Abstract
Climate-smart solutions and practices have the potential to contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of achieving zero hunger; ensuring healthy lives and promoting the wellbeing of humans, animals, and plants; reducing ocean overharvesting and overfishing; tackling climate change; driving economic growth; and promoting innovation. Achieving these goals will require searching for, defining, and adopting the most effective and suitable scientific approach for studying synergies between often-opposing socioeconomic and environmental priorities. Developing a critical conceptual framework as a reading key for the SDGs’ interactions (theory building) and exploring the possibilities of upscaling successful climate-smart practices, with the case study offered by the SECURE project (theory testing) are the two methods adopted to answer the research hypothesis on the validity and scope of conceptual frameworks for complex systems. The paper concludes with a call for further testing of tools, approaches, and methods to enable dynamic systems thinking to inform upscaling efforts, while recognizing the transdisciplinary nature and complexity of the study of low-trophic marine resources as a constituent of food production, and environmental and health protection systems.
Highlights
Climate-smart solutions [1] to address climate change, achieve sustainable food production and optimal health outcomes for humans, animals, and plants are fraught with obstacles and uncertainties [2]—not least, the fragmentation of research findings, and the difficulty of ensuring their generalizability on the one hand, and of upscaling successful projects and making empiricism meaningful for legal analysis and policy-making, on the other
This chapter explores to what extent a conceptual framework for complex systems identifies, reflects, and helps to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in an integrated manner on the one hand, and how such a framework provides an approach for framing, implementing, and upscaling climate-smart practices on the other
Investing critical-systems thinking as a conceptual approach to the SDGs brought two expected results: it contributed to theory building of a conceptual framework that could inform multidisciplinary research in the identification of common and integrated solutions in the implementation of the Agenda 2030 on the one side; it showed the possibilities of upscaling successful climate-smart practices, as well as informing legal thinking on integrated socioeconomic and environmental objectives
Summary
This chapter explores to what extent a conceptual framework for complex systems identifies, reflects, and helps to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in an integrated manner on the one hand, and how such a framework provides an approach for framing, implementing, and upscaling climate-smart practices on the other. A conceptual framework that systematizes and problematizes the goals of the Agenda 2030 (in particular, achieving sustainable food production, and protecting and guaranteeing the generalizability and relevance of climate-smart solutions and practices) [3], should help to clarify the interactions between systems (environment, food, health, and innovation), and the various governance arrangements to inform decision-making and implementation [4].
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