Nibedita Mukherjee

Brunel University London · Department of Social and Political sciences

Decision‐making is a complex process that typically includes a series of stages: identifying the issue, considering possible options, making judgements and then making a decision by combining information and values. The current status quo relies heavily on the informational aspect of decision‐making with little or no emphasis on the value positions...

Many areas of science, including conservation and environmental management, regularly require engaging stakeholders or experts to produce consensus or technical inputs. The Delphi technique is an iterative and anonymous participatory method used for gathering and evaluating such expert‐based knowledge. We outline the methodology of the Delphi techn...

The nominal group technique ( NGT ) is a qualitative method to elicit judgement from stakeholders. This paper reviews its application in the field of ecology and conservation. We aim to identify patterns in methodological variants, topics covered, scope, advantages and limitations of the technique. Although still not widely used, NGT has been used...

Focus group discussion is frequently used as a qualitative approach to gain an in‐depth understanding of social issues. The method aims to obtain data from a purposely selected group of individuals rather than from a statistically representative sample of a broader population. Even though the application of this method in conservation research has...

1. Interviews are a widely used methodology in conservation research. They are flexible, allowing in-depth analysis from a relatively small sample size and place the focus of research on the views of participants. While interviews are a popular method, several critiques have been raised in response to their use, including the lack of transparency i...

The viva examination or ‘defence’ is a pivotal moment in a student’s or researcher’s career. It marks the conclusion of one stage and the beginning of another, whether during the study period or when competing for research funding. Unlike many other formal assessments, the viva is an oral performance. Its form may strongly depend on the domain of s...

‘New economics’ discourses – comprising diverse approaches advocated as more just and sustainable replacements of dominant neoclassical and neoliberal economic perspectives – have been criticised as insufficiently coherent to form the ‘discourse coalitions’ necessary to enter the mainstream. To date there has been little systematic exploration of t...

Mangroves are a critical coastal habitat that provides a suite of ecosystem services and supports livelihoods. We undertake the first global analysis to estimate density and abundance of 37 commercially important fish and invertebrates that are known to extensively use mangroves. Geomorphic mangrove type, sea surface salinity and temperature, and l...

Transformation of economic systems is widely regarded as an essential strategy to tackle interacting global crises. In response, there are diverse transformative approaches seeking holistic human and planetary wellbeing. However, mainstreaming these ‘new’ economic approaches is hampered by vested interests and intellectual lock-in. They are also di...

The Values Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science- Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services shows that multiple valuation methods and approaches exist to assess diverse value types. The evidence is based on the largest review of academic valuation studies on nature to date, developed for the Values Assessment of the Intergovernme...

Twenty-five years since foundational publications on valuing ecosystem services for human well-being1,2, addressing the global biodiversity crisis³ still implies confronting barriers to incorporating nature’s diverse values into decision-making. These barriers include powerful interests supported by current norms and legal rules such as property ri...

This study is the first ever to gather local mangrove scientists, forest managers and policy-makers world-wide to identify the future scientific curiosity-driven and managerial need-driven questions to which science, management, and/or governance needs an answer.

Business-biodiversity action is increasingly seen as critical for delivering conservation goals, but such action needs to be effective. Using detailed semi-structured interviews with leading business-biodiversity professionals and consultants we aimed to understand the actions currently taken and why, how actions are decided upon, and current chall...

Climate-related effects occur across all regions in Tanzania, affecting primary sectors such as agriculture and fishing. This study investigated the impacts of climatic change on small pelagic catches in fishers in Kilindoni, Kipumbwi and Kilwa Kivinje villages along the Tanzanian coast. We studied how changes in rainfall, sea surface temperature,...

The discourse on mangrove conservation has typically used the ecosystem services narrative– nature as the service provider, to develop management regimes across the globe. In contrast, the emphasis on the reciprocal nature of human relationships with these forests, that is, how local human communities relate with, perceive, and maintain these seasc...

There are severe problems with the decision-making processes currently widely used, leading to ineffective use of evidence, faulty decisions, wasting of resources and the erosion of public and political support. In this book an international team of experts provide solutions. The transformation suggested includes rethinking how evidence is assessed...

There are severe problems with the decision-making processes currently widely used, leading to ineffective use of evidence, faulty decisions, wasting of resources and the erosion of public and political support. In this book an international team of experts provide solutions. The transformation suggested includes rethinking how evidence is assessed...

Managing a complex social-ecological system requires data about the many social and ecological variables characterizing it and about their interactions. While the selection of research topics has its own, mostly unpredictable dynamics and contingencies, there has been a recent surge of interest regarding the involvement of non-academic stakeholders...

Background Anthropogenic degradation of marine ecosystems is widely accepted as a major social-ecological problem. The growing urgency to manage marine ecosystems more effectively has led to increasing application of spatial management measures (marine protected areas [MPAs], sectoral [e.g. fishery] closures and marine spatial planning [marine plan...

1. To be effective, the next generation of conservation practitioners and managers need to be critical thinkers with a deep understanding of how to make evidence-based decisions and of the value of evidence synthesis. 2. If, as educators, we do not make these priorities a core part of what we teach, we are failing to prepare our students to make an...

1. To be effective, the next generation of conservation practitioners and managers need to be critical thinkers with a deep understanding of how to make evidence‐based decisions and of the value of evidence synthesis. 2. If, as educators, we do not make these priorities a core part of what we teach, we are failing to prepare our students to make an...

Mangroves are critical nursery habitats for fish and invertebrates, providing livelihoods for many coastal communities. Despite their importance, there is currently no estimate of the number of fishers engaged in mangrove associated fisheries, nor of the fishing intensity associated with mangroves at a global scale. We address these gaps by develop...

Recent attention to the role of Indigenous knowledge (IK) in environmental monitoring, research and decision‐making is likely to attract new people to this field of work. Advancing the bringing together of IK and science in a way that is desirable to IK holders can lead to successful and inclusive research and decision‐making. We used the Delphi te...

While mangroves are increasingly described as social-ecological systems (SESs), performing SES research is so much more than merely documenting local resource utilisation patterns in case studies. The aim of this paper is to review and show how ecological, human and institutional resilience could be understood and fostered in an era of uncertainty,...

EKLIPSE received a request by Pollinis on the 30th of June 2018, to produce an overview of the current knowledge and research gaps related to the impacts of pesticide and fertilizer use in farmland on the effectiveness of adjacent pollinator conservation measures. The call was answered through a Joint Fact Finding approach, including a workshop on...

Conservation science is a crisis-oriented discipline focused on reducing human impacts on nature. To explore how the field has changed over the past two decades, we analyzed 3245 applications for oral presentations submitted to the Student Conference on Conservation Science (SCCS) in Cambridge, UK. SCCS has been running every year since 2000, aims...

Database of articles using this specific methodology. For each study, the database indicates a variety of characteristics of the study, such as context, goals, methodological decisions, etc. The database was compiled to analyse how the methodology is being applied in conservation, what kind of research decisions were being made, and the quality of...

The SDG14 targets cover more than 70 per cent of the planet, including the coastal zone, where a range of forest resources are located. In this chapter we investigate the potential negative consequences of SDG14 on forest resources, using the example of coastal mangrove forests. SDG14 is likely to have negative impacts on forest resources because i...

A double intergenerational conundrum abounds in sustainability science as young generations of researchers have relatively little influence on current strategic decisions, but inherit their potential future consequences as professionals as well as human-beings. Collaborating with early career researchers (ECRs) in global sustainability initiatives...

Anthropogenic hybridization is widely perceived as a threat to the conservation of biodiversity. Nevertheless, to date, relevant policy and management interventions are unresolved and highly convoluted. While this is due to the inherent complexity of the issue, we hereby hypothesize that a lack of agreement concerning management goals and approache...

Biodiversity is a key component of a healthy planet with healthy people (well established). Though evidence regarding the importance of biodiversity for economic output, health and security has grown significantly in the last two decades, it is certain that existing measures to conserve and sustainably manage biodiversity are inadequate {Box 13.1,...

In a previous series of papers (Sutherland, Dicks, Everard, & Geneletti, ), we summarise the use of a range of social science methods in conservation decision‐making. Moon et al. ( ) claim that the special feature risks narrowing the scope of social science research and suggest that we presented a limited perspective on the field. They thereby crit...

1. Decision‐making is a complex process that typically includes a series of stages: identifying the issue, considering possible options, making judgements and then making a decision by combining information and values. The current status quo relies heavily on the informational aspect of decision‐making with little or no emphasis on the value positi...

In 2008, a group of conservation scientists compiled a list of 100 priority questions for the conservation of the world's biodiversity [Sutherland et al. (2009) Conservation Biology, 23, 557–567]. However, now almost a decade later, no one has yet published a study gauging how much progress has been made in addressing these 100 high‐priority questi...

Conservation policy decisions can suffer from a lack of evidence, hindering effective decision‐making. In nature conservation, studies investigating why policy is often not evidence‐informed have tended to focus on Western democracies, with relatively small samples. To understand global variation and challenges better, we established a global surve...

Conservation policy decisions can suffer from a lack of evidence, hindering effective decision-making. In nature conservation, studies investigating why policy is often not evidence-informed have tended to focus on Western democracies, with relatively small samples. To understand global variation and challenges better, we established a global surve...

FIGURE S1 Flow diagram illustrating the survey methodology FIGURE S2 Ranking of barriers by role according to Human Development Index FIGURE S3 Proportion of different roles (Red: Policy position, Yellow: practitioners, Blue: Policy position) experiencing the barriers FIGURE S4 Proportion of male and female respondents to the online survey by ro...

Understanding human perspectives is critical in a range of conservation contexts, for example, to help overcome conflicts or to develop projects that are acceptable to relevant stakeholders. Q methodology is a unique semi‐quantitative technique to explore human perspectives. It brings together the transparency of a structured quantitative procedure...

This study investigated the effectiveness of mangrove planting initiatives in Sri Lanka. All the lagoons and estuaries in Sri Lanka were included in the study. We documented all agencies and locations, involved in mangrove planting efforts, along with the major drivers of these planting initiatives, their extents, and the possible causes of the suc...

Scientific knowledge is considered to be an important factor (alongside others) in environmental policy-making. However, the opportunity for environmentalists to influence policy can often occur within short, discrete time windows. Therefore, a piece of research may have a negligible or transformative policy influence depending on when it is presen...

Scientific knowledge is considered to be an important factor (alongside others) in environmental policy-making. However, the opportunity for environmentalists to influence policy can often occur within short, discrete time windows. Therefore, a piece of research may have a negligible or transformative policy influence depending on when it is presen...

Background Biodiversity management requires effective decision making at various stages. However decision making in the real world is complex, driven by multiple factors and involves a range of stakeholders. Understanding the factors that influence decision making is crucial to addressing the conflicts that arise in conservation. Decisions can be m...

Brief for the UN Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR), 2016. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics/science/crowdsourcedbriefs

- Scientific brief for the UN Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) 2016 - There is an urgent need to address interlinked sustainability issues in a world challenged by inequality, finite resources and unprecedented changes across Earth’s systems. As Future Earth Fellows, based on our collective expertise in a diverse range of sustainabilit...

Sustainability assessment has emerged as a key decision-support process in development cooperation in response to the growing acknowledgement of the impacts of global change. This paper aims at conceptualizing the effectiveness of sustainability assessment as applied in development cooperation, by focusing on the sustainability assessment practice...

The valuation of ecosystem services is a complex process as it includes several dimensions (ecological, socio-cultural and economic) and not all of these can be quantified in monetary units. The aim of this paper is to conduct an ecosystem services valuation study for mangroves ecosystems, the results of which can be used to inform governance and m...

Appendix S1. (a) Detailed methodology of the Delphi survey in this study. (b) List of all the definitions for the mangrove ecosystem.

Table S1. Detailed information about the 35 experts who contributed information for this Delphi study. Included in the table are their number of publications largely on mangroves, years of experience, research focus, personal webpages, and total number of citations (without self-citations) for their mangrove articles.

Mangroves are threatened worldwide, and their loss or degradation could impact functioning of the ecosystem. Our aim was to investigate three aspects of mangroves at a global scale: (1) their constituents (2) their indispensable ecological functions, and (3) the maintenance of their constituents and functions in degraded mangroves. We focused on an...

Aim To reassess the capacity of mangroves for ecosystem services in the light of recent data. Location Global mangrove ecosystems. Methods We review four long‐standing roles of mangroves: (1) carbon dynamics – export or sink; (2) nursery role; (3) shoreline protection; (4) land‐building capacity. The origins of pertinent hypotheses, current under...

Since the 1980s, the Asian region has seen a groundswell of support for community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), as an answer to claimed overall diversity loss, critiques on ‘fortress conservation’, and advocacy for indigenous rights. CBNRM evolved rapidly from an alternative view toward a widely endorsed concept. Yet, at the same momen...

More than half a decade has passed since the December 26th 2004 tsunami hit the Indian coast leaving a trail of ecological, economic and human destruction in its wake. We reviewed the coastal ecological research carried out in India in the light of the tsunami. In addition, we also briefly reviewed the ecological research in other tsunami affected...

Vegetated coastal ecosystems provide goods and services to billions of people. In the aftermath of a series of recent natural disasters, including the Indian Ocean Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and Cyclone Nargis, coastal vegetation has been widely promoted for the purpose of reducing the impact of large storm surges and tsunami. In this paper, we rev...

There has been considerable interest in activities concerning 'bioshields' in India following the December 2004 tsunami. There is an ongoing debate about the effectiveness of these bioshields with respect to the tsunami within both scientific circles and local communities. Despite the lack of concrete evidence of their role in protecting the coast...

Conservation and management of rare and elusive species requires accurate data on presence or absence. In such cases, molecular genetics based species identification approaches can prove invaluable, especially in conjuncture with non-invasive DNA sampling. However, non-invasive sources yield DNA in low concentration that is degraded, which could re...