Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability最新文献

Payment for ecosystem service (PES) contracts encounters several challenges, encompassing information asymmetry in determining appropriate pricing, communication gaps involving multiple motivations and the evolving societal norms surrounding sustainability for voluntary contracts. Auctions serve as mechanisms for competitively awarding such contracts. However, their application and analysis have predominantly focused on their economic efficiency in overcoming information asymmetries and providing transparency in contract allocation. This instrumental perspective often overlooks the relational and intrinsic values that underlie PES contracts. By recognising PES auctions as multilayered processes of integrated valuation for nature, PES auctions can contribute to allocating resources efficiently, establishing new social relationships and restructuring existing ones while also providing opportunities for innovations.

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 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). We evaluate studies according to environmental justice criteria. The results suggest that although diverse value types and indicators are assessed across studies, few individual studies are plural, and studies fail to provide evidence on distributive justice and score low on procedural justice indicators. We provide a set of recommendations for incorporating issues of justice in the design of valuation studies.

Transformative changes toward sustainability are political because the aim, the ‘how’, and the speed of such transformations are constantly disputed across diverse actors with varying degrees of power and operational scales. A key political question of transformative changes is which (and whose) human-nature relationships and values are legitimized for/against sustainability and justice. In this context, we aim to analyze how power dimensions can operate in a values-based approach toward the transformative changes required to address the current nature crisis. We analyzed how structural power — that involves rule-making and operational power — and discursive power — that involves framing power — may challenge or catalyze value-centered leverage points upon which society can act toward designing just and sustainable futures.

Instrumental values have mostly informed the assessment of viability and decision-making in landscape restoration literature — especially cost–benefit analysis. Yet, relational and intrinsic values have also been suggested as important values to enable holistic approaches to land restoration. We review articles that include relational values in landscape restoration to assess differences in values across social and geographic contexts and their implications in motivating further restoration. While some values are held constant across different communities, we find differences between values held by developing versus developed countries, rural versus urban communities, and between local stakeholders and others. Developed countries and urban communities hold relational values, while developing countries and rural communities emphasize instrumental values. Similarly, local stakeholders hold instrumental values, while other stakeholders hold relational values. The review also highlights the role of culture in restoration and why nonutilitarian values ought to be captured to understand the holistic value of restoration.

Learning and transdisciplinary research are widely acknowledged as key components for achieving sustainability; however, the links between these concepts remain vague in the sustainability literature. Recently, emphasis has been given to transdisciplinary learning, highlighting its potential as an approach that contributes to solving real-world problems. To better understand and foster transdisciplinary learning for sustainability transformations, it is relevant to pay attention to two dimensions that define transdisciplinary learning: social interaction (individual learning in a social setting, as a group, or beyond the group), and learning forms (single-, double-, or triple-loop learning). This article introduces a conceptual framework built upon these two dimensions to understand three specific forms of transdisciplinary learning as a) individual competence development, b) experience-based collaboration, and c) societal interaction. This framework helps to clarify the design of learning processes as well as their interactions in transdisciplinary processes to support transformative change.

One of the top aims of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 ‘zero hunger’ is to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”. While food system sustainability is a growing area of research, it remains unclear to what extent the SDG-2 targets are guiding the creation of new scientific knowledge and the publication of findings. To examine this, we assessed 97,392 publications published between 2017 and 2021 whose research results supposedly support the achievement of SDG 2. We found that the vast majority of articles had only a superficial engagement with SDG 2, suggesting a lack of interest by food system researchers in the 2030 UN agenda and a widespread practice of ‘SDG-washing’. We argue that scientists working on food systems should take better account of the SDG-2 targets and indicators in their research to identify the conditions, incentives, and supporting institutions necessary for their successful implementation.

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 future scenarios, visions, and other types of futures-related works in the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Values Assessment, synthesizing evidence from academia, private sector, governmental and non-governmental strategies, science-policy reports, and arts-based evidence, to identify the types of values of nature that underlie different archetypes of the future. The results demonstrate that futures related to dystopian scenario archetypes such as Regional Competition, Inequality, and Breakdown are mostly underpinned by deeply individualistic and materialistic values. In contrast, futures with more sustainable and just outcomes, such as Global Sustainable Development and Regional Sustainability, tend to be underpinned by a more balanced combination of plural values of nature, with a dominant focus on nature’s contribution to societal (as opposed to individual) aspects of well-being. Furthermore, the paper identifies research gaps and illustrates the key importance of acknowledging not only people’s specific values directly related to nature, such as instrumental, intrinsic, and relational human-nature values and relationships, but also broad values and worldviews that affect the interactions between nature and society, with resulting impacts on Nature's Contributions to People and opportunities for a good quality of life.

Large infrastructure projects generate irreducible trade-offs between different societal values towards nature. We asked what kinds of values and knowledges are articulated in decision-making around these projects, and specifically how well marginalised are values and the values and knowledges of marginalised stakeholders incorporated in it. Focusing on dams and mines, we chose and systematically analysed a set of well-documented cases from the Environmental Justice Atlas to answer this question. We found that there is substantial overlap between the values and knowledges articulated by proponents and opponents of such projects: values for human life, material livelihood and well-being are invoked by both sides, as is modern scientific knowledge, while relational value for nature and experiential knowledge are highlighted by ecosystem-dependent communities. It is, however, the lack of a value for democratic process and for justice towards marginalised people, that contributes the most to environmental concerns being overlooked in decision-making, thereby obstructing transformative change.

Many discourses, both academic and public, assume that values, understood as principles (e.g. fairness, loyalty), lead to behavior. We analyze how 134 theories of human behavior treat values, which we define broadly to include value(s) related to both principles (e.g. moral values) and value(s) related to importance (e.g. cost or priorities). We find that values and closely related constructs comprise roughly a third of all constructs (n = 2232) in analyzed theories. The nuanced portrayal of values–behavior links offered here is crucial for understanding how values may be associated with transformative change: values must be considered holistically (including principles and importance), alongside other factors.

This paper critically examines the current political context in which valuation studies of nature are undertaken. It challenges the belief that somehow, more and technically better valuation will drive the societal change toward more just and sustainable futures. Instead, we argue that current and proposed valuation practices risk to continue to overrepresent the values of those who hold power and dominate the valuation space, and to perpetuate the discrimination of the views and values of nondominant stakeholders. In tackling this politically sensitive issue, we define a political typology of valuations, making explicit the roles of power and discrimination. This is done to provide valuation professionals and other actors with a simple framework to determine if valuation actions and activities are constructive, inclusive, resolve injustices and enable systemic change, or rather entrench the status quo or aggravate existing injustices. The objective is to buttress actors in their decisions to support, accept, improve, oppose, or reject such valuations.