Zuzana V. Harmáčková

Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences - CzechGlobe · Department of Social-Ecological Analysis

Gray literature is increasingly considered to complement evidence and knowledge from peer-reviewed literature for science-policy processes and applied research. On the one hand, science-policy assessments need to consider a diversity of worldviews, knowledge types and values from a variety of sectors and actor groups, and synthesize policy-relevant...

Knowledge is an essential determinant and component of the international development cooperation agenda and projects. Therefore, it is vital to understand and reflect on how knowledge in international development cooperation is created, what knowledge counts, and how it influences the planning, implementation, and outcomes of international developm...

Individual actors and actor groups are vital catalysts of transformative change as they are able to initiate bottom-up interventions that nurture and protect biodiversity. This paper analyses biodiversity-focused practices across the civil, market and public spheres to identify the modes of intervention that actors in Europe utilise when they seek...

Knowledge is an essential determinant and component of international development cooperation agenda and projects. Therefore, it is vital to understand and reflect on how knowledge in international development cooperation is created, what knowledge counts, and how it influences the planning, implementation, and outcomes of international development...

Values have been recognized as critical leverage points for sustainability transformations. However, there is limited evidence unpacking which types of values are associated with specific types of sustainable and unsustainable futures, as described by future scenarios and other types of futures-related works. This paper builds on a review of 460 fu...

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...

Achieving sustainability in the Anthropocene requires radical changes to how human societies operate. The Seeds of Good Anthropocenes (SOGA) project has identified a diverse set of existing initiatives, called “seeds,” that have the potential to catalyze transformations toward more sustainable pathways. However, the empirical investigation of facto...

The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) were developed as a framework for exploring alternative futures with challenges for climate change mitigation and adaptation. Whilst originally developed at the global scale, the SSPs have been increasingly interpreted at the national scale in order to inform national level climate change policy and impact a...

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...

The chapter assesses the role of nature's diverse values in supporting social-ecological transformations towards more just and sustainable futures. This is approached as a two-fold and mutually complementing task: a) assessing the diverse values that have been considered in developing and creating visions for, and scenarios of the future, particula...

Link to the pre-print full text: https://osf.io/kcqem/ Gray literature is increasingly considered to complement evidence and knowledge from peer-reviewed literature for science-policy processes and applied research. On the one hand, science-policy assessments need to both consider a diversity of worldviews, knowledge types and values from a variet...

Projecting the distribution of population is critical in supporting analysis of the impacts and risks associated with climate change. In this paper, we apply a computational algorithm parameterised for the UK Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (UK-SSP) narratives to create 1-km gridded urban land use and population projections for the UK to the end of th...

Regional analyses of risks from climate change require reproducible, consistent and robust approaches to downscaling global socioeconomic scenarios, with coherent processes that work across multiple projects and communities. We address this need by developing an iterative approach to stakeholder-based Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) downscaling...

Despite substantial progress in understanding global biodiversity loss, major taxonomic and geographic knowledge gaps remain. Decision makers often rely on expert judgement to fill knowledge gaps, but are rarely able to engage with sufficiently large and diverse groups of specialists. To improve understanding of the perspectives of thousands of bio...

Wider participation in ecosystem governance has been called for as a means to reach pluralism in biodiversity conservation research and practice. The logical arguments given are that plurality in worldviews, priorities and values (social plurality) should be brought to the table to be reflected in decision-making, via participation. In this chapter...

Reaching sustainable and just futures for people and nature requires tackling complex social-ecological challenges across multiple scales, from local to global. Pathways towards such futures are largely driven by people’s decisions and actions, underpinned by multiple types of motivations and values. Thus, understanding the link between potential f...

Models help decision-makers anticipate the consequences of policies for ecosystems and people; for instance, improving our ability to represent interactions between human activities and ecological systems is essential to identify pathways to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. However, use of modeling outputs in decision-making remains unc...

The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EEA) represents a crucial approach to incorporate the assessment of the sustainable use of natural resources and ecosystems into decision- and policy-making. However, its application is constrained by challenges distinct across specific implementation contexts,...

Reversing the alarming trend of rising food insecurity requires transformations towards just, sustainable and healthy food systems with an explicit focus on the most vulnerable and fragile regions.

The United Nations 2030 Agenda catalysed the development of global target-seeking sustainability-oriented scenarios representing alternative pathways to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Implementing the SDGs requires connected actions across local, national, regional, and global levels; thus, target-seeking scenarios need to reflect...

The United Nations 2030 Agenda catalysed the development of global target-seeking sustainability-oriented scenarios representing alternative pathways to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Implementing the SDGs requires connected actions across local, national, regional, and global levels; thus, target-seeking scenarios need to reflect...

Despite increasing scientific understanding of the global environmental crisis, we struggle to adopt the policies science suggests would be effective. One of the reasons for that is the lack of inclusive engagement and dialogue among a wide range of different actors. Furthermore, there is a lack of consideration of differences between languages, wo...

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,...

The workshop entitled ‘From visions to scenarios for nature and nature’s contributions to people for the 21st century’ was organized by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) expert group on scenarios and models and its technical support unit, and hosted by the NF-UBC Nereus Program, the Peter Wall Institute f...

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...

HE SECOND AFRICAN DIALOGUE on The World in 2050 (TWI2050) brought together stakeholders to discuss pathways to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), within the planetary boundaries, and through the transformation of African agriculture and food systems. The motivation for the discussion is the understanding that for implementing the SD...

People depend on functioning ecosystems, which provide benefits that support human existence and wellbeing. The relationship between people and nature has been experienced and conceptualized in multiple ways. Recently, ecosystem services (ES) concepts have permeated science, government policies, multi-national environmental agreements, and science–...

Cities are complex socioecological systems that are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and are also exposed to other trends, such as urbanization and population aging. Due to the changing climate, days with extreme temperatures are expected to become more numerous, which is particularly important for urban areas, where the urb...

Future provision of ecosystem services (ES) has been increasingly analysed through the scenario approach to address uncertainties and to communicate them to stakeholders and decision-makers. Multiple uncertainty-related aspects of the scenario approach have been discussed in the literature, e.g. how uncertainty is accounted for in ES modelling proc...

Deliverable D3.3 EU Horizon 2020 ESMERALDA Project, Grant agreement No. 642007. The aims of The Report are: 1) to gather the latest knowledge of biophysical mapping and assessment of the ecosystem services, including methods, data, tools, and software commonly used; 2) based on the above findings, to suggest a harmonised methodology describing ho...

This chapter aims to provide up-to-date quantitative estimates of the costs and benefits related to adaptation strategies for different sectors in Europe. This is done by critically evaluating modeling frameworks and contexts applied to adaptation and by describing new developments achieved in sectoral assessment models (water, agriculture, ecosyst...

The case study research developed over the past 4 years (2012-2016) has provided a significant contribution to our knowledge regarding climate change adaptation at the local level in Europe, and across the world. By case study we refer to empirical analysis of climate change adaptation in real life contexts (Yin, 1994). Europe is equally a supra ca...

This book is inspired by the positive feedback received by the Adaptation Inspiration Book developed in CIRCLE-2, coordinated by the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon. This inspiration book is a culmination of four years extensive case study research carried out within the EU FP7 Project BASE: Bottom-up climate adaptation strategies towards...

The aim of the study was to analyse economic costs and benefits of stakeholder-defined adaptation scenarios for the Šumava National Park, the Czech Republic, and to evaluate their impact on the provision of ecosystem services, primarily focusing on ecosystem-based adaptation options which support disaster risk reduction in a broader region. The stu...

Protected areas serve as reserves of biological diversity and conserve the naturalness of characteristic regional ecosystems. Numerous approaches have been applied to estimate the level of transformation of ecosystems and to compare trends inside and outside of protected areas. In this study, we apply aggregate indicators of anthropogenic pressures...

Ecosystem services, defined as benefits provided by ecosystem functioning to society, are essential to human well-being. Due to global environmental change and related anthropogenic drivers, ecosystems are often degraded, which hinders the delivery of ecosystem services. This study aims to quantify the impacts of land use and climate change on two...

This study aims to contribute to current discussions on ecosystem-service related decision-making by conducting an assessment of trade-offs between alternative land use scenarios in the Třeboňsko Wetlands Biosphere Reserve, the Czech Republic, in terms of regulating ecosystem services provision. To achieve this, we created three land use change sce...

O workshop Avaliação Multicritério de Medidas de Adaptação para a Agricultura e Florestas do Alentejo, organizado pelo CCIAM-CE3C-FFCUL no âmbito do projeto BASE, decorreu em 27 de Novembro de 2014 no Instituto Politécnico de Beja com agricultores, investigadores e outros agentes interessados no desenvolvimento do território alentejano e próximos d...

This deliverable produces a comparative analysis of national adaptation strategies in a selected sample of EU Member States. It is split into 3 analytical parts. Part 1 explores the architecture of adaptation policy in different EU Member States through the lens of policy coordination, including knowledge sharing, and explores the tension between t...

Mainstreaming the concept of ecosystem services has been receiving increasing attention in recent years. Initially, most studies on ecosystem services assessments addressed global, sub-global or local levels. More recently, development of ecosystem services assessments at national level has been emphasized. Following this trend, integrated assessme...