Adaptive governance, ecosystem management, and natural capital.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Schultz L
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4475994 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:The central challenge of the 21st century is to develop economic, social, and governance systems capable of ending poverty and achieving sustainable levels of population and consumption while securing the life-support systems underpinning current and future human well-being. Essential to meeting this challenge is the incorporation of natural capital and the ecosystem services it provides into decision-making. We explore progress and crucial gaps at this frontier, reflecting upon the 10 y since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. We focus on three key dimensions of progress and ongoing challenges: raising awareness of the interdependence of ecosystems and human well-being, advancing the fundamental interdisciplinary science of ecosystem services, and implementing this science in decisions to restore natural capital and use it sustainably. Awareness of human dependence on nature is at an all-time high, the science of ecosystem services is rapidly advancing, and talk of natural capital is now common from governments to corporate boardrooms. However, successful implementation is still in early stages. We explore why ecosystem service information has yet to fundamentally change decision-making and suggest a path forward that emphasizes: (i) developing solid evidence linking decisions to impacts on natural capital and ecosystem services, and then to human well-being; (ii) working closely with leaders in government, business, and civil society to develop the knowledge, tools, and practices necessary to integrate natural capital and ecosystem services into everyday decision-making; and (iii) reforming institutions to change policy and practices to better align private short-term goals with societal long-term goals.
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Project description:Recovering or threatened carnivore populations are often harvested to minimise their impact on human activities, such as livestock farming or game hunting. Increasingly, harvest quota decisions involve a set of scientific, administrative and political institutions operating at national and sub-national levels whose interactions and collective decision-making aim to increase the legitimacy of management and ensure population targets are met. In practice, however, assessments of how quota decisions change between these different actors and what consequences these changes have on population trends are rare.We combine a state-space population modelling approach with an analysis of quota decisions taken at both regional and national levels between 2007 and 2018 to build a set of decision-making models that together predict annual harvest quota values for Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) in Norway.We reveal a tendency for administrative decision-makers to compensate for consistent quota increases by political actors, particularly when the lynx population size estimate is above the regional target. Using population forecasts based on the ensemble of decision-making models, we show that such buffering of political biases ensures lynx population size remains close to regional and national targets in the long term.Our results go beyond the usual qualitative assessment of collaborative governance systems for carnivore management, revealing a system of checks and balances that, in the case of lynx in Norway, ensures both multi-stakeholder participation and sustainable harvest quotas. Nevertheless, we highlight important inter-regional differences in decision-making and population forecasts, the socio-ecological drivers of which need to be better understood to prevent future population declines. Synthesis and applications. Our work analyses the sequence of decisions leading to yearly quotas for lynx harvest in Norway, highlighting the collaborative and structural processes that together shape harvest sustainability. In doing so, we provide a predictive framework to evaluate participatory decision-making processes in wildlife management, paving the way for scientists and decision-makers to collaborate more widely in identifying where decision biases might lie and how institutional arrangements can be optimised to minimise them. We emphasise, however, that this is only possible if wildlife management decisions are documented and transparent.
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Project description:Protected areas (PAs) are a prominent approach to maintaining and enhancing biodiversity and ecosystem services. A critical question for safeguarding these resources is how PA governance processes and management structures influence their effectiveness. We conduct an impact evaluation of 12 PAs in three Central American countries to assess how processes in management restrictions, management capacity, and decentralization affect the annual change in the satellite-derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). NDVI varies with greenness that relates to plant production, biomass, and important ecosystem functions related to biodiversity and ecosystem services such as water quality and carbon storage. Any loss of vegetation cover in the form of deforestation or degradation would show up as a decrease in NDVI values over time and gains in vegetation cover and regeneration as an increase in NDVI values. Management restriction categories are based on international classifications of strict versus multiple-use PAs, and capacity and decentralization categories are based on key informant interviews of PA managers. We use matching to create a counterfactual of non-protected observations and a matching estimator and regression to estimate treatment effects of each sub-sample. On average, strict and multiple-use PAs have a significant and positive effect on NDVI compared to non-protected land uses. Both high and low decentralized PAs also positively affect NDVI. High capacity PAs have a positive and significant effect on NDVI, while low capacity PAs have a negative effect on NDVI. Our findings advance knowledge on how governance and management influence PA effectiveness and suggest that capacity may be more important than governance type or management restrictions in maintaining and enhancing NDVI. This paper also provides a guide for future studies to incorporate measures of PA governance and management into impact evaluations.
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Project description:Socioeconomic demand for natural capital is causing catastrophic losses of biodiversity and ecosystem functionality, most notably in regions where socioeconomic-and eco-systems compete for natural capital, e.g., energy (animal or plant matter). However, a poor quantitative understanding of what natural capital is needed to support biodiversity in ecosystems, while at the same time satisfy human development needs-those associated with human development within socioeconomic systems-undermines our ability to sustainably manage global stocks of natural capital. Here we describe a novel concept and accompanying methodology (relating the adult body mass of terrestrial species to their requirements for land area, water, and energy) to quantify the natural capital needed to support terrestrial species within ecosystems, analogous to how natural capital use by humans is quantified in a socioeconomic context. We apply this methodology to quantify the amount of natural capital needed to support species observed using a specific surveyed site in Scotland. We find that the site can support a larger assemblage of species than those observed using the site; a primary aim of the rewilding project taking place there. This method conceptualises, for the first time, a comprehensive "dual-system" approach: modelling natural capital use in socioeconomic-and eco-systems simultaneously. It can facilitate the management of natural capital at the global scale, and in both the conservation and creation (e.g., rewilding) of biodiversity within managed ecosystems, representing an advancement in determining what socioeconomic trade-offs are needed to achieve contemporary conservation targets alongside ongoing human development.
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Project description:The term "governance" encompasses both governmental and nongovernmental participation in collective choice and action. Law dictates the structure, boundaries, rules, and processes within which governmental action takes place, and in doing so becomes one of the focal points for analysis of barriers to adaptation as the effects of climate change are felt. Adaptive governance must therefore contemplate a level of flexibility and evolution in governmental action beyond that currently found in the heavily administrative governments of many democracies. Nevertheless, over time, law itself has proven highly adaptive in western systems of government, evolving to address and even facilitate the emergence of new social norms (such as the rights of women and minorities) or to provide remedies for emerging problems (such as pollution). Thus, there is no question that law can adapt, evolve, and be reformed to make room for adaptive governance. In doing this, not only may barriers be removed, but law may be adjusted to facilitate adaptive governance and to aid in institutionalizing new and emerging approaches to governance. The key is to do so in a way that also enhances legitimacy, accountability, and justice, or else such reforms will never be adopted by democratic societies, or if adopted, will destabilize those societies. By identifying those aspects of the frameworks for adaptive governance reviewed in the introduction to this special feature relevant to the legal system, we present guidelines for evaluating the role of law in environmental governance to identify the ways in which law can be used, adapted, and reformed to facilitate adaptive governance and to do so in a way that enhances the legitimacy of governmental action.
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Project description:We explore whether Rotterdam city has the governance capacity in terms of processes at place, and the attention in terms of vision and strategy to take up an integrated approach toward urban resilience. We adopt an interpretative policy analysis approach to assess the dynamics of urban ecosystem governance considering interviews, gray literature, and facilitated dialogues with policy practitioners. We show the inner workings of local government across strategic, operational, tactical, and reflective governance processes about the way urban ecosystems are regulated. Despite the existing capacity to steer such processes, a number of underlying challenges exist: need for coordination between planning departments; need to ease the integration of new policy objectives into established adaptive policy cycles; and need to assess the lessons learnt from pilots and emerging green initiatives. Regulating and provisioning ecosystem services receive heightened policy attention. Focus on regulating services is maintained by a policy renewal cycle that limits and delays consideration of other ecosystem services in policy and planning.
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Project description:Legal and institutional structures fundamentally shape opportunities for adaptive governance of environmental resources at multiple ecological and societal scales. Properties of adaptive governance are widely studied. However, these studies have not resulted in consolidated frameworks for legal and institutional design, limiting our ability to promote adaptation and social-ecological resilience. We develop an overarching framework that describes the current and potential role of law in enabling adaptation. We apply this framework to different social-ecological settings, centers of activity, and scales, illustrating the multidimensional and polycentric nature of water governance. Adaptation typically emerges organically among multiple centers of agency and authority in society as a relatively self-organized or autonomous process marked by innovation, social learning, and political deliberation. This self-directed and emergent process is difficult to create in an exogenous, top-down fashion. However, traditional centers of authority may establish enabling conditions for adaptation using a suite of legal, economic, and democratic tools to legitimize and facilitate self-organization, coordination, and collaboration across scales. The principles outlined here provide preliminary legal and institutional foundations for adaptive environmental governance, which may inform institutional design and guide future scholarship.
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