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Through the expansion of human activities, humanity has evolved to become a driving force of global environmental change and influences a substantial and growing part of natural ecosystem trophic interactions and energy flows. However, by constructing and building its own niche, human distance from nature increased remarkably during the last decades due to processes of globalization and urbanization. This increasing disconnect has both material and immaterial consequences for how humans interact and connect with nature. Indeed, many regions across the world have disconnected themselves from the productivity of their regional environment by: (1) accessing biological products from distant places through international trade, and (2) using non-renewable resources from outside the biosphere to boost the productivity of their natural environment. Both mechanisms allow for greater resource use then would be possible otherwise, but also involve complex sustainability challenges and lead to fundamentally different feedbacks between humans and the environment. This dissertation empirically investigates the sustainability of biophysical human-nature connections and disconnections from a social-ecological systems perspective. The results provide new insights and concrete knowledge about biophysical human-nature disconnections and its sustainability implications, including pervasive issues of injustice. Through international trade and reliance on non-renewables, particularly higher-income regions appropriate an unproportional large share of global resources. Moreover, by enabling seemingly unconstrained consumption of resources and simultaneous conservation of regional ecosystems, increasing regional disconnectedness stimulates the misconception of decoupling. Whereas, in fact, the biophysically most disconnected regions exhibit the highest resource footprints and are, therefore, responsible for the largest environmental damages. The increasing biophysical disconnect between humans and nature effectively works to circumvent limitations and self-constraining feedbacks of natural cycles. The circumvention of environmental constraints is a crucial feature of niche construction. Human niche construction refers to the process of modifying natural environments to make them more useful for society. To ease integration of the chapters in this thesis, the framework paper uses human niche construction theory to understand the mechanisms and drivers behind increasing biophysical disconnections. The theory is employed to explain causal relationships and unsustainable trajectories from a holistic perspective. Moreover, as a process-oriented approach, it allows connecting the empirically assessed states of disconnectedness with insights about interventions and change for sustainability. For a sustainability transformation already entered paths of disconnectedness must be reversed to enable a genuine reconnection of human activities to the biosphere and its natural cycles. This thesis highlights the unsustainability of disconnectedness and opens up debate about how knowledge around sustainable human niche construction can be leveraged for a reconnection of humans to nature.
Climate change presents a major sustainability challenge to coastal social-ecological systems (SES). The integration of climate change adaptation into processes or structures for coastal governance, however, has been described as challenging. Resilience presents a suitable concept to approach this problem, as it facilitates bridging between the natural and social sciences, as well as between science and policy in an inter- and trans-disciplinary approach. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also makes use of the concept of resilience and confirms that recent literature increasingly suggests that transformative changes in SES are required to enhance their resilience to climate change. Yet, knowledge gaps still exist on how to enable effective coastal governance to enhance the climate resilience of coastal SES. To address this problem, the importance of actionable knowledge is growing in climate change adaptation, environmental governance, and broader sustainability research. Actionable knowledge refers to knowledge that contributes to solving societal problems and points to actions and processes of change. One way of generating actionable knowledge is the co-production of knowledge with societal stakeholders. Yet, knowledge gaps exist in what methods and approaches may contribute to generating actionable knowledge and what obstacles to knowledge co-production exist especially for early-career researchers (ECRs).
This dissertation contributes to research on generating actionable knowledge for coastal governance to enhance the resilience of coastal SES to climate change. It does this by providing theoretical, methodological and empirical insights on three research questions (RQs), laid out in Chapter I. These are: 1) what is a more actionable concept for applying the concept of resilience in coastal governance?; 2) what methods and approaches are suitable to generate actionable knowledge for coastal governance?; and 3) what obstacles to knowledge co-production exist for ECRs and how can they be overcome? The RQs are addressed in five publications, each presenting one chapter of this dissertation. For answering RQ1, Chapter II applies a research synthesis to bring together common themes and challenges documented in resilience, climate change and environmental governance literature. For answering RQ2, in Chapter III-V different methods and approaches for generating actionable knowledge are proposed and tested using a case-study in the SES of Algoa Bay, South Africa. These include i) the analysis of stakeholder agency as an indicator of the ability of stakeholders to act in governance processes; ii) the application of a stakeholder analysis to gain an improved understanding of the current degree of knowledge exchange for climate change adaptation; and iii) the combination of a capital approach framework, and fuzzy cognitive mapping, which shed light on the governance performance for climate change adaptation and on leverage points that can enhance climate resilience. Finally, for answering RQ3, Chapter VI provides a perspective on the obstacles that especially ECRs face, and actions that are needed to create the conditions under which knowledge co-production processes can be successful. This is done by applying a multi-method approach combining an online survey and workshop targeted at ECRs in the marine sciences.
Key findings suggest that system and transformative knowledge are particularly important when applying the concept of resilience in coastal governance to generate actionable knowledge. The different methods and approaches that are proposed and tested contribute to generating both system and transformative knowledge. Firstly, they provide an overview of the capacities of different stakeholders to act, shed light on current collaboration and knowledge exchange, and enable the identification of different governance processes for coastal governance and climate change adaptation (system knowledge). Secondly, results have implications for how to improve knowledge exchange and identify leverage points that can enhance overall governance performance, thus providing recommendations on actions and processes that can enhance climate resilience in the case-study area (transformative knowledge). It is also highlighted how knowledge co-production can contribute to generating system and transformative knowledge together with stakeholders, and what actions are needed to build the capacities to translate knowledge into action. Additionally, the findings of this dissertation put forward actions that are needed at different organisational levels of the academic system to facilitate knowledge co-production processes with stakeholders involved in coastal governance.
The results of this dissertation have implications for stakeholders and decision-making in the case-study area, as well as for environmental governance, climate change adaptation and broader sustainability research. Implications for stakeholders include recommendations for implementing formal commitments to share climate information across levels and sectors, establishing the role of information providers in the municipality, and reinforcing human capital within the local municipality in Algoa Bay. It also requires more support from the provincial government, such as addressing funding issues, offering training focusing on stakeholders with lower agency and capacities, and improving the overall availability and accessibility of climate information, as well as the priority given to climate change in the Integrated Development Plan. Findings also suggest the need for a more integrated approach to climate change adaptation in coastal planning and management frameworks. It also suggests that the conservation of environmental assets presents an important bottleneck for resilience management and needs to be further prioritised within decision-making. Implications for research include the applicability of methods beyond the context of this dissertation; a more actionable concept for approaching resilience in (coastal) governance systems that can be applied for achieving broader sustainability goals; and a more critical reflection on how transformative research is conducted, and what academic foundation is needed so that it can fulfil its societal goal.
Future research may include a combination of the methods applied in this dissertation; qualitative applications of the stakeholder network analysis; and an application of the proposed approach to other case-studies using real-world laboratories. Overall, this dissertation provides theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications and insights into pressing SES problems. It also contributes to advancing the field of transformative research for more societally relevant outcomes in face of climate change and broader sustainability challenges
Summary
Since the early 2000s, ecosystem services strongly gained significance as a research topic. While the number of papers strongly increased, the concept was further developed which changed the way it was applied. From highlighting the value of ecosystems by viewing them not only from an ecological, but also from an economic perspective in the beginning, it is nowadays, among others, used to map and calculate the monetary value of ecosystem services. Lately, the International Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) further developed the concept into Nature’s contributions to people (NCP) which puts a stronger emphasis on stakeholders and indigenous knowledge.
However, so far none of the conceptual developments managed to integrate the temporal dimension of ecosystem services into this concept, although this should be the basis for a sustainable long-term management of ecosystems and their services.
Therefore, I present three articles in this thesis that deal with temporal aspects of ecosystem services. In two of them I also present a proposal for a framework for the classification of ecosystem services based on their temporal dynamics.
In this dissertation I differentiate between two types of temporal aspects, both of which have in common that change takes place over a certain period of time. The concepts of transformation, transition and regime shift are used to describe changes in social or ecological systems as a whole, for example the transformation towards a more sustainable society. The temporal dynamics that I present, on the other hand, relate to the temporal changes in ecosystem services themselves.
The first article focuses on how the literature on ecosystem services incorporates social and ecological change, illustrated by the concepts of transformation, transition, and regime shift. The second and third articles deal with the temporal dynamics of ecosystem services. While the second article presents a preliminary framework for categorizing the temporal dynamics of ecosystem services, the third article uses this framework to test how the temporal dynamics of ecosystem services are represented in the literature.
Based on the insights from the three articles, I conclude that most of the studies on ecosystem services only focus on one point in time. One reason for this is that most studies are conducted over a maximum of a four-year time span which does not allow to monitor dynamics over longer time spans. In most articles that do account for temporal aspects, the focus is strongly on the side of ecological supply of ecosystem services rather than on the demand-side which leads to the exclusion of stakeholder perceptions and therefore, makes it impossible to connect ecosystem service demand and supply over time. Moreover, the concept of change that is used most often in the literature is that of regime shifts which comes from a purely ecological background and focuses mostly on changes that happened in the past. This neglects the possibility of change towards a positive outcome in the future. In general, there is a strong disciplinary divide in the concepts and terminology used. This leads to a lack of exchange between different scientific disciplines and non-academic stakeholders. Approaches that are needed to solve problems of ecosystem service management are therefore impeded.
To enable future research to better account for temporal aspects and connect supply and demand sides of ecosystem services with each other, I give four recommendations for future research. These are (I) take temporal dynamics into account by conducting long-term research, (II) ensure conceptual clarity, (III) create a solution-oriented agenda and (IV) take the demand side into account by involving stakeholders’ perceptions over time.
By following these recommendations, future research could help to support the sustainable management of ecosystem services as dynamics will be better known and targeted measures can be implemented.
