Mark Stafford Smith

• The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

In light of the escalating pace and heightened intensity of contemporary climate change and human interventions, a more systematic and comprehensive approach to research has become imperative for the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within dryland regions. In 2017, a collaborative research consortium comprising experts from d...

Transformative urban development is urgent to achieve future sustainable development and wellbeing. Transformation can benefit from shared and cumulative learning on strategies to guide urban development across local to national scales, while also reflecting the complex emergent nature of urban systems, and the need for context-specific and place-b...

In the first 27 years of the Central Australian Laboratory (CAL), to 1980, research focussed almost entirely on the needs of the pastoral industry. By the 1980s, ongoing campaigns for Aboriginal land rights and demands to conserve biodiversity plainly showed that there were other land uses deserving research attention. Initially CAL’s research agen...

Infrastructure investment needs to account for climate change globally, yet most day-to-day projects are small and poorly served by economic assessment processes. Four simple adjustments to cost–benefit analysis practices would greatly improve decision making for future infrastructure resilience.

Inequalities in benefits from ecosystem services (ES) challenge the achievement of sustainability goals, because they increase the vulnerability of socio-ecological systems to climate hazards. Yet the unequal effects of changes in ES, and of climate change more generally, on human well-being (HWB) are still poorly accounted for in decision-making a...

As the world recognises the need to adapt to unavoidable climate change, diverse adaptation planning and risk assessment guides have emerged, with the legitimate intent of providing context- or sector-specific guidance. Despite this, adaptation seems challenged to move to action, and users of guides often report being overwhelmed or confused. New g...

This book is a comprehensive manual for decision-makers and policy leaders addressing the issues around human caused climate change, which threatens communities with increasing extreme weather events, sea level rise, and declining habitability of some regions due to desertification or inundation. The book looks at both mitigation of greenhouse gas...

Behavioural change is at the heart of efforts to identify, design, and implement effective solutions to the challenges posed by changing environmental conditions. The need for behavioural change to support societal change in response to evolving environmental conditions and priorities remains one of the most pressing issues of our time. Future Ear...

Climate change is threatening water security in water-scarce regions across the world, challenging water management policy in terms of how best to adapt. Transformative new approaches have been proposed, but management policies remain largely the same in many instances, and there are claims that good current management practice is well adapted. Thi...

Abstract The achievement of global sustainability agendas, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, relies on transformational change across society, economy, and environment that are co‐created in a transdisciplinary exercise by all stakeholders. Within this context, environmental and societal change is increasingly understood and represented vi...

Recent years have seen growing calls to govern land resources as global environmental commons, delivering benefits to all of humanity in support of the Sustainable Development Goals. Applying this call to drylands – almost half of the world’s land – allows responses that are better tailored to dryland attributes. Four key elements for global drylan...

Australia's rangeland communities, industries, and environment are under increasing pressures from anthropogenic activities and global changes more broadly. We conducted a horizon scan to identify and prioritise key challenges facing Australian rangelands and their communities, and outline possible avenues to address these challenges, with a partic...

Owing to a lack of understanding, and data being unavailable, unusable or unsuitable, weather and climate information is currently underutilized in Sustainable Development Goal implementation. Improvements are essential in knowledge brokering, clarifying responsibilities, multi-institutional and multi-stakeholder governance arrangements and researc...

Stories matter: as powerful frames for policy and public understanding, but the current narratives about Outback Australia are both confused and often negative. We illustrate this power of stories, including how deliberate framing and story-telling to create a better narrative on some rangeland issues has had positive policy outcomes. Moving to a m...

Australia’s rangeland communities, industries, and environment are under increasing pressures from anthropogenic activities and global changes more broadly. We conducted a horizon scan to identify and prioritise key challenges facing Australian rangelands and their communities, and outline possible avenues to address these challenges, with a partic...

Future Earth Australia at the Australian Academy of Science is leading a process to consolidate and extend a broader agenda of proactive and productive reform of climate adaptation, alongside accepting the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. After the devastating bushfires, droughts, floods and hailstorms of the past year, an evidence-b...

Monoculture plantations have been promoted for the restoration of the world’s forested area, but these have not contained or reversed the loss of biodiversity. To protect the health of forest ecosystems, more innovative incentive policies should be implemented to shift the planet’s forest restoration policies from increasing the area of forests per...

Drylands occupy 43% of the African continent and play an important role in the global carbon cycle and in supporting local livelihoods. Understanding how dryland ecosystems respond to environmental changes, both structurally and functionally, is of great significance for sustainable dryland management. In this article, we review the current remote...

Given the increasing speed and intensity of ongoing climate change and human interventions, more systematic research is needed to realize the Sustainable Development Goals in drylands. The current research status of drylands globally was reviewed together with a conceptual framework that included four key themes: (1) dryland social-ecological syste...

It is no longer possible nor desirable to address the dual challenges of equity and sustainability separately. Instead, they require new thinking and approaches which recognize their interlinkages, as well as the multiple perspectives and dimensions involved. We illustrate how equity and sustainability are intertwined, and how a complex social–ecol...

Despite the decades-long efforts of sustainability science and related policy and action programs, humanity has not gotten closer to global sustainability. With its focus on the natural sciences, sustainability science is not able to contribute sufficiently to the global transition to sustainability. This Perspective argues for transforming sustain...

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...

Global drylands are a significant driver of earth system processes that affect the world’s common resources such as the climate. Their peoples are also among the first to be widely affected by global changes such as land degradation and climate change. Yet drylands are a source of many social and technical innovations, globally, as well as in Austr...

This strategy by Future Earth Australia, hosted by the Australian Academy of Science, aims to develop widespread support for enabling a major sustainability transition for our cities and regions. Government, industry, the research sector, peak bodies, the philanthropic sector, and civil society all have parts to play in driving this change. Future...

In 2016, the United Nations (UN) launched the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework for sustainable development and a sustainable future. However, the global challenge has been to engage, connect, and empower communities, particularly young people, to both understand and deliver the 17 SDGs. In this study, we show the benefit of a...

As exposure to climate change increases, there is a growing need for effective adaptation decision support products across public, private and community sectors and at all scales (local, regional, national, international). Numerous guidance products have been developed, but it is not clear to what extent they meet end-user needs, especially as deve...

The Anthropocene era is characterized by a pronounced negative impact of human and social activities on natural ecosystems. To the extent finance, economics and management underlie human social activities, we need to reassess these fields and their role in achieving global sustainability. This article briefly presents the scientific evidence on acc...

Australia’s rangelands contain wildlands, relatively intact biodiversity, widespread Indigenous cultures, pastoral and mining industries all set in past and present events and mythologies. The nature of risks and threats to these rangelands is increasingly global and systemic. Future policy frameworks must acknowledge this and act accordingly. We c...

Non-technical summary It is no longer possible nor desirable to address the dual challenges of equity and sustainability separately. Instead, they require new thinking and approaches which recognize their interlinkages, as well as the multiple perspectives and dimensions involved. We illustrate how equity and sustainability are intertwined, and how...

Pursuing integrated research and decision-making to advance action on the sustainable development goals (SDGs) fundamentally depends on understanding interactions between the SDGs, both negative ones (“trade-offs”) and positive ones (“co-benefits”). This quest, triggered by the 2030 Agenda, has however pointed to a gap in current research and polic...

China has responded to a national land-system sustainability emergency via an integrated portfolio of large-scale programmes. Here we review 16 sustainability programmes, which invested US$378.5 billion (in 2015 US$), covered 623.9 million hectares of land and involved over 500 million people, mostly since 1998. We find overwhelmingly that the inte...

On 25 September, 2015, world leaders met at the United Nations in New York, where they adopted the Sustainable Development Goals. These 17 goals and 169 targets set out an agenda for sustainable development for all nations that embraces economic growth, social inclusion, and environmental protection. Now, the agenda moves from agreeing the goals to...

Rapid urbanisation generates risks and opportunities for sustainable development. Urban policy and decision makers are challenged by the complexity of cities as social–ecological–technical systems. Consequently there is an increasing need for collaborative knowledge development that supports a whole-of-system view, and transformational change at mu...

The imperative to measure progress towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has resulted in a proliferation of targets and indicators fed by an ever-expanding set of observations. This proliferation undermines one principal purpose of the SDGs: to provide a framework for coordinated action across policy domains. Systems approaches to defining E...

Climate change science predicts warming and greater climatic variability for the foreseeable future. These changes in climate, together with direct effects of increased atmospheric CO2 concentration on plant growth and transpiration, will influence factors such as soil water and nitrogen availability that regulate the provisioning of plant and anim...

The aims of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) are to provide a framework for the intercomparison of global and regional-scale risk models within and across multiple sectors and to enable coordinated multi-sectoral assessments of different risks and their aggregated effects. The overarching goal is to use the knowledge...

This chapter concludes the book with a reflection on its key messages. Prior chapters add up to a strong denunciation of the simplistic but far reaching notion of desertification as promulgated over the past century. It continues to be enlisted to support policies that disempower dryland peoples around the world. There remains a question, though, o...

There is a need for more integrated research on sustainable development and global environmental change. In this paper, we focus on the planetary boundaries framework to provide a systematic categorization of key research questions in relation to avoiding severe global environmental degradation. The four categories of key questions are those that r...

RAPTA is a unique tool to help project designers and planners build the ideas of resilience, adaptation and transformation into their projects from the start, to ensure outcomes that are practicable, valuable and sustainable through time and change. This report offers practical advice to planners, project managers, policy makers, donors, farmers, r...

There is a need for further integrated research on developing a set of sustainable development objectives, based on the proposed framework of planetary boundaries indicators. The relevant research questions are divided in this paper into four key categories, related to the underlying processes and selection of key indicators, understanding the impa...

The National Outlook Report - Seeks to provide a better understanding of Australia’s physical economy. It has a particular focus on understanding two aspects: The ‘energy-water-food nexus’ and the prospects for Australia’s materials- and energy-intensive industries. Explores over 20 possible futures for Australia out to 2050 against the backdrop o...

In this work, a risk-based assessment method and benefit-cost analysis to support policy decisions for adapting Australian coastal residential buildings to future coastal inundation hazard is presented. Future coastal inundation is mainly influenced by storm surge and rising sea level. The sea level rises projected by the A1FI, A1B and B1 emissions...

The United Nations (UN) Rio+20 summit committed nations to develop a set of universal sustainable development goals (SDGs) to build on the millennium development goals (MDGs) set to expire in 2015. Research now indicates that humanity’s impact on Earth’s life support system is so great that further global environmental change risks undermining long...

Scientists must step up and secure meaningful objectives if they are to protect both people and planet, says Mark Stafford-Smith.

We develop a systems framework for exploring adaptation pathways to climate change among people in remote and marginalized regions. The framework builds on two common and seemingly paradoxical narratives about people in remote regions. The first is recognition that people in remote regions demonstrate significant resilience to climate and resource...

Current trajectories of global change may lead to regime shifts at regional scales, driving coupled human–environment systems to highly degraded states in terms of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human well-being. For business-as-usual socioeconomic development pathways, regime shifts are projected to occur within the next several decades, to...

Several years with extreme floods or droughts in the past decade have caused human suffering in remote communities of the Brazilian Amazon. Despite documented local knowledge and practices for coping with the high seasonal variability characteristic of the region’s hydrology (e.g., 10 m change in river levels between dry and flood seasons), and des...

The need to adapt to climate change is now widely recognised as evidence of its impacts on social and natural systems grows and greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated. Yet efforts to adapt to climate change, as reported in the literature over the last decade and in selected case studies, have not led to substantial rates of implementation of ad...

Climate and weather variables such as rainfall, temperature, and pressure are indicators for hazards such as tropical cyclones, floods, and fires. The impact of these events can be due to a single variable being in an extreme state, but more often it is the result of a combination of variables not all of which are necessarily extreme. Here, the com...

We report on the modeling and initial results from the first national-scale integrated assessment of costs and benefits of different climate adaptation policy approaches affecting built assets at statistical local area resolution. In this study we simulated damage incurred from coastal inundation hazard under three climate outlooks. At all stages,...

The planetary boundaries concept, which aims to define a safe operating space for humanity within the dynamics of the Earth System, has often been criticised on the basis of a presumed conflict between global equity and environmental sustainability goals. However, a re-analysis of the equity–environmental sustainability relationship suggests that s...

Climate variables give rise to hazards such as cyclones, floods and fires where an extreme impact is the result of a combination of variables rather than any one variable being in an extreme state in isolation. The combination of variables is termed a compound event and the nature of any given compound event will depend upon the variety of physical...

Planetary stability must be integrated with United Nations targets to fight poverty and secure human well-being, argue David Griggs and colleagues.

Significant progress has been made in the use of ensemble agricultural and climate modelling, and observed data, to project future productivity and to develop adaptation options. An increasing number of agricultural models are designed specifically for use with climate ensembles, and improved methods to quantify uncertainty in both climate and agri...

This is an introductory chapter of Climate Adaptation Futures, a book that seeks to expose and debate key issues in climate change adaptation, and to report the current state of knowledge on adaptation. Many challenges surround the definition and implementation of successful adaptation, which this book seeks to address. To explore these challenges,...

A concerted and well coordinated science agenda to address the needs of climate adaptation is crucial. There are some challenges associated with climate change that are different from those experienced in the past, and these warrant special attention in terms of adaptation research, policy and practice. This chapter explores these issues to provide...

The world faces ever increasing rates and degrees of global environmental change. This chapter explores how the resulting need for transformative thinking, particularly in adapting to climate change, can be supported by the use of scenarios. Based on the accumulated experience of many scenario processes, it asks to what extent our current use of sc...

Adaptation is the poor cousin of the climate change challenge - the glamour of international debate is around global mitigation agreements, while the bottom-up activities of adaptation, carried out in community halls and local government offices, are often overlooked. Yet, as international forums fail to deliver reductions in greenhouse gas emissio...

National Climate Change Adaptation Research Plans (NARPs) are produced for nine key sectors where adaptation response is critical in safeguarding against climate and climate change risks to social, economic and environmental well-being. The purpose of a NARP is to identify priority needs in developing knowledge on how governments, businesses and co...

Cities are rapidly increasing in importance as a major factor shaping the Earth system, and therefore, must take corresponding responsibility. With currently over half the world's population, cities are supported by resources originating from primarily rural regions often located around the world far distant from the urban loci of use. The sustaina...

Conventional environmental assessments are not enough — it is time for some joined-up global thinking, says Mark Stafford Smith.

The 2012 United Nations Rio+20 Summit must be seen in the context of a significant expansion of the scientific knowledge base since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. We now know definitively that humans have become a prime driver of change at the planetary level, significantly altering Earth’s biological, chemical and physical processes. There is increasi...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to stimulate discussion across ASCD on: • the goals of adaptation policy; • the framing of adaptation policy as a public policy agenda; and • what this means for the role of government and DCCEE. Key propositions A re-examination of adaptation as a public policy agenda has led to the following series of propos...

The Global Drylands Observing System proposed in this issue should reduce the huge uncertainty about the extent of desertification and the rate at which it is changing, and provide valuable information to scientists, planners and policy-makers. However, it needs careful design if information outputs are to be scientifically credible and salient to...

Quantitative data on dryland changes and their effects on the people living there are required to support policymaking and environmental management at all scales. Data are regularly acquired by international, national or local entities, but presently exhibit specific gaps. Promoting sustainable development in drylands necessitates a much stronger i...

Social actors in arid regions must develop strategies to respond to available resources, which are scarce, variable, patchy and unpredictable relative to other regions. We explore our observations of relationships amongst people and organisations in Australian deserts using a stylised network model of the structure of social networks in arid system...

With weakening prospects of prompt mitigation, it is increasingly likely that the world will experience 4°C and more of global warming. In such a world, adaptation decisions that have long lead times or that have implications playing out over many decades become more uncertain and complex. Adapting to global warming of 4°C cannot be seen as a mere...

The socio-economic impacts of environmental stresses associated with global environmental change depend to a large extent on how societies organize themselves. Research on climate-related societal impacts, vulnerability and adaptation is currently underdeveloped, prompting international global environmental change research institutions to hold a se...

As in all parts of the globe, rapid climate change in Australia will have significant negative impacts on biodiversity. It also will interact with pre-existing stressors such as native vegetation clearing, altered natural disturbance regimes and invasive species – all of which already have major negative effects on biota in Australia. Strategies to...

As in all parts of the globe, rapid climate change in Australia will have significant negative impacts on biodiversity. It also will interact with pre-existing stressors such as native vegetation clearing, altered natural disturbance regimes and invasive species-all of which already have major negative effects on biota in Australia. Strategies to r...

Critiques of governance arrangements for natural resource management in Australia have expanded rapidly in recent years. Meanwhile, arguments have strengthened internationally that drylands share characteristics that justify a specific ‘drylands syndrome’ understanding of their management. These issues converge in the drylands of the Murray-Darling...

Combating desertification has been a major challenge for half a century, with little discernible progress. In part, this is due to the disconnect between the policy making or development institutions, on one side, and the scientific community on the other. The latter has failed, until recently, to propose a coherent, integrated, interdisciplinary a...

Ecosystem stewardship is an action-oriented framework intended to foster the social-ecological sustainability of a rapidly changing planet. Recent developments identify three strategies that make optimal use of current understanding in an environment of inevitable uncertainty and abrupt change: reducing the magnitude of, and exposure and sensitivit...