Erik Andersson

• Professor
• Professor (Full) at University of Helsinki

Within-city green infrastructure can offer opportunities and new contexts for people to become stewards of ecosystem services. We analyze cities as social–ecological systems, synthesize the literature, and provide examples from more than 15 years of research in the Stockholm urban region, Sweden. The social–ecological approach spans from investigat...

The design and implementation of nature-based solutions (NBS) in cities are often limited by an anthropocentric approach that prioritizes utilitarian goals instead of the diverse needs and abilities of multiple species that would support ecological flourishing. This paper starts from the premise that multispecies justice (MSJ) thinking provides a n...

Peri-urban landscapes are the meeting point of a wide range of human activities, power dynamics, and social-ecological processes in the Anthropocene. Multiple interests, as well as differences in governance regimes and decision-making processes increase the complexity of peri-urban landscapes. With this complexity as a background, we place our focu...

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...

Underpinned by systemic thinking, social-ecological systems (SES) research has emerged as a critical field for addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene, marked by a cross-scale focus, inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, and a strong emphasis on place-based work. Thanks to the efforts of many networks and institutes, the field has advanced...

There is now widespread recognition of the need for inter/transdisciplinary (I/TD) approaches to solving global problems like climate change and biodiversity. Yet methods for successfully integrating knowledge across disciplines, and between research and practice, are in need of further development, particularly approaches that can ameliorate epist...

Identifying research gaps and priorities is paramount to advance sustainability science and contribute to a sustainable future. This editorial contributes to this effort by contemplating the sustainability science research agenda and aligning it with recent changes in global dynamics. Drawing on consultations with the editorial board members of the...

Understanding and building resilience is critical to responding to the deepening polycrisis. Pathway diversity is a promising approach to resilience that combines individual and systems perspectives, but so far has only been applied to idealized cases. Here, we use a rich case study from the mosaic landscape of Västra Harg, Sweden, to test and adva...

Enabling diverse actors to address interlinked sustainability issues is important and challenging. This paper focuses on how to design a dialogue-based knowledge co-production process to nurture collective action. Using the conceptualization of systems, target, and operational knowledge as the guiding framework, we designed and combined different c...

A growing number of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) has been advocated for urban flood risk management (FRM). However, whether NbS for FRM (NbS-FRM) achieves both social and ecological co-benefits remains largely unknown. We here propose and use a conceptual framework with a coupled social-ecological perspective to explore and identify such “win-win”...

The world has become urban; cities increasingly shape our worldviews, relation to other species, and the large-scale, long-term decisions we make. Cities are nature, but they need to align better with other ecosystems to avoid accelerating climate change and loss of biodiversity. We need a science to guide urban development across the diverse reali...

This paper positions urban ecology as increasingly conversant with multiple perspectives and methods for understanding the functions and qualities of diverse cities and urban situations. Despite progress in the field, we need clear pathways for positioning, connecting and synthesising specific knowledge and to make it speak to more systemic questio...

In an increasingly urbanized world, the concepts of ecosystem services and nature-based solutions can help tackle grand challenges. However, ambiguity in their definitions and in the relationship between the two concepts complicates comprehensive research efforts as well as their effective application in policy and planning in urban systems. This p...

Increasing evidence demonstrates the psychological benefits of nature contact. However, the evidence is often established at the population level, and the individual differences in the psychological benefits gained from nature are considered negligible variations. In this study, we performed a cross-sectional online survey in Brisbane and Sydney, A...

People-nature interdependencies in the social-ecological system (SES) are fundamental to coping with urban flood risks. Nature-based solutions (NbS), a holistic tool considering the people-nature interdependencies, have been advocated widely for urban flood risk management (FRM). However, how NbS has been used from SES perspectives in urban FRM is...

Funktionell grön infrastruktur för biologisk mångfald i urbana miljöer och tätortsmiljöer - Sammanställning från ett kunskapsseminarium

New urban models increasingly seek to create more sustainable, livable, and healthier cities by reinvigorating green space. In this article, we highlight and briefly review several main but disconnected areas of study in which the factors that frame human–environment interactions and therefore also influence the potential well-being outcomes of tho...

Urban dwellers’ use of public and private green spaces may have changed during the early years of the Covid-19 pandemic due to movement restriction. A survey was deployed in Brisbane and Sydney, Australia 1 year after the start of Covid-19 restrictions (April 2021) to explore relationships of mental health and wellbeing to different patterns of pri...

While held to be a means for climate change adaptation and mitigation, nature-based solutions (NbS) themselves are vulnerable to climate change. To find ways of compensating for this vulnerability we combine a focused literature review on how information technology has been used to strengthen positive social–ecological–technological feedback, with...

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely challenged mental health and wellbeing. However, research has consistently reinforced the value of spending time in green space for better health and wellbeing outcomes. Factors such as an individual’s nature orientation, used to describe one’s affinity to nature, may influence an individual’s green space visitati...

Financial advisers recommend a diverse portfolio to respond to market fluctuations across sectors. Similarly, nature has evolved a diverse portfolio of species to maintain ecosystem function amid environmental fluctuations. In urban planning, public health, transport and communications, food production, and other domains, however, this feature ofte...

Although potential urban green space accessibility is being discussed widely, specific barriers that affect accessibility are often under-estimated. They do not equate to limited or uneven accessibility nor are they exclusively related to physical settings. Rather, the range of barriers and their complex interactions, including people’s perceptions...

The understanding of urban social-ecological systems requires integrated and interdisciplinary methods. This paper explores differences in the accessibility of urban green spaces (UGS) based on urban morphology. In contrast to other comparative analyses that followed simplified quantification of UGS provision and/or omitted the impact of morphologi...

As rates of urbanization and climatic change soar, decision-makers are increasingly challenged to provide innovative solutions that simultaneously address climate-change impacts and risks and inclusively ensure quality of life for urban residents. Cities have turned to nature-based solutions to help address these challenges. Nature-based solutions,...

Although potential urban green space accessibility is being discussed widely, specific barriers that affect accessibility are often under-estimated. They do not equate to limited or uneven accessibility nor are they exclusively related to physical settings. Rather, the range of barriers and their complex interactions, including people’s perceptions...

Inter- and transdisciplinary research projects bring with them both challenges and opportunities for learning among all stakeholders involved. This is a particularly relevant aspect in social-ecological research projects, which deal with complex real-world systems and wicked problems involving various stakeholders’ interests, needs, and views, whil...

Smart city development is expanding rapidly globally and is often argued to improve urban sustainability. However, these smart developments are often technology-centred approaches that can miss critical interactions between social and ecological components of urban systems, limiting their real impact. We draw on the social-ecological-technological...

The draft Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework commits to achievement of equity and justice outcomes and represents a “relational turn” in how we understand inclusive conservation. Although “inclusivity” is drawn on as a means to engage diverse stakeholders, widening the framing of inclusivity can create new tensions with regard to how to manage...

Urban infrastructure will require transformative changes to adapt to changing disturbance patterns. We ask what new opportunities hybrid infrastructure-built environments coupled with landscape-scale biophysical structures and processes-offer for building different layers of resilience critical for dealing with increased variation in the frequency,...

Social-ecological interactions have been shown to generate interrelated and reoccurring sets of ecosystem services, also known as ecosystem service bundles. Given the potential utility of the bundles concept, along with the recent surge in interest it is timely to reflect on the concept, its current use and potential for the future. Based on our ec...

Present and future urbanization together with climate change and other uncertainties make urban quality of life a critical issue, and one that will need constant attention and deliberation. Across cities and contexts, urban ecosystems in the form of green and blue infrastructure, have the potential to contribute to human well-being as well as suppo...

Ecosystem services (ES) from urban green and blue infrastructure (GBI) provide cities and their citizens with benefits necessary to cope with present and future sustainability challenges. Long-term comprehensive urban greening strategies, policies, and plans are thus central to the development of sustainable, liveable, and resilient cities. However...

Performance-based green area indicators are increasingly used as policy instruments to promote nature-based solutions in urban property development. We explore the differences and parallels of three green area indicators: Berlin’s Biotope Area Factor (BAF), Stockholm’s Green Area Factor (GYF) and Oslo’s Blue Green Factor (BGF). As policy instrument...

Background: People caring for urban green infrastructure, not least urban trees, play an important role in maintaining the quality of the urban environment. But what happens when information processing and knowledge generation become digitalized? This study examines digital tools developed to provide knowledge support and with ambitions of inciting...

Record climate extremes are reducing urban liveability, compounding inequality, and threatening infrastructure. Adaptation measures that integrate technological, nature-based, and social solutions can provide multiple co-benefits to address complex socioecological issues in cities while increasing resilience to potential impacts. However, there rem...

Globally, cities face massive environmental and societal challenges such as rapid population growth and climate change. In response, natural infrastructure is increasingly recognized for its potential to enhance resilience and improve human well-being. Here, we examine the role of the ecosystem services and resilience approaches in urban planning,...

Urban green and blue space interventions may bring about unintended consequences, involving trade-offs between the different land uses, and indeed, between the needs of different urban inhabitants, land users, and owners. Such trade-offs include choices between green/blue and non-green/blue projects, between broader land sparing vs. land sharing pa...

Inter- and transdisciplinary research projects bring with them both challenges and opportunities for learning among all stakeholders involved. This is a particularly relevant aspect in social-ecological research projects, which deal with complex real-world systems and wicked problems involving various stakeholders’ interests, needs and views, while...

Paper available online here: https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol26/iss2/art35/ Understanding opportunities as well as constraints for people to benefit from and take care of urban nature is an important step toward more sustainable cities. In order to explore, engage, and enable strategies to improve urban quality of life, we combine a social-ec...

Urban social–ecological–technological systems (SETS) are dynamic and respond to climate pressures. Change involves alterations to land and resource management, social organization, infrastructure, and design. Research often focuses on how climate change impacts urban SETS or on the characteristics of urban SETS that promote climate resilience. Yet...

In this perspective, we reflect upon the question: what processes may help transition scientific insights on sustainability issues into practice and thus contribute to tackling the complex, systemic sustainability problems of today? We use five forerunners in the field of providing and brokering knowledge for science informed real world solutions,...

Urban social-ecological resilience research has focused on conceptual explorations, while less attention has been paid to how resilience thinking in practice may inform urban development. Using the rapidly urbanizing landscape in Stockholm as a case, we explore the urban specifics of resilience thinking practice and thereby contribute to the develo...

To ensure that cities and urban ecosystems support human wellbeing and overall quality of life we need conceptual frameworks that can connect different scientific disciplines as well as research and practice. In this perspective, we explore the potential of a traits framework for understanding social-ecological patterns, dynamics, interactions, and...

Key insights on needs in urban regional governance - Global urbanization (the increasing concentration in urban settlements of the increasing world population), is a driver and accelerator of shifts in diversity, new cross-scale interactions, decoupling from ecological processes, increasing risk and exposure to shocks. Responding to the challenges...

'Behind the paper' reflection

In this perspective, we reflect upon the question: what processes may help transition scientific insights on sustainability issues into practice and thus contribute to tackling the complex, systemic sustainability problems of today? We use the five papers in the Ambio Anniversary collection on solution-oriented research as our starting point; five...

Organic farming aims to minimize negative impacts on the local environment, but its contributions to global food sustainability also depend on a resilient food supply. We studied a farm aiming to move beyond organic and become "a sustainable farm of the future", in the farmer's own words. This meant going beyond local impacts to consider how the fa...

Remote sensing has evolved to become a key tool for various fields of environmental analysis, thus actively informing policy across areas and domains. To evaluate the degree to which remote sensing is contributing to the science of ecologically-oriented urban planning, we carried out a systematic literature review using the SCOPUS database, searchi...

Humanity places a heavy burden on agricultural landscapes, demanding plentiful food, multiple ecosystem functions, and biodiversity conservation. We quantified areas growing ‘brighter’ and ‘darker’ (i.e., better or worse than expected based on extrinsic constraints) for multifunctionality of ecosystem services (ES) over time across a dynamic agricu...

Context: Urban densification has been argued to increase the contrast between built up and open green space. This contrast may offer a starting point for assessing the extent and magnitude of the positive influences urban green infrastructure is expected to have on its surroundings. Objectives: Drawing on insights from landscape ecology and urban g...

The need to link different valuation methods, especially beyond disciplinary realms, has been discussed at least since the 1990s, and recently it has gained special attention. In the present contribution to this debate, we analyse the prospects for integrating different valuation methods representing three areas of disciplinary knowledge or value d...

In this study we explore species richness and traits across two urban gradients in the City of Cape Town. The first is the natural-urban boundary and the second is a socio-economic gradient informed by historical race-based apartheid planning. Plant species and cover were recorded in 156 plots sampled from conservation areas, private gardens, and p...

The circumstances under which different ecosystem service benefits can be realised differ. Benefits tend to be co-produced and enabled by multiple interacting social, ecological, and technological factors, which is particularly evident in cities. As many cities are undergoing rapid change, these factors need to be better understood and accounted fo...

We have entered the urban century and addressing a broad suite of sustainability challenges in urban areas is increasingly key for our chances to transform the entire planet towards sustainability. For example, cities are responsible for 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions and, at the same time, 90% of urban areas are situated on coastlines, mak...

We categorize Stockholm’s urban green spaces according to the use values and social meanings they support, based on a sociotope mapping, and estimate their impact on property prices with a hedonic pricing model. The approach allows us to identify the most and least desired green space characteristics (attributes) and to assess the willingness to pa...

Cities are currently experiencing serious, multifaceted impacts from global environmental change, especially climate change, and the degree to which they will need to cope with and adapt to such challenges will continue to increase. A complex systems approach inspired by evolutionary theory can inform strategies for policies and interventions to de...

Managing for increased multifunctionality of agricultural landscapes is a crucial step toward a sustainable global agriculture. We studied two contrasting agricultural landscapes that exist in parallel on two sides of a ditch in the South African Drakensberg Mountains. The large-scale commercial and smallholder farmers operate within a similar biop...

Urban green infrastructure (UGI) is a promising concept when developing multifunctional green space systems to address major challenges of urbanisation such as increasing social cohesion, promoting the transition to a green economy, adaptation to climate change and conservation of biodiversity. In response to the European Commission’s Communication...

We see two related, but not well-linked fields that together could help us better understand biodiversity and how it, over time, provides benefits to people. The affordances approach in environmental psychology offers a way to understand our perceptual appraisal of landscapes and biodiversity and, to some extent, intentional choice or behavior, i.e...

A pressing issue for mankind is how to combine urban expansion and food production for present and future generations. Using a case study example –the Stockholm County in Sweden- we illustrate how incorporating an ecosystem service perspective into urban planning may help us rethink the urban-rural divide in order to facilitate a sustainable develo...

Biocultural diversity is an evolving perspective for studying the interrelatedness between people and their natural environment, not only in ecoregional hotspots and cultural landscapes, but also in urban green spaces. Developed in the 1990s in order to denote the diversity of life in all its manifestations―biological, cultural and linguistic―co-ev...

Human enterprise and endeavour increasingly influence global processes of change, from the planetary scale down to the very local. Cities are hubs of human activity, and as the places where the majority of the world’s population live we must, when looking into an uncertain future, consider how we think about urban design. Cities are densely inhabit...

The GREEN SURGE project was a collaborative project between 23 partners in 11 countries funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). GREEN SURGE identified, developed and tested ways of linking green spaces, biodiversity, people and the green economy in order to meet the major urban challenges related to land use conflicts...

In this article we provide an overview of five case studies of initiatives using the image of White Stork as a focal species. Our case studies are preceded by a short overview of existing approaches to achieve broader environmental goals through species conservation and a review of the social, ecological and social-ecological importance of White St...

This report is the final deliverable (D2.3) of WP2 of GREEN SURGE project (2013-2017) as a part of the EU FP7 (ENV.2013.6.2-5-603567). This research aims to illustrate how the Biocultural Diversity (BCD) concept can help urban practitioners, planners and decision-makers to understand the integration between biological diversity in Urban Green Infra...

Global urbanisation has led to extreme population densities often in areas prone to problems such as extreme heat, storm surges, coastal and surface flooding, droughts and fires. Although nature based solutions (NBS) often have specific targets, one of the overarching objectives with NBS design and implementation is to protect human livelihoods and...

Urban green infrastructure (UGI) plays an important role in the many urban challenges of the 21st century. This report summarizes and integrates the main findings which are presented in the GREEN SURGE deliverables and scientific papers. With this, our work contributes to important debates around UGI. This includes debates around which benefits are...

This guide aims to provide a tools for navigating through important urban green space governance principles and issues. The guide synthesises results from the European research project GREEN SURGE about the current state-of-art of knowledge and innovative practice of UGI governance (see also: www.greensurge.eu). The guide is aimed at a broad range...

Improving the dynamic relationship between nature and human well-being is a pressing issue of our time. Landscapes embody this tight interconnectedness and serve as unique sustainability learning hubs, showcased by the global rise of place-based and holistic landscape stewardship initiatives. Incorporating these exciting developments, this book exp...

Greening cities, namely installing new parks, rooftop gardens or planting trees along the streets, undoubtedly contributes to an increase in wellbeing and enhances the attractiveness of open spaces in cities. At the same time, we observe an increasing use of greening strategies as ingredients of urban renewal, upgrading and urban revitalization as...

Urban green infrastructure (GI) has been promoted as an approach to respond to major urban environmental and social challenges such as reducing the ecological footprint, improving human health and well-being, and adapting to climate change. Various definitions of GI have been proposed since its emergence more than two decades ago. This article aims...

Densification of cities is presently one of the dominating strategies for urbanization globally. However, how densification of cities is linked to processes in the peri-urban landscapes is rather unknown. The aim of this paper is to highlight the potentials in of peri-urban landscapes to be recognized as complementary providers of urban ecosystem s...

Active citizens may contribute to the environmental, social, and institutional resilience of cities. This review discusses how citizen initiatives protect biodiversity hotspots, contribute to social cohesion, institutional innovation, and diversity in urban green space management. Challenges related to social inclusiveness, ecological connectivity...

Active citizens may contribute to the environmental, social, and institutional resilience of cities. This review discusses how citizen initiatives protect biodiversity hotspots, contribute to social cohesion, institutional innovation, and diversity in urban green space management. Challenges related to social inclusiveness, ecological connectivity...

Traditionally, biocultural diversity (BCD) has been researched in non-western and indigenous societies. Recently, it has also been applied in urbanized and industrialized societies, in particular for the planning and management of urban green infrastructure (UGI). Diversity in human and biological systems is considered to support cities’ adaptation...

The combination of climate change and urbanization projected to occur until 2050 poses new challenges for land-use planning, not least in terms of reducing urban vulnerability to hazards from projected increases in the frequency and intensity of climate extremes. Interest in investments in green infrastructure (interconnected systems of parks, wetl...

Functional traits have been proposed as a more mechanistic way than species data alone to connect biodiversity to ecosystem processes and function in ecological research. Recently, this framework has also been broadened to include connections of traits to ecosystem services. While many links between traits and ecosystem processes/functions are easi...