Ambio最新文献

Since May 2024, New Caledonia has faced civil unrest, economic collapse, food insecurity, and social instability, severely disrupting environmental management in this globally significant biodiversity hotspot. The crisis has exacerbated threats to biodiversity from poaching, illegal fishing, deforestation, urban fires, waste pollution, and pet abandonment, while conservation efforts have ground to a halt. Immediate action is needed to address these threats to nature. Here, we outline the current challenges and propose a strategy for achieving socio-ecological resilience that incorporates traditional knowledge, community led resource management, sustainable economic recovery, and increased funding for conservation. Protecting New Caledonia's species and ecosystems is critical to global biodiversity conservation.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Biosphere Reserves aim to balance nature and human coexistence, but increasing tourism challenges landscape management. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) stresses the importance of understanding stakeholder values for effective management of natural spaces through a typology of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values. This study applies this IPBES typology to tourism preferences in the Archipelago Sea Biosphere Reserve (ABR) using Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS). A 2022 survey gathered data from 690 locals, recreationists, and tourists revealing intrinsic values as the most significant. Locals prioritized intrinsic and relational values, while recreationists and tourists emphasized relational and instrumental values. The study highlights a preference for small-scale tourism that preserves landscapes and heritage, illustrating the complexity of aligning stakeholder values in tourism and conservation. Insights from this research guide policymaking to better accommodate diverse values in protected areas.

"Sustainability" can mean different prioritisations of society, environment and economy to different people. As one of the largest globally traded food commodities, for seafood, these differences could have large implications. The study captures different understandings of "sustainable seafood" among 29 key actors along the seafood supply chain-government, NGOs, industry bodies, retailers and producers-using a novel cross-country application of Q method in Japan and Sweden. Sweden, known for its uptake of green consumption, contrasts with Japan's focus on alternative sustainability initiatives such as satoumi. Participants ranked 40 prepared statements on seafood sustainability revealing four distinct perspectives: Regulation-centric, Ecocentric, Industry-centric and Community-centric. There were clear country-based divisions, with only one perspective containing participants from both countries. Interactions and prioritisations of different dimensions of sustainability are also presented, through which we hypothesise areas of conflict and consensus. We stress the need to understand diverse perspectives when tackling global seafood sustainability challenges.

This paper presents results from a grounded theory study of rewilding aims, addressing calls for broad scale studies of rewilding to contribute to the development of guidelines. The grounded theory draws from a broad set of data sourced from rewilding organizations, case studies, and research. Expressions from the data relating to rewilding aims and outcomes were coded. The results demonstrate the intentions for rewilding to affect systemic, ecological, and socio-cultural change. Outcomes to support rewilding aims are also identified. The aims and outcomes are presented under these headings in a social-ecological framework which offers a shared vision for rewilding. The significance of this research is that it demonstrates rewilding's multi-disciplinarity and engagement with systemic or transformative change. It addresses a perceived paradox between rewilding intervention and non-human autonomy, demonstrating that rewilding is not necessarily about removing human influence but affecting coexistence through more-than-human collaboration. A revised rewilding continuum integrating coexistence is proposed.

Unsustainable land use practices have led to increased forest loss rates. Implementing cacao agroforestry can reduce forest loss by preventing the clear-cutting of forests for monoculture plantations. However, research is needed on its effectiveness in preventing forest loss and the factors influencing its adoption between full-time and part-time farmers. Here, we address these gaps in the Maya Golden Landscape, Belize, by using Mahalanobis distance matching to compare forest loss in cacao agroforestry concession, forest reserve, and de-reserve areas and analyzing social data of 187 households. The results suggest that the odds of forest loss in the cacao agroforestry concession area are approximately 16% higher than in the Maya Mountain North Forest Reserve. In comparison, they are 85% lower than in the de-reserved areas. We also report differences in the factors influencing agroforestry adoption between part-time and full-time farmers. Successful cacao agroforestry adoption requires considering the differences that exist between farmers' categories.

This study aims to expand the understanding of public acceptance of carbon taxes by exploring the role of habits. Habits play a pivotal role in guiding our behaviors and reasoning and can even influence our self perception and identity but remain an underexplored variable in relation to public policy acceptance. We employed a large scale (N > 5200) national survey to measure public acceptance of higher carbon taxation in Sweden, also capturing car driving habits, car usage, and other relevant variables. The findings show that habit strength is negatively correlated with policy acceptance, regardless of self reported driving distance, while also appearing to moderate the relationship between policy acceptance and environmental concern and political leaning, variables previously shown to be of relevance. The study suggests that the influence of habits needs to be recognized to better understand the formation of climate policy acceptance, and exploring this perspective paves the way for future research.

Our study explores governing of European eel in Sweden. The paper aims to analyze and tentatively explain the degree of policy coherence between different political levels and discuss implications for management. The study focuses on the Advocacy Coalition Framework and a qualitative methodology. Results show that EU and Swedish eel fishery policies are based on partly different beliefs about prioritized groups, problem descriptions, and policy preferences. Swedish policy is more considerate of fishery, attentive to the problems of hydropower, and hesitant toward fishery closures, than is the EU. These differences can be understood by the positions and power of the two advocacy coalitions competing for influence at the national level. National decisions align more with the coalition that includes fishery organizations, the Swedish Board of Agriculture, and coastal municipalities than with the beliefs of the coalition involving environmental-and sport fishing organizations and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency.

Balancing increasing demand for wood products while also maintaining forest biodiversity is a paramount challenge. Europe's Biodiversity and Forest Strategies for 2030 attempt to address this challenge. Together, they call for strict protection of 10% of land area, including all primary and old growth forests, increasing use of ecological forestry, and less reliance on monocultural plantations. Using data on country wide silvicultural practices and a new database on strict forest reserves across Europe, we assess how triad forest zoning could help meet these goals. Our analysis reveals that zoning in Europe is overwhelmingly focused on wood production, while there has been little concomitant protection of forests in strict reserves. Moreover, most strict forest reserves are < 50 ha in size, likely too small to capture the minimum dynamic area necessary to sustain many taxa. We outline research priorities to meet future demands for timber while minimizing the impact on native biodiversity.

Despite a well-established system of community lands, the current lack of spatial data on community territories impacts how Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs) in Europe are included in global discussions about land rights recognition and their critical role in land stewardship. We present an aggregation of spatial data for 42.5 Mha of recognized IPs and LCs lands in Western and Northern Europe, including data that were not previously included in global datasets. We show that governments recognize IPs and LCs lands through a diversity of tenure systems, which are managed under a variety of governance arrangements, including community, State, and shared governance. IPs and LCs contribute important services to people, underscoring their potential role in the climate and conservation needs of Europe.

The Water Framework Directive protects groundwater-dependent terrestrial ecosystems, but its concepts and definitions remain unclear. This paper aims to clarify the margin of discretion for the Member States, by applying a cross-disciplinary legal and biological analysis. We conclude that description of the protected ecosystems must include at least key components and processes and be based on a number of well-known groundwater-dependent habitats, but not restricted to habitats fed entirely by groundwater. We argue that the potential harm to terrestrial ecosystems by lowering the groundwater table should include the impact of both water abstraction and drainage, and, despite the discretion regarding scale, we recommend basing assessments and protection at a landscape-scale that aligns with the scale of bodies of groundwater, which typically includes a range of habitats in various ecological conditions.