Garry D. Peterson

Stockholm University | SU · Stockholm Resilience Centre

Ecosystems influence human societies, leading people to manage ecosystems for human benefit. Poor environmental management can lead to reduced ecological resilience and social–ecological collapse. We review research on resilience and collapse across different systems and propose a unifying social–ecological framework based on (i) a clear definition...

Regime shifts, i.e., large, persistent, and usually unexpected changes in ecosystems and social-ecological systems, can have major impacts on ecosystem services, and consequently, on human well-being. However, the vulnerability of different regions to various regime shifts is largely unknown because evidence for the existence of regime shifts in di...

Resilience theory offers a framework for understanding the dynamics of complex systems. However, operationalizing resilience theory to develop and test empirical hypotheses can be difficult. We present a method in which simple systems models are used as a framework to identify resilience surrogates for case studies. The process of constructing a sy...

Envisioning positive scenarios that recognize the multiple values of nature is fundamental for designing transformative changes in local socio-ecological systems. This study developed a protocol with three specifications for operationalizing the Nature Futures Framework (NFF) in a landscape scenario analysis using a multi-objective optimization fra...

Achieving global sustainability goals requires most people and societies to fundamentally revisit their relationship with nature. New approaches are called for to guide change processes towards sustainable futures that embrace the plurality of people's desired relationships with nature. This paper presents a novel approach to exploring desirable fu...

The Anthropocene is characterized by accelerating change and global challenges of increasing complexity. Inspired by what some have called a polycrisis, we explore whether the human trajectory of increasing complexity and influence on the Earth system could become a form of trap for humanity. Based on an adaptation of the evolutionary traps concept...

Landscapes have typically been produced by varied, diverse, and long-term interactions between people and nature. However, most landscape planning and ecosystem service mapping approaches focus on the biophysical aspects of landscapes rather the social. Spatial representations of people’s perceptions, mental models, and local knowledge of ecosystem...

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...

The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) is a heuristic tool for co-creating positive futures for nature and people. It seeks to open up a diversity of futures through mainly three value perspectives on nature – Nature for Nature, Nature for Society, and Nature as Culture. This paper describes how the NFF can be applied in modelling to support decision-m...

Unlabelled: To halt further destruction of the biosphere, most people and societies around the globe need to transform their relationships with nature. The internationally agreed vision under the Convention of Biological Diversity-Living in harmony with nature-is that "By 2050, biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaini...

Nearly a billion people depend on tropical seascapes. The need to ensure sustainable use of these vital areas is recognised, as one of 17 policy commitments made by world leaders, in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 (‘Life below Water’) of the United Nations. SDG 14 seeks to secure marine sustainability by 2030. In a time of increasing social-...

1. Invasive alien species are one of the major threats to global biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, natures contribution to people and human health. While scenarios about potential future developments have been available for other global change drivers for quite some time, we largely lack an understanding of how biological invasions might unfold in...

Future dynamics of biological invasions are highly uncertain because they depend on multiple environmental, societal and socio-economic drivers. We adopted a qualitative scenario approach to explore the future of invasive alien species (IAS) in Europe and created an overall strategy for their management that considers different plausible future dev...

Burkina Faso and the wider Sahel region have experienced substantial changes in rainfall, population, and landscape use. These changes have altered ecosystem services, the benefits that people receive from ecosystems, and rural livelihoods. However, it is difficult to assess the magnitude of these changes because of missing and fragmented social, a...

How do social-ecological systems change over time? In 2002 C. S. Holling and colleagues proposed the concept of panarchy, which presented social-ecological systems as an interacting set of adaptive cycles, each produced by the dynamic tensions between novelty and efficiency at multiple scales. Initially introduced as a conceptual framework and set...

Ecologists are challenged by the need to bridge and synthesize different approaches and theories to obtain a coherent understanding of ecosystems in a changing world. Both food web theory and regime shift theory shine light on mechanisms that confer stability to ecosystems, but from different angles. Empirical food web models are developed to analy...

Food is essential to people and is one of the main ways in which people are connected to the world’s ecosystems. However, food systems often cause ecosystem degradation and produce ill-health, which has generated increasing calls to transform food systems to be more sustainable. The Swedish food system is currently undergoing substantial change. A...

Times of crisis offer a rare opportunity to understand the mechanisms underpinning the resilience of complex adaptive systems. The coronavirus pandemic that started in 2020 overwhelmed health systems worldwide and forced governments, businesses, and individuals to deploy a range of coping and adaptation strategies. Through an online survey targetin...

While the scientific community documents environmental degradation and develops scenarios to identify the operational margins of system Earth, less attention is given to how decisions are made that steer the system in one direction or the other. We propose to use strategy games for this purpose, increasing the representation of human agency in scen...

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...

Resilience is the capacity of any system to maintain its function, structure and identity despite disturbances. Assessing resilience has been elusive due to high levels of abstraction that are difficult to empirically test, or the lack of high quality data required once appropriate proxies are identified. Most resilience assessments are limited to...

In a complex and turbulent world, there is heightened interest in managing for resilience. However, resilience guides, particularly those used in the development field, often lack a theoretical grounding in complex adaptive systems. There is a demand for guidance on how to operationalize complexity in applications of resilience, such as resilience...

Scenario analysis has emerged as a key tool to analyze complex and uncertain future socio-ecological developments. However, currently existing global scenarios (narratives of how the world may develop) have neglected biological invasions, a major threat to biodiversity and the economy. Here, we use a novel participatory process to develop a diverse...

While the scientific community has focused on documenting environmental degradation and developing scenarios that help identify the operational margins for system Earth, less attention has been given to the mental models of decision-makers that underpin environmental policies. We suggest that global efforts to stop deforestation and biodiversity lo...

Achieving global sustainability goals requires most people and societies to fundamentally alter their relationship with nature. New approaches are called for to guide change processes towards sustainable futures that embrace the plurality of people’s perspectives on nature. This paper presents a novel approach to exploring desirable futures for nat...

Achieving global sustainability goals requires most people and societies to fundamentally alter their relationship with nature. New approaches are called for to guide change processes towards sustainable futures that embrace the plurality of people’s perspectives on nature. This paper presents a novel approach to exploring desirable futures for nat...

The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) is a heuristic tool for co-creating positive futures for nature and people. It seeks to open up a diversity of futures through mainly three value perspectives on nature – Nature for Nature, Nature for Society, Nature as Culture. In this paper, we describe how the NFF can be applied in modelling to support policy....

Resilience is the capacity of any system to maintain its function, structure and identity despite disturbances. Assessing resilience has been elusive due to high levels of abstraction that are difficult to empirically test, or the lack of high quality data required once appropriate proxies are identified. Most resilience assessments are limited to...

Key methods discussed in this chapter Double uncertainty matrix, Mānoa, scenario archetypes, La Prospective, causal layered analysis

A key sustainability challenge in human-dominated landscapes is how to reconcile competing demands such as food production, water quality, climate regulation, and ecological amenities. Prior research has documented how efforts to prioritize desirable ecosystem services such as food and fiber have often led to tradeoffs with other services. However,...

Global Environmental Assessments (GEAs) are in a unique position to influence environmental decision-making in the context of sustainability challenges. To do this effectively, however, new methods are needed to respond to the needs of decision-makers for a more integrated, contextualized and goal-seeking evaluation of different policies, geared fo...

Different regions, with different contexts and values, will follow different sustainability transformation pathways, giving rise to tensions and opportunities as the outcomes of regional pathways interact. To navigate these changes, we need a better understanding of how regional pathways interact to produce outcomes for people and nature. Different...

Scenario analysis has emerged as a key tool to analyze complex and uncertain future socio-ecological developments. However, current global scenarios (narratives of how the world may develop) have neglected biological invasions, a major threat to biodiversity and the economy. We used a novel participatory process to develop a diverse set of global b...

Creating a sustainable and just future necessitates a transformation in how people interact with the Earth system and one another. Yet there is no “one-size fits all” approach; different regions with different contexts and values are likely to follow different pathways. These will give rise to both tensions and opportunities as the outcomes of thos...

How do social-ecological systems change over time? In 2002 Holling and colleagues proposed the concept of Panarchy, which presented social-ecological systems as an interacting set of adaptive cycles, each of which is produced by the dynamic tensions between novelty and efficiency at multiple scales. Initially introduced as a conceptual framework an...

Global environmental change challenges humanity because of its broad scale, long-lasting, and potentially irreversible consequences. Key to an effective response is to use an appropriate scientific lens to peer through the mist of uncertainty that threatens timely and appropriate decisions surrounding these complex issues. Identifying such corridor...

There are many calls to use the COVID 19 crisis as an opportunity for transforming to a future trajectory that is more equitable and environmentally sustainable. What is lacking is a cohesive framework for bringing these calls together. We propose that such transitions could be informed by lessons from three decades of scholarship on abrupt and sur...

Scientists have repeatedly argued that transformative, multiscale global scenarios are needed as tools in the quest to halt the decline of biodiversity and achieve sustainability goals. As a first step towards achieving this, the researchers who participated in the scenarios and models expert group of the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform o...

Targets for human development are increasingly connected with   targets for nature, however, existing scenarios do not explicitly address this relationship. Here, we outline a strategy to generate scenarios centred on our relationship with nature to inform decision-making at multiple scales.

The Anthropocene presents a set of interlinked sustainability challenges for humanity. The United Nations 2030 Agenda has identified 17 specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a way to confront these challenges. However, local initiatives have long been addressing issues connected to these goals in a myriad of diverse and innovative ways....

Scientists have repeatedly argued that transformative, multiscale global scenarios are needed as tools in the quest to halt the decline of biodiversity and achieve sustainability goals. As a first step towards achieving this, the Expert Group on Scenarios and Models of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Serv...

Scenario development helps people think about a broad variety of possible futures; however, the global environmental change community has thus far developed few positive scenarios for the future of the planet and humanity. Those that have been developed tend to focus on the role of a few common, large-scale external drivers, such as technology or e...

Research practice, funding agencies and global science organizations suggest that research aimed at addressing sustainability challenges is most effective when ‘co-produced’ by academics and non-academics. Co-production promises to address the complex nature of contemporary sustainability challenges better than more traditional scientific approache...

Ecologists are challenged by the need to bridge and synthesize different approaches and theories to obtain a coherent understanding of ecosystems in a changing world. Both food web theory and regime shift theory shine light on mechanisms that confer stability to ecosystems, but from a different angle. Empirical food web models are developed to anal...

Globally, food systems face multifaceted sustainability challenges and the need for food system transformation is increasingly acknowledged. However, there is still a lack of knowledge on the pathways for transformation and how they will play out in diverse regional social-ecological contexts. We explored transformation towards more sustainable and...

The ecologist C. S. Holling was a visionary of change in nature and society.

In the Pamir Mountains of Eastern Tajikistan, the clearance of mountain forests to provide fuelwood for an increasing population is a major source of environmental degradation. International development organisations have implemented joint forestry management institutions to help restore once-forested mountainous regions, but the success of these i...

The workshop drew on the ‘nature futures’ participatory scenario-building exercise initiated by the IPBES expert group on scenarios and models, and other biodiversity modelling initiatives such as the ISIMIP project2 working on adding biodiversity to the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) scenarios framework, the 'bending the curve' initiative3 l...

The workshop entitled ‘From visions to scenarios for nature and nature’s contributions to people for the 21st century’ was organized by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) expert group on scenarios and models and its technical support unit, and hosted by the NF-UBC Nereus Program, the Peter Wall Institute f...

Context Humans continually transform landscapes, affecting the ecosystem services (ES) they provide. Thus, the spatial relationships among services vary across landscapes. Managers and decision makers have access to a variety of tools for mapping landscapes and analyzing their capacity to provide multiple ES. Objectives This paper characterizes an...

Brazil, home to one of the planet’s last great forests, is currently in trade negotiations with its second largest trading partner, the European Union (EU). We urge the EU to seize this critical opportunity to ensure that Brazil protects human rights and the environment. Brazil’s forests, wetlands, and savannas are crucial to a great diversity of I...

Access to ecosystem services and influence on their management are structured by social relations among actors, which often occur across spatial scales. Such cross-scale social relations can be analysed through a telecoupling framework as decisions taken at local scales are often shaped by actors at larger scales. Analyzing these cross-scale relati...

We explore how remittances shape the effect of rural out-migration on the potential for local forest transitions. Building on an existing theoretical model of social-ecological regime shifts that links migration, farmland abandonment, and forest regrowth, we incorporate migrant remittances as an additional rural-urban teleconnection. We also extend...

Cascading effects of regime shifts The potential for regime shifts and critical transitions in ecological and Earth systems, particularly in a changing climate, has received considerable attention. However, the possibility of interactions between such shifts is poorly understood. Rocha et al. used network analysis to explore whether critical transi...

Regime shifts are large, abrupt and persistent critical transitions in the function and structure of systems (1, 2). Yet it is largely unknown how these transitions will interact, whether the occurrence of one will increase the likelihood of another, or simply correlate at distant places. Here we explore two types of cascading effects: domino effec...

Chapter Highlights: 1. The rapid urbanization associated with the Anthropocene provides an imperative for humans to think differently about the future. 2. The “seeds” approach describes how niche experiments can, over time, coalesce to shift the dominant regime onto a more sustainable trajectory. 3. To achieve positive urban futures, it is vi...

Resilience thinking has frequently been proposed as an alternative to conventional natural resource management, but there are few studies of its applications in real-world settings. To address this gap, we synthesized experiences from practitioners that have applied a resilience thinking approach to strategic planning, called Resilience Planning, i...

In order to construct urban environments that limit negative impacts for global sustainability while supporting human wellbeing, there is a need to better understand how features of the environment influence people's everyday experiences. We present a novel method for studying this combining accessibility analysis and public participatory GIS (PPGI...

What is IPBES? IPBES—the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services—was established in 2012 to serve a role linking the science and knowledge about nature and nature’s benefits to people with policy and decision-making. IPBES has many expert groups, including one that focusses on Scenarios and Models of Biodiversity of Ecosy...