Erin Bohensky

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation | CSIRO · Environment

Despite the increasing trend worldwide of integrating indigenous and scientific knowledge in natural resource management, there has been little stock-taking of literature on lessons learned from bringing indigenous knowledge and science together and the implications for maintaining and building social-ecological system resilience. In this paper we...

In the wake of the flood that affected Brisbane, Australia, in January 2011, public attention turned to the causes of the event and lessons for minimizing the impacts of future floods. The news media was an important vehicle for understanding and internalizing the 2011 Brisbane flood. Examining how the flood was framed in the media is, therefore, u...

Why is aid so dysfunctional, and how can science help people in crisis? Raphael Barth’s new film “Aftermath: The Second Flood” exposes the complexities of crisis, culture and development following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the distribution of aid to the Nicobar Islands.

Factors that constitute resilience can themselves change over time in social-ecological systems. This poses a major challenge for understanding resilience and suggests greater investigation is needed of how social-ecological systems evolve through time and how to manage along more resilient pathways given continuous change. Resilient pathways accou...

Technological advancements offer the opportunity for interventions to reduce and potentially even counteract the impacts of climate change. However, advancements that can facilitate the adaptation of human and natural ecosystems to climate change, and possibly lessen the intensity and damaging impacts of extreme weather events, come with social, te...

Many challenges posed by the current Anthropocene epoch require fundamental transformations to humanity's relationships with the rest of the planet. Achieving such transformations requires that humanity improve its understanding of the current situation and enhance its ability to imagine pathways toward alternative, preferable futures. We review ad...

Adaptation pathways are decision-making processes which sequence actions over time to account for rapid change and future uncertainty. In developing economies pathways practice can guide climate-resilient development (CRD) but is hampered by complex political dynamics, intensified by ‘resource curses’ of abundant natural resources. We tested an ada...

Co-design, co-development, and co-delivery (Co-3D for short) are activities within the co-production research pathway that are increasingly being used in climate change science and adaptation projects. However, the research community is still coming to understand how best to incorporate Co-3D in practice, as each project has a specific context arou...

Managing human use of ecosystems in an era of rapid environmental change requires an understanding of diverse stakeholders’ behaviors and perceptions to enable effective prioritization of actions to mitigate multiple threats. Specifically, research examining how threat perceptions are shared or diverge among stakeholder groups and how these can evo...

The sustainable development and food security of islands in the Asia-Pacific region is severely compromised by climate change, sea level rise and compounding socio-economic issues. To achieve a step-change in food production and climate adaptation, livelihoods must rapidly transform. Food security programs continue to apply the “pipeline” model of...

The sustainable development and food security of islands in the Asia-Pacific region is severely compromised by climate change, sea level rise and compounding socioeconomic issues. To achieve a step-change in food production and climate adaptation, livelihoods must rapidly transform. Food security programs continue to apply the "pipeline" model of s...

Scenario planning is a popular decision-support method that is increasingly being applied to climate change adaptation. However, evaluation of scenario planning for adaptation is lacking. In this paper we summarise a science-policy session held at the European Climate Change Adaptation Conference in May 2019, where practitioners explored the streng...

It is commonly argued that cities face unprecedented pressures and therefore must transform. To guide transformations , it is important to develop guiding visions. This paper reports on a futures thinking exercise in the context of cities. It employs a methodology based on a series of community workshops with a diverse mix of experts using a "strat...

Greater Sydney is Australia’s most global city, with a population of 4.7 million people, and this is expected double over the next fifty years. Sydney is changing rapidly in demography, diversity, lifestyle and urban form. Planning for the future of such a city presents opportunities and challenges. There is a need for coordinated planning and buil...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an important marine conservation strategy; however, managing MPAs is challenging due to threats such as coastal development, non-compliance and recreational pressures. We conducted semi-structured interviews with MPA managers and rangers in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria to discuss the opportunity to appl...

In developing countries, change in environmental and socioeconomic systems is occurring at unprecedented rates, driven by rapid globalisation, technological advances, mod-ernisation and increasingly unpredictable economic and environmental shocks (Leach 2008). As a consequence, there are growing concerns that conventional international development...

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility and potential utility of decision-centric social-economic monitoring using data collected from Great Barrier Reef (Reef) region. The social and economic long term monitoring program (SELTMP) for the Reef is a novel attempt to monitor the social and economic dimensions of social-ecological chan...

The city of Darwin is uniquely placed in the centre of northern Australia, closely related socially, culturally and economically to large near-Asian countries and a focus for northern regional development initiatives. Darwin residents point to the quality of the lifestyle in Darwin when speaking of its unique qualities. In the context of other citi...

The claim that in natural resource management (NRM) a change from anthropocentric values and ethics to eco-centric ones is necessary to achieve sustainability leads to the search for eco-centric models of relationship with the environment. Indigenous cultures can provide such models; hence, there is the need for multicultural societies to further i...

Inspiration, aspirations, attitudes, and perception of threats play a pivotal role in the way that individuals associate themselves with natural environments. These sentiments affect how people connect to natural places, including their behaviours, perceived responsibility, and the management interventions they support. World Heritage Areas hold an...

Effective climate adaptation requires engagement (awareness, motivation, and capacity to act) at relevant scales, from individuals to global institutions. In many parts of the world, research attention has focused on the engagement of the general public. We suggest that studies also need to focus on key stakeholders in the government and non-govern...

Participatory scenario planning (PSP) is an increasingly popular tool in place-based environmental research for evaluating alternative futures of social-ecological systems. Although a range of guidelines on PSP methods are available in the scientific and grey literature, there is a need to reflect on existing practices and their appropriate applica...

Few studies have examined how to mainstream future climate change uncertainty into decision-making for poverty alleviation in developing countries. With potentially drastic climate change emerging later this century, there is an imperative to develop planning tools which can enable vulnerable rural communities to proactively build adaptive capacity...

Climate adaptation planning provides an opportunity to enhance the adaptive capacity of stakeholders across multiple levels. However, reviews of standard top-down and bottom-up approaches indicate that the value of multistakeholder involvement is not fully recognized or incorporated into guidelines. Focusing on provinces in Indonesia and Papua New...

Climate adaptation planning provides an opportunity to enhance the adaptive capacity of stakeholders across multiple levels. However, reviews of standard top-down and bottom-up approaches indicate that the value of multistakeholder involvement is not fully recognized or incorporated into guidelines. Focusing on provinces in Indonesia and Papua New...

Climate adaptation planning provides an opportunity to enhance the adaptive capacity of stakeholders across multiple levels. However, reviews of standard top-down and bottom-up approaches indicate that the value of multistakeholder involvement is not fully recognized or incorporated into guidelines. Focusing on provinces in Indonesia and Papua New...

As the human and financial costs of natural disasters rise and state finances continue to deplete, increasing attention is being placed on the role of the private sector to support disaster and climate resilience. However, not only is there a recognised lack of private finance to fill this gap, but international institutional and financing bodies t...

Climate adaptation planning provides an opportunity to enhance the adaptive capacity of stakeholders across multiple levels. However, reviews of standard top-down and bottom-up approaches indicate that the value of multistakeholder involvement is not fully recognized or incorporated into guidelines. Focusing on provinces in Indonesia and Papua New...

In spite of their close proximity and their sharing of an international maritime border, Indonesia and Australia are very different nations. Geographically, politically, culturally and economically they bear some similarities, but also some stark differences. As well as presenting results of the Australia Indonesia Centre Foresighting Project’s meg...

The social–ecological systems that provide ecosystem services to society can be viewed as complex adaptive systems (CAS), characterized by a high level of interconnectedness, potential for non-linear change, and inherent uncertainty and surprise. This chapter focuses on whether resilience of ecosystem services is enhanced by management based on wha...

Protected areas and the natural environment deliver a wide range of ecosystem services that contribute to human wellbeing. Here we examine the value of protected areas for cyclone and coastal protection in Queensland, Australia. Natural events such as cyclones threaten the health or wellbeing of human society however we can plan to minimize their i...

Ecosystem services (the benefits people derive from functioning ecosystems) are increasingly being recognized as essential to sustainable human well-being. Oceans and coasts provide a significant portion of ecosystem services. We need to significantly improve our understanding and modelling of the complex interconnections between ecosystems and sus...

This report summarises the final workshop of the NERP-funded project "Building Resilient Communities for Torres Strait Futures", held at Port Kennedy Hall on Thursday Island from 23 July - 25 July, 2014. While the focus was on Masig Island, the process and outcomes of the workshop are applicable to other Torres Strait communities, and provides an e...

This Chapter is based on participatory research we conducted in collaboration with the Government of Indonesia. The participatory modelling process aimed for facilitating a learning experience that involved three tiers of governance. The participatory process included the co-design of the research proposal by stakeholders who were actively involved...

Aboriginal inhabitants of the Wet Tropics of Queensland advocate for greater inclusion of their Indigenous knowledge (IK) in natural resource management (NRM) to fulfil their customary obligations to country and to exert their Native Title rights. Despite a legal and institutional framework for inclusion of IK in NRM, IK has so far been applied onl...

The process of learning in social-ecological systems is an emerging area of research, but little attention has been given to how social and ecological interactions motivate or inhibit learning. This is highly relevant to the South African water sector, where a major policy transition is occurring that provides local water users and managers with ne...

In developing countries adaptation responses to climate and global change should be integrated with human development to generate no regrets, co-benefit strategies for the rural poor, but there are few examples of how to achieve this. The adaptation pathways approach provides a potentially useful decision-making framework because it aims to steer s...

Understanding how individuals engage with climate change is critical for developing successful climate adaptation policies1. Indonesia ranks among theworld’s top CO2 emitters2, affirming its relevance to the global climate change policy arena, yet the dynamics of climate change engagement in Indonesia may differ from developed countries from which...

Enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services (ES) that underpin human well-being is critical for meeting current and future societal needs, and requires specific governance and management policies. Using the literature, we identify seven generic policy-relevant principles for enhancing the resilience of desired ES in the face of disturbance and o...

Rising fuel prices are thought to drive households in developing countries to increase pressure on natural re-sources, primarily through firewood collection and logging. We revisit this assumption and conducted house-hold surveys to elicit responses to energy price changes in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Survey data suggests that household logging,...

Enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services (ES) that underpin human well-being is critical for meeting current and future societal needs, and requires specific governance and management policies. Using the literature, we identify seven generic policy-relevant principles for enhancing the resilience of desired ES in the face of disturbance and o...

Enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services (ES) that underpin human well-being is critical for meeting current and future societal needs, and requires specific governance and management policies. Using the literature, we identify seven generic policy-relevant principles for enhancing the resilience of desired ES in the face of disturbance and o...

The extent to which nations and regions can actively shape the future or must passively respond to global forces is a topic of relevance to current discourses on climate change, ecosystems services, and human well-being. In Australia, climate change has been identified as the greatest threat to the ecological resilience of the Great Barrier Reef an...

Applied models of policy interventions are increasingly expected to consider households' responses to these interventions, which makes agent-based modelling popular in applied policy situations. Implementing an adequate level of agent heterogeneity and mapping it into a spatial environment are critical factors of such applied modelling. However, po...

Scenario planning, a method for structured thinking about the future, offers an important tool for integrating scientific and stakeholder knowledge at different scales to explore alternative natural resource management and policy options. However, actual examples of such integration are rare. A scenario planning exercise was conducted in Milne Bay...

The Great Barrier Reef is an iconic ecosystem that faces multiple threats, including overharvesting, water quality decline and climate change. There is general recognition that these threats occur at multiple scales, and the reef ecosystem therefore requires management at multiple scales. This situation presents a highly complex challenge, as it in...

Factors that constitute resilience can themselves change over time in social-ecological systems. This poses a major challenge for understanding resilience and suggests greater investigation is needed of how social-ecological systems evolve through time and how to manage along more resilient pathways, given continuous change. Resilient pathways acco...

Scenario analysis is a useful tool for exploring key uncertainties that may shape the future of social-ecological systems. This paper explores the methods, costs, and benefits of developing and linking scenarios of social-ecological systems across multiple spatial scales. Drawing largely on experiences in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, we sug...