• Energy Research

Los mecanismos de acceso pueden determinar los beneficios que las personas obtienen de un suministro de servicios ecosistémicos determinado. Sin embargo, en comparación con la disponibilidad de servicios ecosistémicos, el acceso ha recibido poca atención de la investigación. La importancia relativa de la disponibilidad en comparación con el acceso para limitar los beneficios de los servicios ecosistémicos es aún menos conocida. En las ciudades, la desconexión observada entre las personas y la naturaleza podría resultar en parte de los cambios en la disponibilidad y el acceso a los servicios ecosistémicos en comparación con las áreas rurales. Para abordar estas brechas de investigación, comparamos las limitaciones percibidas en los beneficios del bienestar de los servicios ecosistémicos en las zonas urbanas y rurales de las Islas Salomón. Predijimos que más personas reportarían estar limitadas en los beneficios de los servicios ecosistémicos en las zonas urbanas que en las rurales. A partir de los datos de 200 encuestados, encontramos que más habitantes urbanos informaron estar limitados tanto en la disponibilidad como en el acceso a los beneficios que derivaban de los servicios ecosistémicos. Los factores de disponibilidad fueron las limitaciones percibidas con mayor frecuencia, aunque el acceso desempeñó un papel importante tanto para el aprovisionamiento como para los servicios culturales. En las zonas urbanas, las personas más pobres, las mujeres y las personas mayores identificaron las mayores limitaciones. Los hallazgos muestran la importancia de investigar tanto disponibilidad y acceso a los servicios ecosistémicos para gestionar el medio ambiente de una manera que sostenga o aumente los beneficios para las personas. Les mécanismes d'accès peuvent déterminer les avantages que les gens tirent d'une offre de services écosystémiques donnée. Cependant, par rapport à la disponibilité des services écosystémiques, l'accès a reçu peu d'attention de la part de la recherche. L'importance relative de la disponibilité par rapport à l'accès pour limiter les avantages des services écosystémiques est encore moins bien comprise. Dans les villes, la déconnexion observée entre les gens et la nature pourrait résulter en partie des changements dans la disponibilité et l'accès aux services écosystémiques par rapport aux zones rurales. Pour combler ces lacunes de la recherche, nous avons comparé les limites perçues des avantages pour le bien-être des services écosystémiques dans les zones urbaines et rurales des Îles Salomon.Nous avons prédit que davantage de personnes déclareraient être limitées dans les avantages des services écosystémiques dans les zones urbaines que dans les zones rurales.D' après les données de 200 répondants, nous avons constaté que davantage de citadins ont déclaré être limités à la fois dans la disponibilité et l'accès aux avantages qu'ils tiraient des services écosystémiques.Les facteurs de disponibilité étaient les limites les plus fréquemment perçues, bien que l'accès ait joué un rôle important à la fois pour l'approvisionnement et les services culturels.Dans les zones urbaines, les personnes les plus pauvres, les femmes et les personnes âgées ont identifié les plus limites.Les conclusions montrent l'importance d'enquêter à la fois disponibilité des services écosystémiques et accès pour gérer l'environnement d'une manière qui soutient ou augmente les avantages pour les personnes. Access mechanisms can determine the benefits that people derive from a given ecosystem service supply.However, compared to ecosystem service availability, access has received little research attention.The relative importance of availability compared to access in limiting ecosystem service benefits is even less well understood.In cities, the observed disconnect between people and nature might result in part from changes in ecosystem service availability and access compared to rural areas.To address these research gaps, we compared perceived limitations to ecosystem service well-being benefits in urban and rural areas in the Solomon Islands.We predicted that more people would report being limited in ecosystem service benefits in urban than rural areas.Drawing on data from 200 respondents, we found that more urban dwellers reported being limited in both availability and access to the benefits that they derived from ecosystem services.Availability factors were the most frequently perceived limitations, although access played an important role for both provisioning and cultural services.In urban areas, poorer people, women, and older people identified the most limitations.Findings show the importance of investigating both ecosystem service availability and access to manage the environment in a way that sustains or increases benefits to people. يمكن لآليات الوصول أن تحدد الفوائد التي يجنيها الناس من عرض معين لخدمات النظام الإيكولوجي. ومع ذلك، مقارنة بتوافر خدمات النظام الإيكولوجي، لم يحظ الوصول باهتمام بحثي يذكر. والأهمية النسبية للتوافر مقارنة بالوصول في الحد من فوائد خدمات النظام الإيكولوجي أقل فهمًا. في المدن، قد ينتج الانفصال الملحوظ بين الناس والطبيعة جزئيًا عن التغيرات في توافر خدمات النظام الإيكولوجي والوصول إليها مقارنة بالمناطق الريفية. لمعالجة هذه الفجوات البحثية، قارنا القيود المتصورة على فوائد رفاهية خدمات النظام الإيكولوجي في المناطق الحضرية والريفية في جزر سليمان. توقعنا أن المزيد من الناس سيبلغون عن محدودية فوائد خدمات النظام الإيكولوجي في المناطق الحضرية أكثر من المناطق الريفية. وبالاعتماد على بيانات من 200 مستجيب، وجدنا أن المزيد من سكان المناطق الحضرية أفادوا بأنهم محدودون في كل من التوافر والوصول إلى الفوائد التي استمدوها من خدمات النظام الإيكولوجي. كانت عوامل التوافر هي القيود الأكثر شيوعًا، على الرغم من أن الوصول لعب دورًا مهمًا في كل من توفير الخدمات والخدمات الثقافية. في المناطق الحضرية، حدد الفقراء والنساء وكبار السن معظم القيود. تظهر النتائج أهمية التحقيق في كل من توافر خدمات النظام الإيكولوجي والوصول إلى إدارة البيئة بطريقة تحافظ على الفوائد التي تعود على الناس أو تزيد منها.

Achieving effective, sustainable environmental governance requires a better understanding of the causes and consequences of the complex patterns of interdependencies connecting people and ecosystems within and across scales. Network approaches for conceptualizing and analyzing these interdependencies offer one promising solution. Here, we present two advances we argue are needed to further this area of research: (i) a typology of causal assumptions explicating the causal aims of any given network-centric study of social-ecological interdependencies; (ii) unifying research design considerations that facilitate conceptualizing exactly what is interdependent, through what types of relationships, and in relation to what kinds of environmental problems. The latter builds on the appreciation that many environmental problems draw from a set of core challenges that re-occur across contexts. We demonstrate how these advances combine into a comparative heuristic that facilitates leveraging case-specific findings of social-ecological interdependencies to generalizable, yet context-sensitive, theories based on explicit assumptions of causal relationships.

AbstractCoral reefs are increasingly affected by climate-induced disturbances that are magnified by increasing ocean temperatures. Loss of coral reefs strongly affects people whose livelihoods and wellbeing depend on the ecosystem services reefs provide. Yet the effects of coral loss and the capacity of people and businesses to adapt to it are poorly understood, particularly in the private sector. To address this gap, we surveyed about half (57 of 109) of Australian reef tourism operators to understand how they were affected by and responded to severe impacts from bleaching and cyclones. Reef restoration and spatial diversification were the primary responses to severe bleaching impacts, while for cyclone-impacts coping measures and product diversification were more important. Restoration responses were strongly linked to the severity of impacts. Our findings provide empirical support for the importance of response diversity, spatial heterogeneity, and learning for social-ecological resilience.

AbstractConservation biology and applied ecology increasingly recognize that natural resource management is both an outcome and a driver of social, economic, and ecological dynamics. Protected areas offer a fundamental approach to conserving ecosystems, but they are also social‐ecological systems whose ecological management and sustainability are heavily influenced by people. This editorial, and the papers in the invited feature that it introduces, discuss three emerging themes in social‐ecological systems approaches to understanding protected areas: (1) the resilience and sustainability of protected areas, including analyses of their internal dynamics, their effectiveness, and the resilience of the landscapes within which they occur; (2) the relevance of spatial context and scale for protected areas, including such factors as geographic connectivity, context, exchanges between protected areas and their surrounding landscapes, and scale dependency in the provision of ecosystem services; and (3) efforts to reframe what protected areas are and how they both define and are defined by the relationships of people and nature. These emerging themes have the potential to transform management and policy approaches for protected areas and have important implications for conservation, in both theory and practice.

[Extract] Kabisch and colleagues (2017) have reviewed our call for advances in ecosystem service (ES) decision-support tools from an urban perspective and explored how the three research frontiers we identified should be considered in cities. We appreciate how they build on our original ideas and welcome this as a good example of how the general principles we developed in the original article can be applied and adapted to specific contexts. In fact, we believe that similar points about the importance of adapting our general principles for specific social–ecological systems could be made for many other systems, such as marine ecosystems or managed forestry systems. The specific characteristics of these different systems also prov´ide opportunities to expand on current ES knowledge and improve ES management tools. For example, as Kabisch and colleagues (2017) point out, cities are unique because of their relatively small area and high population density, which may make them more ideal than other systems for understanding certain aspects of the links between humans and nature and for implementing this understanding in management tools. We take the opportunity to respond to the ideas presented by Kabisch and colleagues and thus continue the conversation around urban ES.

Under global environmental change, understanding the interactions between people and nature has become critical for human survival. Comparative research can identify trends within social-ecological systems providing key insights for both environmental and developmental research. Island systems, with clear land boundaries, have been proposed as ideal case studies for comparative research, but it is unclear to what extent their potential has been fulfilled. To summarize existing research and identify potential gaps and new directions, we reviewed comparative environmental and developmental research on Pacific Large Ocean States. A diversity of case study locations and research themes were addressed within the sample of reviewed studies. Within the reviewed literature climate change, energy infrastructure, trade and fisheries were key themes of environmental and developmental research compared between island systems. Research was biased towards wealthier Pacific Large Ocean States and those with a relatively higher degree of socio-economic development. Our review highlights the potential value of a stronger a priori inclusion of spatial scale and conceptual frameworks, such as spatial resilience, to facilitate generalization from case studies.

AbstractEarly efforts in wildlife management focused on reducing population variability and maximizing yields of selected species. Later, Aldo Leopold proposed the concept of habitat management as superior to population management, and more recently, ecosystem management, whereby ecological processes are conserved or mimicked, has come into favour. Managing for resilience builds upon these roots, and focuses on maintaining key processes and relationships in social‐ecological systems so that they are robust to a great variety of external or internal perturbations at a range of ecological and social scales. Managing for resilience focuses on system‐level characteristics and processes, and the endurance of system properties in the face of social or ecological surprise. Managing for resilience consists of actively maintaining a diversity of functions and homeostatic feedbacks, steering systems away from thresholds of potential concern, increasing the ability of the system to maintain structuring processes and feedbacks under a wide range of conditions, and increasing the capacity of a system to cope with change through learning and adaptation. The critical aspect of managing for resilience, and therefore ecosystem management, is undertaking adaptive management to reduce uncertainty and actively managing to avoid thresholds in situations where maintaining resilience is desired. Managing adaptively for resilience is the approach best suited for coping with external shocks and surprises given the non‐linear complex dynamics arising from linked social‐ecological systems.