Kasper Kok

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Verified

Kasper verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• Dr.
• Professor (Assistant) at Wageningen University & Research

Silvopastoral systems, integrating woody vegetation and livestock farming, are increasingly recognized as a sustainable land-use supporting biodiversity and ecosystem services provision in the Mediterranean. However, this traditional practice has declined in recent decades, mainly because of land abandonment and intensification processes. We invest...

To enable detailed study of a wide variety of future health challenges, we have created future land use maps for the Netherlands for 2050, based on the Dutch One Health Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs). This was done using the DynaCLUE modelling framework. Future land use is based on altitude, soil properties, groundwater, salinity, flood risk...

Non-technical Summary Agricultural research is vital for sustainable food production, amid changing challenges. To address these challenges effectively and achieve sustainable food systems, researchers and funding bodies have to prioritize research efforts. We conducted horizon scanning to determine how rice systems might change by 2050 and to iden...

The Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming hinges on forest carbon sequestration as a key in several national strategies. However, Portugal’s rising forest fire occurrences threaten its ability to meet ambitious 2030 and 2050 carbon sequestration targets. Considering fire and forest trends, this study aims to quantify whether Portugal ca...

The world is changing, in terms of both climate and socio-economics. These changes have the potential to have a profound impact on the health of humans, animals and the environment, often grouped together as ‘One Health’. Humans, animals and the environment are closely interlinked and to determine realistic future vulnerabilities we must consider e...

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 evolutionary paths of social-ecological systems comprise periods of structural continuity punctuated by moments of convulsive change. Various forms of systemic global shock could materialize in the coming decades, triggered by the climate crisis, social disruption, economic breakdown, financial collapse, nuclear conflict, or pandemics. The unfo...

Comparing the impacts of future scenarios is essential for developing and guiding the political sustainability agenda. This review-based analysis compares six IPBES scenarios for their impacts on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 20 biodiversity targets (Aichi targets) for the Europe and Central Asia regions. The comparison is based on a...

Chemicals are used in all aspects of our lives and are either intentionally or unintentionally released into the natural environment, leading to chemical pollution which negatively effects biodiversity and ecosystem and human health. The world is going through socio-economic, climate and technological changes that will affect chemical emissions to...

The current COVID-19 pandemic has affected societies across the world while its economic impact has cut deeper than any recession since the Second World War. Climate change is potentially an even more disruptive and complex global challenge. Climate change could cause social and economic damage far larger than that caused by COVID-19. The current p...

Understanding the psychology of human-wildlife interactions has grown beyond cognitive frameworks to include appreciation of roles played by emotion in human responses to wildlife. From its beginnings as an essentially cognitively framed proposition, mental modeling has been shown readily applicable to representing and interpreting stakeholder pers...

This paper offers an approach to long-term planning for an industrial sector that is sensitive to climate change, the state of adjacent natural environments and the associated socioeconomic developments. The paper combines exploratory and target-seeking scenarios to understand the future challenges of nature-based blue tourism under alternative glo...

Eurasian beaver, Castor fiber has been restored to England’s natural fauna following a trial reintroduction in the country’s southwestern region. Beavers characteristically generate profound and frequently beneficial shifts to river dynamics, nutrient cycling, biodiversity, and human cultural experience, but can also be associated with unwanted hum...

The goal of limiting global warming to well below 2°C as set out in the Paris Agreement calls for a strategic assessment of societal pathways and policy strategies. Besides policy makers, new powerful actors from the private sector, including finance, have stepped up to engage in forward-looking assessments of a Paris-compliant and climate-resilien...

Participatory modelling (PM) processes involve stakeholders in developing a simplified representation of reality based on stakeholders' knowledge, perceptions, values and assumptions about a system in which they live and/or work. There has been an increase in the need for structured methods for the implementation of PM processes, to elicit knowledg...

Climate change adaptation requires understanding of complex social ecological systems (SESs). One source of uncertainty in complex SESs is ambiguity, defined as the range and variety of existing perceptions in and of an SES, which are considered equally valid, resulting in a lack of a unique or single system understanding. Current modelling practic...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-00981-9.

Chapter 16 focuses on expert models, which are computer-based models that can mimic (or outperform) the decisions of a human expert. Expert models belong to the field of artificial intelligence and essentially use inference techniques to deduce novel information of the system under study. The chapter discusses Bayesian networks and fuzzy cognitive...

Long-term global scenarios have underpinned research and assessment of global environmental change for four decades. Over the past ten years, the climate change research community has developed a scenario framework combining alternative futures of climate and society to facilitate integrated research and consistent assessment to inform policy. Here...

Scenarios describe plausible and internally consistent views of the future. They can be used by scientists, policymakers and entrepreneurs to explore the challenges of global environmental change given an appropriate level of spatial and sectoral detail and systematic development. We followed a nine-step protocol to extend and enrich a set of globa...

With growing awareness of the adverse impacts of anthropogenic climate change, it is essential to understand whether and how societal transformation can be achieved. Future society’s ability to transform depends on how human agency can develop within evolving socioeconomic contexts. Scenarios, therefore, provide different enabling conditions and ch...

With this letter, we respond to the commentary by Kamp et al. on our paper (Nunez et al. in Reg Environ Chang 20:39, 2020) that reports on potential biodiversity change in Central Asian grasslands using climate and land-use change scenarios. In their commentary, Kamp et al. criticize data and methods employed and discuss several shortfalls of our a...

Central Asian grasslands are extensively used for pastoral livestock grazing. This traditional land use is nowadays characterized by intensifying grasslands into more productive pastures. This change affects biodiversity and diminishes grasslands’ ecological role. Biodiversity impacts are probably also exacerbated by climate change. These changes i...

The complex interactions of drivers represented in scenarios and climate change impacts across scales have led to the development of multiscale scenarios. Since the recent development of global shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), which have started being downscaled to lower scales, the potential of scenarios to be relevant for decision making and...

Moving towards a more sustainable future requires concerted actions, particularly in the context of global climate change. Integrated assessments of agricultural systems (IAAS) are considered valuable tools to provide sound information for policy and decision-making. IAAS use storylines to define socio-economic and environmental framework assumptio...

Sitas, N., Z. V. Harmáčková, J. A. Anticamara, A. Arneth, R. Badola, R. Biggs, R. Blanchard, L. Brotons, M. Cantele, K. Coetzer, R. DasGupta, E. Den Belder, S. Ghosh, A. Guisan, H. Gundimeda, M. Hamann, P. A. Harrison, S. Hashimoto, J. Hauck, B. Klatt, K. Kok, R. M. Krug, A. Niamir, P. J. O'Farrell, S. Okayasu, I. Palomo, L. M. Pereira, P. Riordan,...

Scenarios are a useful tool to explore possible futures of social-ecological systems. The number of scenarios has increased dramatically over recent decades, with a large diversity in temporal and spatial scales, purposes, themes, development methods, and content. Scenario archetypes generically describe future developments and can be useful in mea...

With a range of potential pathways to a sustainable future compatible with the Paris Agreement 1.5 °C target, scenario analysis has emerged as a key tool in studies of climate change mitigation and adaptation. A wide range of alternative scenarios have been created, and core amongst these are five socioeconomic scenarios (Shared Socioeconomic Pathw...

Uncertainties in our understanding of current and future climate change projections, impacts and vulnerabilities are structured by scientists using scenarios, which are generally in qualitative (narrative) and quantitative (numerical) forms. Although conceptually strong, qualitative and quantitative scenarios have limited complementarity due to the...

Scenarios have been recognised as a useful tool for planning, which have resulted in a strong increase in the number of (multi-scale) scenarios in climate change research. This paper addresses the need for methodological progress and testing of conceptual considerations, by extending the global shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs). We present a se...

The complex challenges arising from climate change that exceeds the +2 °C target (termed ‘high-end climate change’) in Europe require new integrative responses to support transformations to a more sustainable future. We present a novel methodology that combines transition management and high-end climate and socioeconomic change scenarios to identif...

Climate change and land-use change are two major drivers of vegetation change causing habitat and biodiversity loss and posing a threat to the sustained provisioning of ecosystem goods and services. Following-up on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the Sustainable Development Goals have been a fresh stimulus to the current interest in ecosystem...

The Mediterranean region is anticipated to be (or, already is) one of the hot spots for climate change, where freshwater ecosystems are under threat from the effects of multiple stressors. Climate change is impacting natural resources and on the functioning of Ecosystem Services. The challenges about modelling climate change impact on water cycle i...

The objective of this study is to provide spatially distributed water use maps at a high spatial and thematic resolution as detailed input data for further modelling purposes. The maps were derived on the basis of official water statistics and land use maps to represent the current conditions in four European river basins affected by water scarcity...

Human use of land increasingly alters the structure and the functioning of the environment. To ex-ante understand and anticipate these changes there is an increased need for readily available and operational land use change models. One of these models is CLUE, which has been used in many studies all over the world. These studies brought forward ope...

Successfully meeting the mitigation and adaptation targets of the Paris Climate Agreement (PA) will depend on strengthening the ties between forests and agriculture. Climate-smart land use can be achieved by integrating climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and REDD+. The focus on agriculture for food security within a changing climate, and on forests fo...

Understanding complex processes of landscape change is crucial to guide the development of future landscapes and land resources. Through Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping, we studied the processes of landscape change of six different environmental zones in Europe. Results show that landscapes are complex systems, with many interactions. Except for one, all r...

The challenge of meeting the UNFCCC CoP21 goal of keeping global warming ‘well below 2 °C and to pursue efforts towards 1.5 °C’ (‘the 2–1.5 °C target’) calls for research efforts to better understand the opportunities and constraints for fundamental transformations in global systems dynamics which currently drive the unsustainable and inequitable u...

Either meeting the UNFCCC Paris agreement to limit global average warming below the 2–1.5 °C threshold, or going beyond it entails huge challenges in terms of institutional innovation and transformation. This research describes a participatory integrated assessment process aimed at exploring the options, opportunities, necessary capacities and impl...

This chapter presents the lessons and challenges in land change modeling that emerged from years of reflection and numerous panel discussions at scientific conferences concerning a collaborative cross-case comparison in which the authors have participated. We summarize the lessons as nine challenges grouped under three themes: mapping, modeling, an...

This chapter presents the lessons and challenges in land change modeling that emerged from years of reflection and numerous panel discussions at scientific conferences concerning a collaborative cross-case comparison in which the authors have participated. We summarize the lessons as nine challenges grouped under three themes: mapping, modeling, an...

Climate change is expected to reduce water availability in the Mediterranean region and water management needs to adapt to future conditions. The aims of this study were (1) to develop a participatory approach for identifying and evaluating management options for river basin climate adaptation and (2) to apply and evaluate the approach in four case...

Stakeholder involvement in modeling studies is increasing. Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) are emerging as a promising tool to provide a common base for stakeholders and modelers. FCMs developed by stakeholders from three local Mediterranean case studies are used to construct a stakeholder based FCM. This is done via a workshop in which the locally dev...

Literature critiques current predictive scenario approaches applied in the forest sector. Backcasting -a means to create normative scenarios- seems promising, but sparsely used. Combining backcasting with exploratory scenarios (combined scenario approach) seems appropriate to address these critiques. We performed such an exercise with the participa...

This policy booklet, High-End Climate Change in Europe, is based on “work in progress” by researchers from the IMPRESSIONS, HELIX and RISES-AM projects.

Water and water-related services are major components of the human wellbeing, and as such are major factors of socio-economic development; yet freshwater systems are under threat by a variety of stressors (organic and inorganic pollution, geomorphological alterations, land cover change, water abstraction, invasive species and pathogens). Water scar...

In the land use and land cover (LULC) literature, narrative scenarios are qualitative descriptions of plausible futures associated with a combination of socio-economic, policy, technological, and climate changes. LULC models are then often used to translate these narrative descriptions into quantitative characterizations of possible future societal...

Climate change and land-use change are two major drivers of biome shifts causing habitat and biodiversity loss. What is missing is a continental-scale future projection of the estimated relative impacts of both drivers on biome shifts over the course of this century. Here, we provide such a projection for the biodiverse region of Latin America unde...

What does the future hold for the world’s ecosystems and benefits that people obtain from them? While the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has identified the development of scenarios as a key to helping decision makers identify potential impacts of different policy options, it currently lacks a long-term sce...

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...

We used Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) to assess the process of landscape change. A Cognitive Map is a cognitive interpretation of the system and graphical representation, where components are represented as boxes and relationships as arrows. The state of a system component is not exact but rather represented in a number of classes (‘strong’ or ‘wea...

Deforestation is a widely recognized problem in the Brazilian Amazon. Small farmers play a key role in this process in that they earn their livelihood by ranching and farming. Many studies have addressed the link between deforestation and livelihood strategies adopted by small farmers. Most have focused on advanced monitoring systems, simulation mo...

Long-term scenarios play an important role in research on global environmental change. The climate change research community is developing new scenarios integrating future changes in climate and society to investigate climate impacts as well as options for mitigation and adaptation. One component of these new scenarios is a set of alternative futur...

We set out to map the soil organic carbon (SOC) content, as an indicator of soil fertility, at the village scale, and to relate the SOC content to farm scale management and landscape scale characteristics. Topsoil samples were taken at 100 randomly locations in the Murewa smallholder farming area in Zimbabwe and analysed for organic carbon. Using d...

An understanding among societal actors of how social–ecological systems interact across multiple levels and scales contributes to better governance of those systems. This paper introduces a tool, Scale Perspectives, developed to help societal actors share their perspectives on issues of social–ecological systems governance in a multilevel framework...

Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) modelling is highly suitable for the demands of Future Studies: it uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches, it enables the inclusion of multiple and diverse sources to overcome the limitations of expert opinions, it considers multivariate interactions that lead to nonlinearities, and it aims to make implicit...

To take on the current and future challenges of global environmental change, fostering a widespread societal understanding of and engagement with the complex dynamics that characterize interacting human and natural systems is essential. Current science communication methods struggle with a number of specific challenges associated with communicating...

Water scarcity is a serious environmental problem in many European regions, and will likely increase in the near future as a consequence of increased abstraction and climate change. Water scarcity exacerbates the effects of multiple stressors, and thus results in decreased water quality. It impacts river ecosystems, threatens the services they prov...

Scenario development methods get to grips with taking a long-term view on complex issues such as climate change through involvement of stakeholders. Many of the recent (global) scenario exercises have been structured according to a Story-and-Simulation approach. Although elaborately studied, conceptual and practical issues remain in linking qualita...

This report provides an overview on the process and results from the first and second round of stakeholder workshops held at the three ROBIN case study sites in Bolivia, Brazil and Mexico. The results from the first round of stakeholder meetings include the analysis of the current state of the local environment, while the second round was devote...

This paper examines the development and use of scenarios as an approach to guide action in multi-level, multi-actor adaptation contexts such as food security under climate change. Three challenges arehighlighted: (1) ensuring the appropriate scope for action; (2) moving beyond intervention-based decision guidance; and (3) developing long-term share...

This paper examines the development and use of scenarios as an approach to guide action in multi-level, multi-actor adaptation contexts such as food security under climate change. Three challenges are highlighted: (1) ensuring the appropriate scope for action; (2) moving beyond intervention-based decision guidance; and (3) developing long-term shar...

Ensuring active participation of stakeholders in scientific projects faces many challenges. These range from adequately selecting stakeholders, overcoming stakeholder fatigue, and dealing with the limited time available for stakeholder engagement, to interacting with, and integrating, the research itself. At the same time, stakeholder participation...

The management of transformative processes requires a sound understanding of the relation between socio-ecological systems and stress impacting upon them. Within the multitude of conditions determining this relation, distinct processes recur in various regions inspiring research on typologies, that is to say typical patterns of underlying condition...

Context of application The recurrence of specific processes that shape farmers’ vulnerability to environmental and socio-economic perturbations in various regions has inspired research on archetypical patterns of vulnerability. This presentation assesses patterns of vulnerability to climate variability, market impacts and demographic perturbations...