Murray W. Scown

Lund University | LU · Centre for Sustainability Studies

Interactions between fluvial processes and floodplain ecosystems occur upon a floodplain surface that is often physically complex. Spatial patterns in floodplain topography have only recently been quantified over multiple scales, and discrepancies exist in how floodplain surfaces are perceived to be spatially organised. We measured spatial patterns...

Floodplain surface topography is an important component of floodplain ecosystems. It is the primary physical template upon which ecosystem processes are acted out, and complexity in this template can contribute to the high biodiversity and productivity of floodplain ecosystems. There has been a limited appreciation of floodplain surface complexity...

The uneven burden of climate-related losses and damages and its implications for equity and social justice are receiving growing attention in science and policy. Smallholder farmers, indigenous groups, and ethnic minorities are often identified as particularly vulnerable and likely to experience a greater burden of climate-related loss and damage....

Projecting land-use allocation under various scenarios can be useful for reconciling conflicts between urbanization , food security, and ecological integrity throughout landscapes, but existing approaches often fail to capture the interactions in land systems that occur across scales and within and between hierarchical jurisdictions of societal org...

Context The capacity of a landscape to maintain multifunctionality through ongoing pressures relates to its sustainability and is affected by land use policy and environmental changes. In coastal zones, limited empirical evidence exists regarding the impact of macro-level policy changes on local landscapes and their resulting temporal and spatial r...

Deltas play a critical role in the ambition to achieve global sustainable development given their relatively large shares in population and productive croplands, as well as their precarious low-lying position between upstream river basin development and rising seas. The large pressures on these systems risk undermining the persistence of delta soci...

For millennia, agriculture has been shaping landscapes on Earth. Technological change has increased agricultural productivity dramatically, especially in the past six decades, but also resulted in trade-offs such as land and soil degradation, emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs), and spreading of toxic substances. In this article we review the impac...

Transformation of rural land systems is essential if the European Union is to achieve its goal of fair and healthy food systems while becoming the first climate-neutral continent and halting biodiversity loss. Here we develop and apply a method to quantitatively assess the environmental and social sustainability of rural land systems in Europe, wit...

Non-technical summary The United Nations' sustainable development goals (SDGs) articulate societal aspirations for people and our planet. Many scientists have criticised the SDGs and some have suggested that a better understanding of the complex interactions between society and the environment should underpin the next global development agenda. We...

Context Rivers are heterogeneous landscapes characterised by distinct patches separated by boundaries. The significance of tributaries as dominant geomorphic boundaries in determining the character of the river discontinuum is a prevailing, yet largely unscrutinised, paradigm of river science. Objectives This study examines the spatial organisatio...

Loss and damage is the "third pillar" of international climate governance alongside mitigation and adaptation. When mitigation and adaptation fail, losses and damages occur. Scholars have been reacting to international political discourse centred around governing actual or potential severe losses and damages from climate change. Large gaps exist in...

Many deltas are increasingly threatened by environmental change, including climate change-induced sea-level rise, land subsidence and reduced sediment delivery. Dealing with these challenges is a pressing necessity because deltas are home to many people and are important centres for economic and agricultural development. Successfully adapting to cl...

Non-technical summary We summarize what we assess as the past year's most important findings within climate change research: limits to adaptation, vulnerability hotspots, new threats coming from the climate–health nexus, climate (im)mobility and security, sustainable practices for land use and finance, losses and damages, inclusive societal climate...

A central challenge for sustainable development is how societies are to avoid, minimize or address impacts from anthropogenic climate change. However, competing perspectives on “what should be sustained” lead to widely different understandings of what mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage entail and how best to approach them. We provide a nove...

The notion of disproportionate impacts of climate change on certain groups and regions has long been a part of policy debates and scientific inquiry, and was instrumental to the emergence of the “Loss and Damage” (L&D) policy agenda in international negotiations on climate change. Yet, ‘disproportionality’ remains relatively undefined and implicit...

Abstract Under the Paris Agreement, parties should undertake a global stocktake of progress toward meeting the goals of the agreement and tackling climate change. The first global stocktake will be undertaken in 2023, and an assessment of loss and damage from climate change is an important part of the process. Loss and damage refer to the impacts o...

The effects of climate change, whether they be via slow- or rapid-onset events such as extreme events, are inflicting devastating losses and damage on communities around the world, with the most vulnerable affected the most. Although the negative impacts of climate change and the concept of loss and damage are included in international conventions,...

A physical, chemical and biological characterization of river systems is needed to evaluate their ecological quality and support restoration programs. Herein, we describe an approach using water chemistry, physical structure and land use for identification of a disturbance gradient existing in the Karun River Basin. For this purpose, at each site,...

A central challenge for sustainable development (SD) is how societies are to avoid, minimize or address impacts from anthropogenic climate change. However, competing perspective on “what should be sustained” lead to widely different understandings of what mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage entail and how best to approach them. We provide a...

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the largest budget item in the European Union, but varied data reporting hampers holistic analysis. Here we have assembled the first dataset to our knowledge to report individual CAP payments by standardized CAP funding measures and geolocation. We created this dataset by translating, geolocating to the count...

Loss and damage from climate change, recognized as a unique research and policy domain through the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) in 2013, has drawn increasing attention among climate scientists and policy makers. Labelled by some as the “third pillar” of the international climate regime—along with mitigation and adaptation—it has been sugges...

Debates around “Loss and Damage” (L&D) from anthropogenic climate change have expanded rapidly since the adoption of the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) in 2013. Despite the urgent need for scientific best practice to inform policies to avoid, minimize and address L&D, the nascent research field faces internal disagreements and lacks a coheren...

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the guiding policy for agriculture and the largest single budget item in the European Union (EU). Agriculture is essential to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but the CAP's contribution to do so is uncertain. We analyzed the distribution of €59.4 billion of 2015 CAP payments and show that curren...

Non-technical summary Agriculture provides many benefits to people, such as producing food and creating jobs in rural areas, but it can also have negative impacts on the environment. We analysed existing monitoring indicators for the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to evaluate whether the CAP is effectively achieving multiple soci...

Significance Research, policy, and practice should be integrated to understand, guide, and implement the changes necessary to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, from an analysis of research literature, policy indicators, and assessment tools for agriculture in Europe, we find that more than half of the 239 variables identifi...

Both research and policy recognize land systems as fundamental to human life and activities. However, these two perspectives approach land from different ends and it can be difficult to see how studied variables contribute to broader policy goals. In this paper, we argue that there is a need to better select variables to study land systems as socia...

Fluvial geomorphology provides the basis for characterizing complex river networks and evaluating biophysical processes within watersheds. Understanding the spatial organization of morphological features, their influencing processes, and resultant geomorphic diversity in stream networks are important for efficient restoration, river health assessme...

A recent paradigm shift from purely biophysical towards social-ecological assessment of watersheds has been proposed to understand, monitor, and manipulate the myriad interactions between human well-being and the ecosystem services that watersheds provide. However, large-scale, quantitative studies in this endeavour remain limited. We utilised two...

Governance of coupled social-ecological systems (SESs) and the underlying geomorphic processes that structure and alter Earth's surface is a key challenge for global sustainability in the increasing uncertainty and change that defines the Anthropocene. Social-ecological resilience as a concept of scientific inquiry has contributed to new understand...

Spatial data are playing an increasingly important role in watershed science and management. Large investments have been made by government agencies to provide nationally-available spatial databases; however, their relevance and suitability for local watershed applications is largely unscrutinized. We investigated how goodness of fit and predictive...

This chapter focuses on measuring spatial pattern in floodplains and reviews 108 publications from 1934-2013 to determine trends, dominant paradigms, and approaches to measuring spatial pattern in floodplains. The development of new technologies, especially those associated with remotely sensed data capture, increases the ability to quantitatively...

Modelling and predicting aquatic ecosystem conditions throughout stream networks is becoming a priority for river researchers and managers. Much of the recent research effort has focused on determining the relationships between stream ecosystem variables (e.g., water temperature, nutrients, species assemblages) and drainage basin variables (e.g., l...

Floodplain surface topography is an important component of floodplain ecosystems. It is the primary physical template upon which ecosystem processes are acted out. There has been a limited appreciation of floodplain surface complexity because of the traditional focus on temporal variability in floodplains as well as limitations to quantifying spati...

Stream ordering approaches to the study of entire stream networks are relatively simple and provide only crude estimations of the physical makeup of river ecosystems. These fail to acknowledge the importance of the hierarchical organisation of rivers and consequently use very crude variables when characterising stream networks. We provide an altern...