, in the practice of transdisciplinary sustainability research, ambiguity is often an 'elephant in the room' to be either side-stepped or reduced rather than explicitly mobilized in pursuit of solutions. These responses threaten the salience and legitimacy of sustainability science by masking the pluralism of real-world sustainability challenges and how research renders certain frames visible and invisible. Critical systems thinking (CST) emerged from the efforts of operational researchers to address theoretical and practical aspects of ambiguity. By adapting key concepts, frameworks, and lessons from CST literature and case studies, this paper aims to establish (1) an expansive conceptualization of ambiguity and (2) recommendations for operationalizing ambiguity as a valuable means of addressing sustainability challenges. We conceptualize ambiguity as , and propose Reflexive Boundary Critique (RBC) as a novel framework to help navigate these boundary processes. Our characterization of ambiguity acknowledges the boundary of a researcher's subjective orientation and its influence on how ambiguity is exposed and mediated in research (being), characterizes knowledge as produced through the process of making boundary judgments, generating a partial, contextual, and provisional frame (knowing), and situates a researcher as part of the complexity they seek to understand, rendering any boundary process as a form of intervention that reinforces or marginalizes certain frames and, in turn, influences action (intervening). Our recommendations for sustainability scientists to operationalize ambiguity include (1) nurturing the reflexive capacities of transdisciplinary researchers to navigate persistent ambiguity (e.g., using our proposed framework of RBC), and (2) grappling with the potential for and consequences of theoretical incommensurability and discordant pluralism. Our findings can help sustainability scientists give shape to and embrace ambiguity as a fundamental part of rigorous sustainability science.

European agri-food systems must overcome structural lock-ins to achieve more sustainable modes of production and consumption. Yet European regions are highly diverse, and we lack understanding of how different regional characteristics may enable or inhibit sustainability transitions. This hinders the development of context-tailored governance strategies. In this paper, we identify and apply sets of spatial indicators to map the regional potentials for agri-food transitions. We first analyse the strength of lock-in to the incumbent agro-industrial paradigm. We then map the enabling environments for two alternative agri-food networks-multifunctional value chains and civic food networks-that each embed distinct social-ecological qualities of agriculture and food. Results demonstrate a large spatial diversity in transition potential, with stronger lock-ins throughout North and Western Europe and stronger enabling environments for agri-food transitions in Italy, France, Switzerland, and Southwest Germany. We find that lock-ins are strongest in livestock-dominated regions and are associated with higher GHG emissions and excess nitrogen levels. Our study demonstrates the need for coordinated public policies that (1) leverage region-specific transition potentials and (2) enable complementary innovations in market-based and community-led networks.

The modern global food system is highly unsustainable, shaped by industrialisation and corporate consolidation, with negative repercussions on the environment and biodiversity as well as human health. This paper looks at the burgeoning economy in neglected and underutilised species (NUS) in the Western Cape, South Africa, as a potential innovation that could make the local food system more socially and ecologically resilient. Although, at present, NUS are only marginally included in the local food system and policy discussions, NUS increasingly appear in the high-end food industry, driven by international gastronomic trends. These species hold potential as climate resilient, nutritionally dense, and socially and culturally significant foods in the region, but they also carry ecological and social risks. We critically examine the fledgling NUS economy in the Cape Town area to unpack the motivations and challenges associated with the potentially transformative inclusion of these foods into the local food system. We demonstrate that the main risks associated with NUS are negative ecological repercussions, privatisation of the NUS economy, and the reproduction and further entrenchment of unequal power and race dynamics in the region. To mitigate these risks and actualise the related benefits associated with NUS, engagement with the ecological, social, and political context of NUS needs to be significantly deepened. This is particularly true for those working in the high-end food industry, who appear to be driving the NUS economy, and will require education around sustainability and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), as well as a foregrounding awareness of power dynamics.

A number of labeling systems based on text have been proposed to help monitor work on the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Here, we present a systematic comparison of prominent SDG labeling systems using a variety of text sources and show that these differ considerably in their sensitivity (i.e., true-positive rate) and specificity (i.e., true-negative rate), have systematic biases (e.g., are more sensitive to specific SDGs relative to others), and are susceptible to the type and amount of text analyzed. We then show that an ensemble model that pools SDG labeling systems alleviates some of these limitations, exceeding the performance of the individual SDG labeling systems considered. We conclude that researchers and policymakers should care about the choice of the SDG labeling system and that ensemble methods should be favored when drawing conclusions about the absolute and relative prevalence of work on the SDGs based on automated methods.

There is an ongoing trend toward more frequent and multiple crises. While there is a clear need for behaviors to become more sustainable to address the climate crisis, how to achieve this against the backdrop of other crises is unknown. Using a sample of 18,805 participants from the UK, we performed a survey experiment to investigate if communication messages provide a useful tool in nudging intentions toward improved sustainability in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that, despite the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, media messaging resulted in increases in sustainability-related intentions for all our communication messaging conditions. Specifically, after our communication was presented, (i) almost 80% of people who were not currently recycling their surgical masks reported their intention to do so; there was a > 70% increase in both (ii) the number of people likely to pick up face mask litter and (iii) the number of people willing to disinfect and reuse their filtering facepiece (FFP) masks 4-6 times, while (iv) there was an increase by 165% in those who would wash cloth masks at 60 °C. Our results highlight that communication messaging can play a useful role in minimizing the trade-offs between multiple crises, as well as maximizing any synergies. To support this, decision-makers and practitioners should encourage the delivery of sustainability advice via multiple sources and across different types of media, while taking steps to address potential misinformation.

The dominant narrative to motivate business actors to take climate actions emphasizes opportunities to increase monetary gains, linking sustainability to the financial goals of these organizations. The prevalence of monetary motivations in sustainability communication among businesses, consultancies, academics and international organizations has made this narrative a truism in the private sector. We conducted an online, real-world, large- experiment to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of different motivations using narrative communication. We show that non-monetary narratives highlighting prosocial or achievement motivations are 55% more effective in creating responses from businesses than narratives emphasizing monetary gains. These findings are robust across most narrative and audience characteristics, including age and language. Our findings suggest that communication towards business leaders around sustainability can be multi-pronged and should incorporate prosocial and achievement motivations aside from articulating potential financial benefits.

Intertwined within a patchwork of different types of land use and land cover, novel ecosystems are urban ecosystems that have no historical analogues and contain novel species assemblages. Some researchers and practitioners in the field of conservation and restoration regard urban novel ecosystems unworthy of concern, while other groups call for their preservation due to the rate of biodiversity loss in cities and limited access to nature among some social groups. However, very little is known about how people perceive novel ecosystems (such as informal green spaces, post-industrial or derelict land sites awaiting redevelopment, brownfield sites, vacant lots, interstitial or gap spaces) which are often characterised by assemblages of wild, spontaneous, and overgrown vegetation, but also remanent or derelict urban infrastructure in cities. This paper addresses this gap by firstly asking how people percieve assemblages of wild-looking vegetation and urban infrastructure often found in novel ecosystems and how our affective and aesthetic responses to these ecosystems affects our attitudes towards wildness in cities. To begin to unpack this question, we obtain data from a series of exploratory workshops held in four cities in the global north where we asked people 'what is urban nature?' Our findings suggest that value judgements that people ascribe to novel ecosystems are often deeply polarised, but they are influenced by different ecological and urban conditions that people encounter within them. However, some negative perceptions about novel ecosystems may be mediated by situational cues; these situational cues could have important implications for rewilding and restoration programmes that aim to reconnect urban communities with nature through socio-ecological stewardship. To conclude, areas for further research that could improve our understanding of the social values of novel ecosystems in cities and the influence that these ecosystems may have on affective encounters with urban nature are proposed.