Publications

Tilman Hertz, Anja Klein, Maria Mancilla García, Maja Schlüter. 2025. Transforming a world that never stands still. Ecosystems and People. https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2025.2469859

Process-relational perspectives (PRP) have been put forward as a crucial contribution for conceptualizing radical transformations towards sustainability. This is because PRP conceptualize transformations as open processes. This openness is attributed, first, to processes and relations having performative power, which means that processes and relations are constitutive of elements. Second, PRP take processes and relations as co...

Nico Wunderling, Annika Högner, Tessa Möller, Paul Ritchie, Johan Rockström, Norman Steinert, Jonathan F. Donges. 2025. Increased climate tipping risks from temperature overshoots. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-15540

In Paris 2015, the global community agreed to keep global warming well below 2.0°C aiming to limit it to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. However, recent research has shown that overshooting this temperature guardrail is becoming increasingly likely and several climate data teams across the world recorded 2024 as the first individual year with a global warming level above 1.5°C. Such temperature levels endanger critical com...

Woi Sok Oh, Wolfram Barfuss, Kelsea Best, Jonathan Donges, Simon Levin, Daniel Rubenstein. 2025. Timing dynamics of internal displacement in Somalia vary depending on the coincidence with local political and climatic conditions. Research Square. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-4752717/v2

Human migration is one of the defining topics of our time, but the dynamics of when and how often migration events occur are poorly understood. Often, a single, context-unaware model is assumed without empirical evidence. Spatiotemporal dependencies and heterogeneities cannot be explained by such a viewpoint. These gaps produce misunderstanding of migration, leading to imprecise predictions and ineffective responses. To addres...

André Pinto da Silva, Nielja Knecht, Romain Thomas, Romi Lotcheris, Beatrice Crona, Juan Rocha. 2025. Challenges and opportunities when assessing exposure of financial investments to ecosystem regime shifts. EcoevoRxiv. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2X335

Financial investments will be affected by ecological regime shifts through the loss of natural resources underpinning dependencies of most economic sectors. We suggest one possible pathway to link industry and products to the likelihood of ecological regime shifts. The challenges and opportunities are discussed at each step, including datasets, methods and metrics. To this end, we identify recent large-scale, state-of-the-art ...

Chuixiang Yi, Max Rietkerk, John M Anderies, Deliang Chen, Vasilis Dakos, Paul D L Ritchie, Juan C Rocha, Manjana Milkoreit, Courtney Quinn. 2025. Principles for guiding future research on resilience and tipping points. Environmental Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/adb7f3

The world is currently experiencing a series of dramatic changes, from the consequences of global warming, flooding, forest fires and drought-induced forest mortality to the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical conflicts. These events have elevated the concepts of resilience and tipping points into widespread use across various disciplines. However, each discipline often interprets and defines these concepts differently, leading...

Rachel Mazac, Minna Kaljonen, Kaisa Kurki, Niko Räty, Sanja Tuovila, Iryna Herzon. 2025. Planetary plate puzzle. International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2025.2501067

The debate around dietary change, particularly the importance of culturally acceptable changes, has become highly polarised, hindering societal transitions towards sustainability. Serious games have been used as effective deliberation tools fostering safe spaces for co-creation and respectful participation. We designed a serious game, the Planetary Plate Puzzle, aimed at investigating ecologically and culturally sufficient die...

Ana Paula Dutra Aguiar, David Collste, Sofia Cortés-Calderón, Taís Sonetti-González, Minella Alves-Martins, Antonio J. Castro, Amadou Diallo, Karl Martin Eriksson, Deborah Goffner, Zuzana V. Harmáčková, Amanda Jiménez-Aceituno, María D. López-Rodríguez, María Mancilla-García, Veronica Olofsson, Aldrin Martin Pérez Marin, Francisco Gilney Silva-Bezerra, Hanna Sinare, Claire Stragier. 2025. Unraveling deep roots in drylands: a systems thinking participatory approach to SDGs. Global Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2025.6

Achieving sustainability on the ground poses a challenge in decoding globally defined goals, such as sustainable development goals, and aligning them with local perspectives and realities. This decoding necessitates the understanding of the multifaceted dimensions of the sustainability challenges in a given context, including their underlying causes. In case studies from Brazilian drylands, we illustrate how an enhanced multis...

Paula Andrea Sánchez-García, Barbara Schröter, Torsten Krause, Andrew Sean Merrie, Laura Pereira, Jonas Østergaard Nielsen, Lasse Loft. 2025. A decolonial and participatory research approach to envision equitable transformations toward sustainability in the Amazon. Futures. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2025.103638

How people relate to and see themselves as part of nature relations differs worldwide and often depends on culture and worldviews. Nonetheless, challenging the dominant Euro-Western epistemic domination is needed to attain more equitable and sustainable future visions. This change entails fostering decolonial mediation between different knowledge systems in a context of intersectional difference. The collective struggles of Bl...

Gianelli, I., Trimble, M., Juri, S., Pereira, L.M., González-Mon, B., Villasante, S.. 2025. The seeds’ substrate: a concept to understand how transformations toward Good Anthropocenes can be enabled. Ecology and Society. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-15792-300138

The importance of connectedness in laying the ground for social-ecological transformations or in spreading new ideas and practices for transformation is increasingly recognized. However, the role of networks in supporting the emergence and growth of seeds (initiatives with the potential to positively shape the future) has not yet been comprehensively studied empirically. To this end, we introduce a novel concept, the seeds’ su...

Johan Rockström, Jonathan F. Donges, Ingo Fetzer, Maria A. Martin, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Katherine Richardson. 2025. Publisher Correction: Planetary Boundaries guide humanity’s future on Earth. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-025-00696-5