Adrienne Grêt-Regamey

• Professor
• Chair at ETH Zurich

Ecosystem services (ES) assessments are rarely integrated into decision-making processes, with uncertainties often cited as a major barrier. While various uncertainties, such as modelling and data uncertainties, are inherent in ES assessments, their role in uptake of ES assessment results in decision-making remains unclear. We conducted a semi-syst...

The rapid and impactful growth of urban areas necessitates a thorough understanding of settlement development pathways to inform effective urban planning. This study investigates settlement developments on the Swiss Plateau from 1899 to 2021, focusing on identifying, describing, and predicting archetypes of settlement development. Using historical...

Adaptation to climate change is a social–ecological process: it is not solely a result of natural processes or human decisions but emerges from multiple relations within social systems, within ecological systems and between them. We propose a novel analytical framework to evaluate social–ecological relations in nature-based adaptation, encompassing...

Introduction: Virtual reality (VR) used for healthcare, particularly through exergames, is promising for improving therapeutic outcomes. However, effectively engaging patients and providing realistic environments for everyday situations remain major challenges. The technical aspects of developing engaging VR applications for rehabilitation are larg...

Modern agriculture faces conflicting objectives—increasing agricultural production while preserving and fostering biodiversity. As intensive agricultural management threatens biodiversity, legal obligations aim to halt biodiversity loss and safeguard threatened species. In Switzerland, agricultural priority species have been defined to set environm...

In the past, biodiversity research and conservation has often suffered from a narrow focus on either the instrumental or the intrinsic value of biodiversity. Authors and stakeholders from diverse knowledge systems have instead argued for the need to mobilize value pluralism in transdisciplinary approaches. However, the transformative potential of t...

We evaluated the effectiveness of various Large Language Models (LLMs) in conducting the screening phase of systematic reviews. Several models, after careful prompt optimization, achieved results comparable to or marginally superior to human reviewers. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs can serve as reliable tools for systematic reviews when provid...

The war in Ukraine has caused massive destruction of the country’s infrastructure, particularly its electricity system. Discussions on how to rebuild the system are underway within the country and the international community. Yet, major uncertainties about patterns of destruction and rebuilding potential complicate this task. Here, we present the f...

Although metacommunity theory provides many useful insights for conservation planning, the transfer of this knowledge to practice is hampered due to the difficulty of identifying metacommunities in bioregions. This study aims to identify the spatial extent of metacommunities at bioregional scales using current and historical habitat data, especiall...

Within scenario-based research of social-ecological systems, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of normative scenarios that define positive outcomes for both nature and society. While several frameworks exist to guide the co-creation of normative scenario narratives, examples of operationalizing these narratives in quantitative...

Das Schweizer Energiesystem soll gemäss Energiestrategie 2050 massgeblich mit Photovoltaik- (PV) und Wind-energieanlagen umgestaltet werden. Jedoch beeinflussen diese Anlagen die Wahrnehmung der Landschaft durch die Bevölkerung und können zu Konflikten mit verschiedenen gesellschaftlichen Interessen führen. Auch der Wald steht zunehmend in der Disk...

Aiming at understanding the role of plural values in decision-making, the IPBES Values Assessment defined nature valuation broadly as including biophysical, economic and socio-cultural assessments, including ecosystem service assessment. IPBES reviews of scientific literature revealed a lack of documentation of uptake by stakeholders across method...

Traffic on roads outside of urban areas (i.e. extra-urban roads) can have major ecological and environmental impacts on agricultural, forested, and natural areas. Yet, data on extra-urban traffic volumes is lacking in many regions. To address this data gap, we produced a global time-series of traffic volumes (Annual Average Daily Traffic; AADT) on...

Studies show that economic growth contributes to biodiversity loss and that, after a certain threshold, it does not contribute to wellbeing. Thus, when developing biodiversity scenarios, considering societal futures where economic growth is not a pre-condition deserves special attention. However, to date, degrowth scenarios have not been explored f...

Changes in climate and land use represent significant risks of biodiversity loss globally, affect ecological stability, impact nature’s contributions to people (NCP, i.e. ecosystem services) and compromise human livelihood. As framings of conservation evolve to consider the interdependence between species and human needs, there is a growing recogni...

This study examines the siting scenarios for renewable energy installations (REI) in a mountainous region of Europe (Switzerland), incorporating the external costs of ecosystem services and, innovatively, social preferences. This approach challenges the prevalent techno-economic siting paradigm, which often overlooks these externalities. To minimiz...

Understanding historical urban form transformation is critical for guiding current and future urban development, as urban form is related to, e.g., emotional well-being, environmental sustainability, and urban vibrancy. Our goal is to determine which factors influence specific patterns of spatial settlement development. This study introduces a nove...

The rapid expansion of tourism, transportation, energy, and agricultural infrastructure in mountain areas raises concerns about landscape fragmentation and impacts on aesthetic values. Effective delineation of these areas relies on negotiating various qualities that define them. In our study, we developed a collaborative consensus-building process...

Growing urban population and contemporary urban systems lock-in unsustainable urban development pathways, deteriorating the living quality of urban dwellers. The systemic complexity of these challenges renders it difficult to find solutions using existing planning processes. Alternatively, transformative planning processes are radical, take place o...

A new policy is needed to manage Switzerland’s increasing urbanization and growing population. The second stage of the revision of the Swiss Spatial Planning Law, which has been ongoing since 2014, aims to create the legal framework to reduce or prevent the negative consequences of soil sealing, such as loss of biodiversity or urban sprawl. The rev...

The concept of Ecological Infrastructure (EI) as a lens for landscape management has the potential to address environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation, by instrumentalizing Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP). Nature’s Contributions to People (NCPs) stems from the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity an...

Presentation from the 4th D-BAUG Urban Research Seminar, ETH Zurich, discussing 'Settlement relationships and their morphological homogeneity across time and scale'. This presentation offers insights into recent publications and ongoing research in the field of urban morphology, focusing on the evolving relationships within settlements over various...

Previous experiences play a multifaceted role in shaping current perspectives in integrated natural resource management. We used qualitative interviews and a quantitative survey to study the similarities and differences in terms of the links between the diverse actors' previous experiences and their current perspectives on the various issues to be...

Given the increasing importance of public participation in urban transformation processes, serious games have emerged as a promising tool for fostering active engagement and constructive dialogue. By providing insights into opposing arguments and helping navigate complex trade-offs, serious games can support informed decision-making and promote col...

Mountain regions face substantial challenges and opportunities arising from global change. The capacity of mountain regions for (systemic) innovation will be determinant to the success of system transformations envisioned by social actors of mountain communities. By analysing the social networks of two regions in the Alps and relating them to desir...

Scenarios are useful for considering development pathways under different future conditions. To manage a functioning ecological infrastructure (EI) as a network of natural and semi-natural habitats that can promote biodiversity and provide nature’s contributions to people (NCPs), one needs to understand future biophysical and socio-economic influen...

Homogeneous settlement morphologies negatively impact urban vibrancy, the environment, and emotions. Mainly resulting from the separation of functions such as work and living, homogeneous settlements have often been found around large cities. However, it remains unknown whether this phenomenon occurs in settlements of any size and persisted over ti...

Place-making is a concept used to describe and understand how meaningful places emerge from interactions between people and their environments. We present a first attempt at describing and measuring place-making through latent variable modelling, based on a large and representative sample (N = 7′035) in the Netherlands and two field surveys in the...

Agricultural intensification has profoundly changed agricultural landscapes with important biodiversity impacts. There is increasing knowledge on the general effects of landscape structure and management practices on plant and animal species but understanding the role of surrounding landscape structure for patch-scale biodiversity is more complex....

This work is an experimental contribution to assessing the relationship between place attachment and well-being in urban parks in a mobility and migratory context. Using virtual park visits, we aimed at finding out whether place attachment and familiarity with parks are related to physiological responses, i.e. relaxation/arousal. The experimental s...

Energy production from the power of wind is being increasingly promoted around the world to reach climate and energy targets and gain independence from fossil fuels. The identification of possible sites for on-shore wind energy production faces multiple challenges. National wind energy strategies cite various physical, ecological, social and econom...

Coexistence with wildlife is becoming a key challenge in Europe as populations of large carnivores recover in human-dominated landscapes. Modeling the spatial distribution of conditions for human-bear coexistence can help support conservation by identifying priority areas and measures to support coexistence, but existing models often only address r...

Using a participatory Bayesian network-based land-use decision model, we simulate future land-use patterns under various scenarios, including changes in vanilla and clove market prices as well as changes in irrigation water availability and potential harvest failures. Findings indicate that specifically the vanilla value chain (compared to the clov...

Urban landscapes face significant challenges, as they must transform towards sustainability while remaining resilient. Urban landscape transformation is a complex task for landscape designers. They must not only create new solutions for landscapes but also ensure that their proposals are capable to deliver and maintain key ecosystems services over...

Urban expansion is generating unprecedented homogenization of landscapes across the world. This uniformization of urban forms brings along dramatic environmental, social, and health problems. Reverting such processes requires activating people’s sense of place, their feeling of caring for their surroundings, and their community engagement. While em...

The increasing complexity of the dynamics captured in Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) change modelling has made model behaviour less transparent and calibration more extensive. For cellular automata models in particular, this is compounded by the fact that validation is typically performed indirectly, using final simulated change maps; rather than d...

Studies show that economic growth contributes substantially to biodiversity loss and that, after a certain threshold, it does not contribute to wellbeing. Thus, when developing biodiversity scenarios, considering societal futures where economic growth is not a pre-condition requires special attention. However, to date, degrowth scenarios have not b...

Abstract: Investigating pathways for the transformative adaptation of socio-ecological systems (SESs) frequently requires simulating the development of aspects of the system in both space and time, often into the future. In many cases this is achieved through the creation of predictive models which are calibrated and validated using historical data...

The identification of landscape classes facilitates the implementation of planning strategies. Although landscape patterns are key distinctive features of landscape classes, existing unsupervised clustering techniques for clustering landscapes rely on categorical input data to quantify such patterns and consider only a limited number of pattern met...

Therapy of gait insecurity is usually a lengthy and laborious process, which requires a high level of motivation and willpower on the part of the patients. The aim is to return the patients to a level of confidence for everyday life by providing therapy sessions that promote dual-task performance and support patient motivation. This can be fostered...

CONTEXT Farm numbers are steadily declining in Europe and globally while farms become larger and more intensive. Driven in part by worsening macroeconomic conditions, these structural changes and the associated rationalization of agricultural supply chains have affected social relations in rural areas. In turn, farmers' social contacts influence fa...

Densification of cities threatens the provision of public open space for people living in and around cities. The increasing evidence of the many benefits of recreational walking for physical and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted an urgent need for fostering the availability of public open space. In this context, urban plann...

This paper examines how mixes (wind, PV, power lines) of different renewable energy infrastructure (REI) impact people's preferences for various landscape types. This does not only involve the visual character but also meanings that are assigned to these landscapes, which together influence the perceived landscape quality. The research is based on...

Worldwide, urbanization leads to increased pressure on prime agricultural land with irreversible impacts on the provision of life-supporting services such as food and drinking water production or habitat for plants and animals. As a basis for designing new policy instruments to protect soil resources, we applied Q-methodology to assess factors that...

The devastating 2015 earthquakes in Nepal highlighted the need for effective disaster risk reduction (DRR) in mountains, which are inherently subject to hazards and increasingly vulnerable to extreme events. As multiple UN policy frameworks stress, DRR is crucial to mitigate the mounting environmental and socioeconomic costs of disasters globally....

Mountain social-ecological systems (MtSES) are vital to humanity, providing ecosystem services to over half the planet's human population. Despite their importance, there has been no global assessment of threats to MtSES, even as they face unprecedented challenges to their sustainability. With survey data from 57 MtSES sites worldwide, we test a co...

Recent years have seen a massive development of geospatial sensing systems informing the use of space. However, rarely do these sensing systems inform transformation towards urban sustainability. Drawing on four global urban case examples, we conceptualize how passive and active sensing systems should be harnessed to secure an inclusive, sustainabl...

Integrated regional planning aims to achieve sustainable development by considering multiple socio-economic, environmental, and ecological goals. However, determining the synergies and trade-offs between sustainability goals is a challenging task that requires an in depth analysis of the system-level effects of the implementation of planning polici...

Ecosystem service (ES) mapping has been developed with the aim of supporting ecosystem management, but ES maps often lack information about uncertainty and risk, which is essential for decision-making. In this paper, we use a risk-based approach to map ES in mountain forests, which are experiencing an increasing rate of natural disturbances, such a...

The identification of relationships between multiple ecosystem services (ES) (i.e. trade-offs, synergies and bundles) is essential for ES management. However, the identification of ES relationships may be susceptible to spatial autocorrelation — a statistical bias due to ES observations being related to each other across space. Spatial autocorrelat...

Scientists increasingly cross their disciplinary boundaries and connect with local stakeholders to jointly solve complex problems. Working with stakeholders means higher legitimacy and supports practical impact of research. Games provide a tool to achieve such transdisciplinary collaboration. In this paper, we explore the use of a game in a partici...

Abstract: Assessing Ecological Infrastructure (EI) necessitates value judgements with respect to the importance of different components such as ecosystem services and biodiversity. As such it is crucial that assessments as well as the planning of policies to maintain EI incorporate the participation of relevant stakeholders. However, implementing t...

Presentation of the study on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the demand for recreational spaces in Swiss Cities.

Global sustainability targets demand transformative changes. Nature-based solutions (NbS) are gaining traction in science and policy, but their potential for transformative change remains unexplored. We provide a framework to evaluate how NbS contribute to transformative change and apply it to 93 NbS from mountain social-ecological systems (SES). T...

Finding the “right” sites for developing renewable energy systems (RES) is one of the major challenges in planning strategies for energy transitions. The visibility aspects of such infrastructure are important factors that explain local opposition. Classical visibility and viewshed analyses of RES disregard people’s perceptions and estimations of n...

Global sustainability targets demand transformative changes. Nature-based solutions (NbS) are gaining traction in science and policy, but their potential for transformative change remains unexplored. We provide a framework to evaluate how NbS contribute to transformative change and apply it to 93 NbS from mountain social-ecological systems (SES). T...

The microclimatic conditions of the urban environment influence significantly the thermal comfort of human beings. One of the main human biometeorology parameters of thermal comfort is the Mean Radiant Temperature (Tmrt), which quantifies effective radiative flux reaching a human body. Simulation tools have proven useful to analyze the radiative be...

Increasing temperatures and snow scarcity pose a serious threat to ski tourism. While the impacts of climate change on ski tourism have been elaborated extensively, little is known so far on the vulnerability of winter tourism towards both internal climate variability and climate change. We use a 50-member single model large ensemble from a regiona...

Dynamic process‐based modelling is often proposed as a powerful tool to understand complex socio‐environmental problems and to provide sustainable solutions as it allows disentangling cause and effect of human behaviour and environmental dynamics. However, the impact of such models in decision‐making and to support policy‐making has so far been ver...

The consideration of urban ecosystem services becomes increasingly important when planning compact cities. We implement a multi-objective optimization approach to support decision-makers in their efforts to develop green and dense cities. Embedded in a participatory process, the applied genetic algorithm allows us to assess spatial tradeoffs betwee...

Mountain forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration and protection from natural hazards. Forest cover in the European Alps has increased over the last century, but in recent years, these forests have experienced an increasing rate of natural disturbances by agents such as windthrow, bark beetle outbreaks, and...

The following paper introduces the concept of place for land system science to better understand how the transformation of place, as place-making, can be operationalised. The aim is to operationalise place with the motivation that a deeper understanding of people–place interactions can advance knowledge of land systems towards practicable solutions...

Renewable energy systems (RES) can impact landscape aesthetics and influence the public's perception of the landscape and their acceptance of large infrastructure projects. Perceptual processes have consequences for both physiological and behavioral reactions to visual landscape changes and have not been systematically assessed in the context of RE...

As global environmental change continues to accelerate and intensify, science and society are turning to trans-disciplinary approaches to facilitate transitions to sustainability. Modeling is increasingly used as a technological tool to improve our understanding of social-ecological systems (SES), encourage collaboration and learning, and facilitat...

Die Ökologische Infrastruktur (ÖI) ist für die Erhaltung und Förderung der Biodiversität unerlässlich und stellt lebenswichtige Leistungen für den Menschen bereit. ÖI basieren auf natürlichen und halbnatürlichen Lebensräumen. Die Entwicklung und der Schutz solcher ÖI wurden als zentrale Schritte für den Erfolg der Strategie Biodiversität Schweiz (S...

Ecological infrastructure (EI), which is a planned network of high-quality natural and semi-natural elements designed and managed to provide ecosystem services, has the potential to ensure rich and resilient biodiversity. Within the Action Plan for the Swiss Biodiversity Strategy of the Swiss Confederation, the pilot project known as “ValPar.CH – V...

The urban underground is increasingly recognized as a multifunctional resource important for achieving urban resilience. However, it is often neglected in planning processes. Since this can lead to undesired urban developments, approaches are required to take both the space above and below ground into account. In particular, there is a lack of visu...

Agricultural transitions from subsistence to export-oriented production make households more reliant on volatile agricultural commodity markets and can increase households' exposure to crop price and yield shocks. At the same time, subsistence farming is also highly vulnerable to crop failures. In this work, we define household livelihood vulnerabi...