Publications

Jan Bebbington, Robert Blasiak, Carlos Larrinaga, Shona Russell, Madlen Sobkowiak, Jean-Baptiste Jouffray, Henrik Österblom. 2024. Shaping nature outcomes in corporate settings. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0325

Transnational companies have substantive impacts on nature: a hallmark of living in the Anthropocene. Understanding these impacts through company provision of information is a precursor to holding them accountable for nature outcomes. The effect of increasing disclosures (of varying quality) is predicated on ‘information governance’, an approach that uses disclosure requirements to drive company behaviour. However, its efficac...

Jerneja Penca, Andrea Barbanti, Christopher Cvitanovic, Amel Hamza-Chaffai, Ahmed Elshazly, Jean-Baptiste Jouffray, Nezha Mejjad, Melita Mokos. 2024. Building competences for researchers working towards ocean sustainability. Marine Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2024.106132

The challenges of achieving just, equitable and sustainable ocean futures require a new type of transdisciplinary and action-oriented science that integrates across disciplines and knowledge systems. Scientists and researchers in academia, industry or government, who contribute to knowledge creation, innovation, and policy development for the ocean, must be empowered with a fresh set of competences. This paper maps the knowled...

Therese Lindahl, John M. Anderies, Anne-Sophie Crépin, Krisztina Jónás, Caroline Schill, Juan Camilo Cárdenas, Carl Folke, Gert Jan Hofstede, Marco A. Janssen, Jean-Denis Mathias, Stephen Polasky. 2024. Titanic lessons for Spaceship Earth to account for human behavior in institutional design. npj Climate Action. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-024-00135-z

Combating environmental degradation requires global cooperation. We here argue that institutional designs for such efforts need to account for human behavior. The voyage of the Titanic serves as an analogous case to learn from, and we use behavioral insights to identify critical aspects of human behavior that serve as barriers or opportunities for addressing the challenges we face. We identify a set of public goods that may he...

José Posada-Marín, Juan Salazar, Maria Cristina Rulli, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Fernando Jaramillo. 2024. Upwind moisture supply increases risk to water security. Nature Water. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-024-00291-w

Transboundary assessments of water security typically adopt an ‘upstream’ perspective, focusing on hazards and vulnerabilities occurring within a given hydrological basin. However, as the moisture that provides precipitation in the hydrological basin probably originates ‘upwind’, hazards and vulnerabilities potentially altering the moisture supply can be overlooked. Here we perform a global assessment of risk to water security...

Patrick W. Keys, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Michele-Lee Moore, Agnes Pranindita, Fabian Stenzel, Olli Varis, Rekha Warrier, R. Bin Wong, Paolo D'Odorico, Carl Folke. 2024. The dry sky: future scenarios for humanity's modification of the atmospheric water cycle. Global Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.9

Human societies are changing where and how water flows through the atmosphere. However, these changes in the atmospheric water cycle are not being managed, nor is there any real sense of where these changes might be headed in the future. Thus, we develop a new economic theory of atmospheric water management, and explore this theory using creative story-based scenarios. These scenarios reveal surprising possibilities for the fu...

Anna Lena, Verena Sandner Le Gall, Jürgen Straub, Tim Niclas Höffler, Judith Bopp, Inken Carstensen-Egwuom, Libertad Chavez-Rodriguez, Cordula Dittmer, Florian Dünckmann, Kathrin Eitel, Christian Elster, Zine-Eddine Hathat, Jonas Hein, Silja Klepp, Daniel F. Lorenz, Romina Martin, Laura Otto, Martin Sarnow, Martin Voss, Rainer Wehrhahn, Sören Weißermel, Cosima Werner. 2024. Give qualitative research the recognition it deserves. Journal of Environmental Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102320

Ratcliffe et al. (2024, JEP 93, Art. 102199) raise concern about the exclusion of purely qualitative research from JEP, as proposed by Schultz and McCunn's editorial stance published in 2022. We support Ratcliffe et al.’s call for equal recognition of qualitative work alongside quantitative work in environmental psychology. Our article aims to contribute to this debate by presenting five additional points that emphasise the im...

Joyeeta Gupta, Yang Chen, David I.Armstrong Mckay, Paola Fezzigna, Giuliana Gentile, Aljoscha Karg, Luc van Vliet, Steven Lade, Lisa Jacobson. 2024. Applying earth system justice to phase out fossil fuels. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics. Springer Link. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-024-09628-y

The Paris Agreement has seen the adoption of a 1.5° to 2 °C climate target, based on the belief that climate change becomes ‘dangerous’ above this level. Since then, the scientific community and the countries most affected by global warming have reiterated that the maximum limit to be reached should be 1.5 °C. This paper goes one step further by questioning the reasoning behind the adoption of these targets, arguing that the f...

Jess Cheok, Julia van Velden, Elizabeth Fulton, Iain Gordon, Ilisapeci Lyons, Garry Peterson, Liz Wren, Rosemary Hill. 2024. Framings in Indigenous futures thinking: barriers, opportunities, and innovations. OSF. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/364xf

Human societies face existential challenges on multiple fronts: climate change, biodiversity loss, altered biogeochemical flows, social unrest and injustices. Innovative solutions are needed to shift current trajectories towards a sustainable and just future. ‘Futures thinking’ enables people to explore and articulate alternative futures and find pathways towards these desired futures. Indigenous people have the potential to m...

Rika Preiser, Tanja Hichert, Reinette Biggs, Julia van Velden, Nyasha Magadzire, Garry Peterson, Laura Pereira, Keziah Mayer, Karina Benessaiah. 2024. Transformative foresight for diverse futures: the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes initiative. Development Policy Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/dpr.12791

Foresight methods are increasingly recognized as essential for decision-making in complex environments, particularly within development and research settings. As foresight methods continue to gain prominence for decision-making, their application in these settings grows. Funders and policy-makers can benefit from the experience of transformative foresight practitioners and researchers who are skilled in designing novel ways to...

Francesco Fuso Nerini, Mariana Mazzucato, Johan Rockström, Harro van Asselt, Jim W. Hall, Stelvia Matos, Åsa Persson, Benjamin Sovacool, Ricardo Vinuesa, Jeffrey Sachs. 2024. Extending the Sustainable Development Goals to 2050 — a road map. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01754-6

In this comment in Nature , the authors call on UN member states, in the run-up to the UN Summit of the Future in September, to adapt and extend the SDG framework to 2050. This will entail setting interim targets for 2030 and 2040 and final targets for 2050 that align with science and maintain high, yet achievable, national and global ambitions. To support those discussions, here they highlight six priorities that they cons...