Publications

Pereira, Laura M., Crespo, Guillermo Ortuno, Amon, Diva J., Badhe, Renuka, Bandeira, Salomao, Bengtsson, Frida, Boettcher, Miranda, Carminej, Gabrielle, Cheung, William W. L., Chibwe, Bwalya, Dunn, Daniel, Gasalla, Maria A., Halouani, Ghassen, Johnson, David E., Jouffray, Jean-Baptiste, Juri, Silvana, Keys, Patrick W., Lubker, Hannah M., Merrie, Andrew S., Obaidullah, Farah, Palacios-Abrantes, Juliano, Shannon, Lynne J., Sumaila, U. Rashid, Superchi, Edoardo, Terry, Naomi, Wabnitz, Colette C. C., Yasuhara, Moriaki, Zhou, Wei. 2023. The living infinite: Envisioning futures for transformed human-nature relationships on the high seas. Marine Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.MARPOL.2023.105644

We find ourselves at a critical crossroads for the future governance of the high seas, but the perceived remoteness of the global ocean creates a psychological barrier for people to engage with it. Given challenges of overexploitation, inequitable access and other sustainability and equity concerns, current ocean governance mechanisms are not fit-for-purpose. This decade offers opportunities for direct impact on ocean governan...

Pellowe, K.E., Meacham, M., Peterson, G.D., Lade, S.J. 2023. Global Analysis of Reef Ecosystem Services Reveals Synergies, Trade-Offs and Bundles. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4366024

Millions of people around the world depend on the ecosystem services produced by reef ecosystems, including nutrition, aesthetic value, and coastal protection. Reefs also contribute to critical global and regional processes through the cycling of nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon. The increased stress experienced by reefs in the Anthropocene threatens their ability to provide vital ecosystem services. This study investigates bu...

Cumming, G.S., Adamska, M., Barnes, M.L., Barnett, J., Bellwood, D.R., Cinner, J.E., Cohen, P.J., Donelson, J.M., Fabricius, K., Grafton, R.Q., Grech, A., Gurney, G.G., Hoegh-Guldberg, O., Hoey, A.S., Hoogenboom, M.O., Lau, J., Lovelock, C.E., Lowe, R., Miller, D.J., Morrison, T.H., Mumby, P.J., Nakata, M., Pandolfi, J.M., Peterson, G.D., Pratchett, M.S., Ravasi, T., Riginos, C., Rummer, J.L., Schaffelke, B., Wernberg, T., Wilson, S.K. 2023. Research priorities for the sustainability of coral-rich western Pacific seascapes. Regional Environmental Change. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-023-02051-0

Nearly a billion people depend on tropical seascapes. The need to ensure sustainable use of these vital areas is recognised, as one of 17 policy commitments made by world leaders, in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 (‘Life below Water’) of the United Nations. SDG 14 seeks to secure marine sustainability by 2030. In a time of increasing social-ecological unpredictability and risk, scientists and policymakers working toward...

Agnes B. Olin, Ulf Bergström, Örjan Bodin, Göran Sundblad, Britas Klemens Eriksson, Mårten Erlandsson, Ronny Fredriksson, Johan S. Eklöf. 2023. Spatial connectivity increases ecosystem resilience towards an ongoing regime shift. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.05.12.540484

Ecosystem regime shifts can have severe ecological and economic consequences, making it a top priority to understand how to make systems more resilient. Theory predicts that spatial connectivity and the local environment interact to shape resilience, but empirical studies are scarce. Here, we use >7000 fish samplings from the Baltic Sea coast to test this prediction in an ongoing, spatially propagating shift in dominance from ...

Smith, E., Wiedermann, M., Donges, J., Heitzig, J., Winkelmann, R.. 2022. Concern and anticipation of sea-level rise provide grounds for social tipping towards climate action. OSF. http://dx.doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/nyquv

Effective climate change mitigation necessitates swift societal transformations. Social tipping processes, where small triggers initiate qualitative systemic shifts, are potential key mechanisms instigating societal change. With large shares of the world's population coastally concentrated, sea-level rise is among the most severe impacts of climate change. Here we combine future sea-level rise estimates, social survey data, an...

Hannah Marlen Lübker, Patrick W. Keys, Andrew Merrie, Laura M. Pereira, Juan C. Rocha. 2022. Imagination Beyond National Jurisdiction - Computing and Envisioning Possible Sustainable Futures for the High Seas. Research Square. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2318082/v1

The high seas are experiencing a stark increase in industrial activities, with resources being exploited unsustainably and shared unequally. This suggests the need for a transformation, a shift in the deeper structures of the system such as underlying paradigms and mind-sets. We created future visions by combining computational text analysis with a structured yet creative futuring approach. This process resulted in four scienc...

Carl Folke, Nils Kautsky. 2022. Aquaculture and ocean stewardship. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-021-01528-8

In the mid-1980s contemporary aquaculture had emerged as a new way of producing seafood. It was often portrayed as a new technology that would replace overfished stocks and make humankind independent of nature’s fluctuations. Triggered by such claims, we decided to investigate the fast expanding aquaculture industry, which resulted in the 1989 Ambio paper ‘The role of ecosystems for a sustainable development of aquaculture’...

Blasiak, R., Jouffray, J., Amon, D., Moberg, F., Claudet, J., Søgaard Jørgensen, P., Pranindita, A., Wabnitz, C., Österblom, H.. 2022. A forgotten element of the blue economy: marine biomimetics and inspiration from the deep sea. PNAS Nexus. doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac196

The morphology, physiology, and behavior of marine organisms have been a valuable source of inspiration for solving conceptual and design problems. Here, we introduce this rich and rapidly expanding field of marine biomimetics, and identify it as a poorly articulated and often overlooked element of the ocean economy associated with substantial monetary benefits. We showcase innovations across seven broad categories of marine b...

Luthman, O., Jonell, M., Rönnbäck, P., Troell, M. 2022. Strong and weak sustainability in Nordic aquaculture policies. Aquaculture. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aquaculture.2021.737841

In this paper, we critically analyze how sustainability is considered in aquaculture policies and strategies using the Nordic countries as a case. The strong versus weak sustainability concepts are used to define and clarify what sustainability aspects are central to each state. To illustrate these concepts further, we draw on and modify four mainstream environmental discourses defined by John Dryzek and apply them to the stro...

Lindkvist, E., Pellowe, K., Alexander, S., Drury O'Neill, E., Finkbeiner, E., Girón‐Nava, A., González‐Mon, B., Johnson, A., Pittman, J., Schill, C., Wijermans, N., Bodin, Ö., Gelcich, S., Glaser, M. 2022. Untangling social–ecological interactions: A methods portfolio approach to tackling contemporary sustainability challenges in fisheries. Fish and Fisheries. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/faf.12678

Meeting the objectives of sustainable fisheries management requires attention to the complex interactions between humans, institutions and ecosystems that give rise to fishery outcomes. Traditional approaches to studying fisheries often do not fully capture, nor focus on these complex interactions between people and ecosystems. Despite advances in the scope and scale of interactions encompassed by more holistic methods, for ex...