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AbstractTransformative adaptation will be increasingly important to effectively address the impacts of climate change and other global drivers on social-ecological systems. Enabling transformative adaptation requires new ways to evaluate and adaptively manage trade-offs between maintaining desirable aspects of current social-ecological systems and adapting to major biophysical changes to those systems. We outline such an approach, based on three elements developed by the Transformative Adaptation Research Alliance (TARA): (1) the benefits of adaptation services; that sub-set of ecosystem services that help people adapt to environmental change; (2) The values-rules-knowledge perspective (vrk) for identifying those aspects of societal decision-making contexts that enable or constrain adaptation and (3) the adaptation pathways approach for implementing adaptation, that builds on and integrates adaptation services and the vrk perspective. Together, these elements provide a future-oriented approach to evaluation and use of ecosystem services, a dynamic, grounded understanding of governance and decision-making and a logical, sequential approach that connects decisions over time. The TARA approach represents a means for achieving changes in institutions and governance needed to support transformative adaptation.

Land reform settlements (LRS) in the Brazilian Amazon have been suggested to hold promise for the successful implementation of incipient efforts to reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD). However, differences in forest cover, deforestation behaviour and settler welfare plus the inevitable overlap of upcoming REDD efforts with existing conservation policies, mean that scope and impact of REDD in LRS will not be uniform across settlements. Based on evidence from a case study of four LRS and a Brazilian Amazon regional analysis of opportunity costs, this paper explores the actual scope for targeting initial Brazilian REDD efforts to LRS and discusses potential welfare and equity implications based on scenario analysis. While our findings confirm considerable economic scope for compensation-based schemes for avoided degradation and deforestation, the pre-existence of legal use right limitations in combination with the distribution of forest cover among LRS means that less than half of settlements - poorer - will be able to derive economic gains. Exploring a mix between incentives and disincentives seems to offer the most promising future regarding efficiency and equity successful results. The paper concludes with the implications of the results in the international debate on the constraints ahead to implement the REDD principles.

AbstractThe FLUXNET2015 dataset provides ecosystem-scale data on CO2, water, and energy exchange between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and other meteorological and biological measurements, from 212 sites around the globe (over 1500 site-years, up to and including year 2014). These sites, independently managed and operated, voluntarily contributed their data to create global datasets. Data were quality controlled and processed using uniform methods, to improve consistency and intercomparability across sites. The dataset is already being used in a number of applications, including ecophysiology studies, remote sensing studies, and development of ecosystem and Earth system models. FLUXNET2015 includes derived-data products, such as gap-filled time series, ecosystem respiration and photosynthetic uptake estimates, estimation of uncertainties, and metadata about the measurements, presented for the first time in this paper. In addition, 206 of these sites are for the first time distributed under a Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0) license. This paper details this enhanced dataset and the processing methods, now made available as open-source codes, making the dataset more accessible, transparent, and reproducible.