Jessica P. R. Thorn

• PhD, MSc, BSocSci (Hons)
• Lecturer in Food Security and Global Environmental Change at Imperial College London

Mountain regions are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts. Yet, little is known about local adaptation responses in African mountain regions, especially if these are incremental or transformational. First, using household questionnaires, we interviewed 1,500 farmers across ten African mountain regions to investigate perceived climate c...

Development corridors are linear programmes of infrastructure and agriculture aiming to facilitate rapid socio-economic development. In Africa, they are a major development activity, with 88 underway or planned corridors. Drawing from extensive literature and insights gleaned from a 4 year research programme, this review scrutinizes the impacts of...

Citation: Newman, R.J.S.; Enns, C.; Capitani, C.; Thorn, J.P.R.; Courtney-Mustaphi, C.J.; Buckton, S.J.; Om, S.; Fazey, I.; Haji, T.A.; Nchimbi, A.Y.; et al. 'Kesho' Scenario Development for Supporting Water-Energy Food Security under Future Conditions in Zanzibar. Land 2024, 13, 195. https://doi. Abstract: Social-ecological interactions mediate wa...

Small developing islands face a number of environmental and social pressures which impact resource security. This study uses a people-centred framework to investigate social-ecological interactions for water, energy and food security. Ten semi-structured focus group discussions were conducted in Pemba and Unguja islands with village elders and lead...

The Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a comprehensive assessment of the scientific literature relevant to climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. The report recognizes the interactions of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societie...

The transformations required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals across the African continent demand new ways of mobilising, weaving together, and applying knowledge. Research, policymaking, planning, and action must be effectively inter-linked to address complex sustainability challenges and the different needs and interests of societal a...

The water‐energy‐food (WEF) nexus is a prominent approach for addressing today's sustainable development challenges. In our critical appraisal of the WEF, covering different approaches, drivers, enablers, and applications, we emphasize the situation across the Global South (Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean). Here, WEF research covers a...

The scale of climate migration across the Global South is expected to increase during this century. By 2050, millions of Africans are likely to consider, or be pushed into, migration because of climate hazards contributing to agricultural disruption, water and food scarcity, desertification, flooding, drought, coastal erosion, and heat waves. Howev...

The large-scale expansion of built infrastructure is profoundly reshaping the geographies of Africa, generating lock-in patterns of development for future generations. Understanding the impact of these massive investments can allow development opportunities to be maximised and therefore be critical for attaining the United Nations’ Sustainable Deve...

Mining is important for economic development in many tropical countries, but mining can have serious impacts on biodiversity, both directly through operations at extraction sites, and indirectly via wider social-economic development. However, mitigation efforts by large-scale mining operators focus almost exclusively on extraction sites. We provide...

Significance Statement Cities in sub-Saharan countries are simultaneously facing climate change, rapid urbanisation, and social inequalities. Nature-based Solutions harness nature’s benefits to address these environmental, social, and economic challenges. In this study, we investigate how taking into account temporal dynamics and multiple values of...

Land cover has been modified by anthropogenic activities for thousands of years, although the speed of change has increased in recent decades, particularly driven by socio-economic development. The development of transport infrastructure can accelerate land use land cover change, resulting in impacts on natural resources such as water, biodiversity...

The science could not be more emphatic, as a spate of hard-hitting assessments have indicated, achieving prosperous societies, climate stability and a flourishing biosphere requires urgent global action across scales and sectors. Meeting the ambitions of the post-2015 Sustainable Development agenda, Paris Climate Agreement, and the Convention of Bi...

Mountains are highly significant regions in the context of climate change and sustainable development, at the intersection of accelerated warming and a large population depending directly or indirectly on them. They are regions of high biological and cultural diversity and provide vital goods and services to people living in and around mountain reg...

Since entering the ‘Millennium of the cities’ omnipresent rapid urbanization has caused dramatic changes to ecosystem functions and generated huge ecological risks across city catchments. An understanding of how multiple ecosystem services are associated across complex social-ecological systems is required for urban sustainability. However, few stu...

The growing production and use of chemicals and the resultant increase in environmental exposure is of particular concern in developing countries where there is rapid industrialisation and population growth but limited information on the occurrence of emerging contaminants. Advancements in analytical techniques now allow for the monitoring of emerg...

Through the Development Corridors Partnership, researchers in the University of York, UK, WWF Tanzania, and Sokoine University of Agriculture – Tanzania worked in partnership with SAGCOT and diverse stakeholders across scales and sectors from the Kilombero cluster to envisage how the land may transform in the future under targeted investments, and...

This Global Environmental Outlook UNEP business brief presents the case that businesses can benefit substantially from climate proofing infrastructure through reduced risks, lower costs, fewer stranded assets and new market opportunities, such as enabling diverse local industries. Upscaling resilient, accessible, low carbon, and quality infrastruct...

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...

Despite a growing recognition of the importance of designing, rehabilitating, and maintaining green infrastructure to provide essential ecosystem services and adapt to climate change, many decision makers in sub-Saharan Africa continue to favour engineered solutions and short term economic growth at the expense of natural landscapes and longer term...

Community-based conservation is advocated as an idea that long-term conservation success requires engaging with, providing benefits for, and establishing institutions representing local communities. However, community-based conservation's efficacy and impact in sustainable resource management varies depending on national natural resource policies a...

Mountain environments and communities are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Changes in temperature are greater than at lower elevations, which affect the height of the cloud base and local rainfall patterns. While our knowledge of the biophysical nature of climate change in East Africa has increased in the past few years, research on I...

Scholars of gender and climate change argue that gender-blind climate change actions could exacerbate existing inequalities and undermine sustained climate change adaptation actions. For this reason, since 2017, the Green Climate Fund placed gender among its key programming prerequisites, making it the first multilateral climate fund to do so world...

In light of increased rural-urban migration, population growth, climate change impacts, and cascading natural, security, and health hazards, many municipalities in Sub-Saharan Africa are beginning to consider the benefits of urban green infrastructure for improving the resilience and wellbeing of residents living in informal settlements. However, p...

Africa has experienced unprecedented growth across a range of development indices for decades. However, this growth is often at the expense of Africa’s biodiversity and ecosystems, jeopardizing the livelihoods of millions of people depending on the goods and services provided by nature, with broader consequences for achieving the United Nations Sus...

Development corridors are extensive, often transnational and linear, geographical areas targeted for investment to help achieve sustainable development. They often comprise the creation of hard infrastructure (i.e., physical structures) and soft infrastructure (i.e., policies, plans, and programmes) involving a variety of actors. They are globally...

Mountain social-ecological systems (MtSES) are transforming rapidly due to changes in multiple environmental and socioeconomic drivers. However, the complexity and diversity of MtSES present challenges for local communities, researchers and decision makers seeking to anticipate change and promote action towards sustainable MtSES. Participatory scen...

Transdisciplinary research is a promising approach to address sustainability challenges arising from global environmental change, as it is characterized by an iterative process that brings together actors from multiple academic fields and diverse sectors of society to engage in mutual learning with the intent to co-produce new knowledge. We present...

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...

This paper aims at provoking broad-based dialogues and debates on ways and means of securing Africa’s health sovereignty. It argues that health sovereignty is about the realization of specific national constitutional and policy objectives on citizens’ access to and enjoyment of good health, resilient to COVID-19 and related disease pandemics. The p...

Rapid degradation of soil regulation services is a growing concern for agricultural producers worldwide, with the potential for adverse impacts on agricultural productivity, food security, and livelihoods. Yet, data integrating observations of soil nutrient and physical status with farmers’ knowledge of soil fertility is lacking, while landscape-le...

Mountain social-ecological systems (MtSES) provide crucial ecosystem services to over half of humanity. However, populations living in these highly varied regions are now confronted by global change. It is critical that they are able to anticipate change to strategically manage resources and avoid potential conflict. Yet, planning for sustainable,...

In July 2019, the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) in coordination with IPCC Secretariat and the United Nations Institute for Natural Resource in Africa (UN-INRA) convened African scientists and key policy stakeholders to deliberate on these challenges and identify evidence based actions to address the issues raised by IPCC SR1.5. The meeting iden...

Background: Despite a rapidly accumulating evidence base quantifying ecosystem services, the role of biodiversity in the maintenance of ecosystem services in shared human-nature environments is still understudied, as is how indigenous and agriculturally dependent communities perceive, use, and manage biodiversity. The present study aims to document...

Background: COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc in different countries across the world, claiming thousands of lives, increasing morbidity and disrupting lifestyles. The global scientific community is in urgent need of relevant evidence, to understand the challenges and knowledge gaps, as well as the opportunities to contain the spread of the virus....

Background: COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc in different countries across the world, claiming thousands of lives, increasing morbidity and disrupting lifestyles. The global scientific community is in urgent need of relevant evidence, to understand the challenges and knowledge gaps, as well as the opportunities to contain the spread of the virus....

Small islands are vulnerable to the synergistic effects of climate change and anthropogenic disturbances due to the fact of their small area, geographical isolation, responsive ecologies, rapidly growing and developing populations and exposure to sea level and climate change. These changes exert pressures on ecosystem services, such as the provisio...

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 4th EAI International Conference on Innovations and Interdisciplinary Solutions for Underserved Areas, InterSol 2020, held in Nairobi, Kenia, in March 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference is postponed to a later date in 2020. The 20 papers presented were selected fro...

Climate change and the environment are key focus areas of the AAS 2018-2022 strategic plan. The consultative scientific process of the IPCC provides various opportunities for African scientists to contribute to the global process. Unfortunately, the contribution and involvement of African scientists both in terms of contributing peer-reviewed publi...

Background Despite a rapidly accumulating evidence base quantifying ecosystem services, the role of biodiversity in the maintenance of ecosystem services in shared human-nature environments is still understudied, as is how indigenous and agriculturally dependent communities perceive, use and manage biodiversity. The present study aims to document t...

Background Despite a rapidly accumulating evidence base quantifying ecosystem services, the role of biodiversity in the maintenance of ecosystem services in shared human-nature environments is still understudied, as is how indigenous and agriculturally dependent communities perceive, use and manage biodiversity. The present study aims to document t...

Background Despite a rapidly accumulating evidence base quantifying ecosystem services, the role of biodiversity in the maintenance of ecosystem services in shared human-nature environments is still understudied, as is how indigenous and agriculturally dependent communities perceive, use and manage biodiversity. The present study aims to document t...

Place-based scenario planning can systematically explore and anticipate future uncertainties regarding interactions between human and the environment. However, to date, few studies explicitly link scenarios at different social-ecological scales, particularly, for forests and Protected Areas (PA) in Eastern Africa. To address this gap, we developed...

Recent land-use and climatic shifts are expected to alter species distributions, the provisioning of ecosystem services, and livelihoods of biodiversity-dependent societies living in multifunctional landscapes. However, to date, few studies have integrated social and ecological evidence to understand how humans perceive change, and adapt agro-ecolo...

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...

Chapter 2 makes the case for using systems thinking as a guiding perspective for TEEBAgriFood’s development of a comprehensive Evaluation Framework for the eco-agri-food system. Many dimensions of the eco-agri-food system create complex analytical and policy challenges. Systems thinking allows better understanding and forecasting of the outcomes of...

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....

Background Systematic conservation planning is a discipline concerned with the prioritisation of resources for biodiversity conservation and is often used in the design or assessment of terrestrial and marine protected area networks. Despite being an evidence-based discipline, to date there has been no comprehensive review of the outcomes of system...

Background: Conservation decisions not only impact wildlife, habitat, and environmental health, but also human wellbeing and social justice. The inclusion of safeguards and equity considerations in the conservation field has increasingly garnered attention in international policy processes and amongst conservation practitioners. Yet, what constitut...

The TEEBAgriFood ‘Scientific and Economic Foundations’ report addresses the core theoretical issues and controversies underpinning the evaluation of the nexus between the agri-food sector, biodiversity and ecosystem services and externalities including human health impacts from agriculture on a global scale. It argues the need for a ‘systems thinki...

The half day Civil Society Forum was held simultaneously with a day before the GEF Expanded Constituency Workshop (ECW) for the Southern Africa Constituency on 21st February 2017 in Lobamba, Swaziland at the Royal Swazi Hotel. Within the framework of the Country Support Programme (CSP), the GEF organizes Expanded Constituency Workshops (ECW). The m...

Background An extensive body of evidence in the field of agro-ecology claims to show the positive effects that maintenance of ecosystem services can have on meeting future food demand by making farms more sustainable, productive and resilient, which then contributes to improved nutrition and livelihoods of farmers. However, inconsistent effects hav...

Increasingly unpredictable, extreme and erratic rainfall with higher temperatures threatens to undermine the adaptive capacity of food systems and ecological resilience of smallholder landscapes. Despite growing concern, land managers still lack quantitative techniques to collect empirical data about the potential impact of climatic variability and...

This is the first document to collate current knowledge on the state of the world’s plants. A large team of researchers has reviewed published literature, scrutinised global databases and synthesised new datasets. The output presented here represents a status report on our knowledge of global vegetation as it stands in 2016, including a synthesis o...

Background An extensive body of literature in the field of agro-ecology claims to show the positive effects that maintenance of ecosystem services can have on sustainably meeting future food demand, by making farms more productive and resilient, and contributing to better nutrition and livelihoods of farmers. In Africa alone, some research has esti...

An extensive body of literature in the field of agro-ecology claims to show the positive effects that maintenance of ecosystem services can have on sustainably meeting future food demand, by making farms more productive and resilient, and contributing to better nutrition and livelihoods of farmers. Site-specific strategies adopted with the aim of i...

The growth of peri-urban areas is increasingly recognised as a dominant planning and urban design challenge for the 21st century. In burgeoning poor urban settlements growing on city margins, autonomous adaptation strategies are often the only measures to respond to increasing climatic and compounding stressors. Yet, in both research and practice t...

More than one billion smallholder farmers, many of whom are women, depend on rain-fed agriculture for their food and income. They produce much of the world’s agricultural output – 80% in sub-Saharan Africa alone - and play an important role maintaining functioning ecosystems by, for example, cultivating crops that house pollinators. However, smallh...

This presentation approaches the problem of water scarcity through the future of water’s present uses—and its past abuses. We combine narration of present challenges faced by small-holder farmers, drawn from research conducted in marginalized communities in the global south agricultural belts of Nepal and Ghana, as well as urban slums in Kenya, wit...

Small-holder farmers play an influential role in prevailing environmental conditions across the globe - constituting 80% people in sub-Saharan Africa alone, and 2 billion globally. However, we have a limited understanding of how small-holder farming practices impact ecosystem functions, such as pollination, pest and disease regulation and decomposi...

THE FARMS OF THE FUTURE (FOTF) APPROACH is an interactive climate adaptation, knowledge sharing and learning experience that transforms climate forecasts into field-based realities by physically taking participants on a journey to areas that already experience climatic conditions that represent plausible future climate scenarios. The hypothesis be...

The 2012 Nepal Farms of the Future (FOTF) Pilot conducted farmer exchanges to diverse alternatives within the climate analogue set provided by CCAFS Climate Analogue Tool. The exchanges provided the basis for an exploratory scenarios exercise, which was embedded in a program to develop capacity for planning and decision-making under uncertainty and...

Measuring ecosystem-services to incentivize sustainable land-management is gaining global attention, however quantifiable assessments of the state of services at the landscape level,and how they are influenced when forced with climate change predictions, have not been developed.Findings present trials of such a method in Nepal,combining ecological...

There is a growing spectrum of ecosystem assessment tools, including computer-based platforms using national data (e.g. InVEST), modeling and scenario driven tools (e.g. MIMES, ARIES), as well as efforts to integrate ecosystem service frameworks (e.g. CICES). However, there are to date very few tools that describe a set of field techniques that can...

The confluence of unprecedented rates of urbanization, global environmental change, the economic pressures of globalization and population growth means that people are streaming in to cities at rates beyond their capacity to integrate. In burgeoning poor urban settlements autonomous adaptation strategies are often the only measures to cope with and...

Community-based adaptation (CBA) has a growing group of interested supporters, researchers, practitioners, policy makers, donors and indeed local communities themselves who see it as a way to tackle some of the many challenges of a world altered by climate change. The sixth international CBA conference in 2012 was held in Hanoi, Vietnam from 16-22...

In this paper we reflect on a contested land occupation in Cape Town, the informal settlement of Zille Raine Heights in the city’s southern suburbs, to explore the settlement’s struggle to gain a legal right to land and the state’s attempts to remove it. In occupying land and defending their right to a decent place in the city, Zille Raine Heights...

The growth of peri-urban areas is a dominant planning and design challenge for the 21st century. • Urban slums are ideal places to analyse climate adaptation , offering examples of extreme social-ecological stress and rapid change that can be anticipated in more established societies. • We use a framework to analyse local adaptation pathways at i...

This paper assesses the application of three renewable energy resources, photovoltaic solar power, anaerobic biogas digestion and wind, for the non-grid electrfication of a rural school in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. The power generated would provide electricity for a mobile computer lab – thereby creating the enabling environment for enhance...

Water is one of the most constrained and valuable resources we have. Droughts and floods have increased in frequency and severity in Africa, with the threat of more to come because of climate change. Demand for water is increasing for domestic, industrial and agricultural use as well. To cope with the severe socio-economic and environmental impa...

Fieldwork in the social sciences is, by its nature, a messy and complicated process. Human relationships established between researcher and participants must be forged and maintained across social boundaries. Notions of difference, perceived through our bodies as they interact with other bodies, can often complicate these experiences in the ‘field’...

This literature review will consider donor motivations for supporting of regional and sub-regional organizations' activities in peace and security. Multilateral donor-recipient relations considered include the United Nations; the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe; the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Developme...