Social Environmental Systems Research Articles

Urban heat governance: examining the role of urban planning

ABSTRACT Heat is an increasing climate risk for cities due to climate change and the urban heat island effect. Extreme heat has inequitable impacts across social, economic, and urban environmental systems. Despite increasing awareness of heat risk, the planning and governance structures for mitigating and managing heat are less understood than those for other climate risks. We studied five large, climatically-diverse U.S. cities to better understand urban heat governance with a focus on the field of urban planning. We first conducted a plan evaluation of these cities’ comprehensive, climate action, and hazard mitigation plans (n = 14) and then interviewed urban planners, resilience professionals, hazard mitigation planners, emergency managers, and public health professionals (n = 22). We found that aspects of heat planning occur across a variety of municipal plans but only a small number of strategies were explicitly framed in terms of heat, suggesting an opportunity to better connect heat with other policy goals. Urban planners tended to play a backseat role relative to other professions, despite the field’s importance for reducing heat-related inequity. Better understanding the role of urban planning within broader governance structures can help policymakers to best engage in heat mitigation and management.

An interdisciplinary framework for navigating social–climatic tipping points

Abstract To effectively navigate out of the climate crisis, a new interdisciplinary approach is needed to guide and facilitate research that integrates diverse understandings of how transitions evolve in intertwined social–environmental systems. The concept of tipping points, frequently used in the natural sciences and increasingly in the social sciences, can help elucidate processes underlying major social–environmental transitions. We develop the notion of interlinked ‘social–climatic tipping points’ in which desirability and intentionality are key constitutive features alongside stable states, feedbacks, reversibility and abruptness. We demonstrate the new insights that our interdisciplinary framework can provide by analysing the slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and associated flooding of the Ahr Valley in Germany as a social–climatic tipping point. This framework can enable more sustainable and equitable futures by prioritising social–climatic tipping points for interdisciplinary research, identifying opportunities for action, and evaluating the nuanced desirability and acceptability of proposed solutions. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Spring is not yet here: raising a child with ASD in rural southwest China

Purpose This study aims to reveal the parenting experiences of parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in rural southwest China under the framework of ecological systems theory. Materials and methods Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 parents of children with ASD from rural southwest China and the interview data were analyzed using the three coding steps of the grounded theory method, namely open, axial, and selective coding. Results The results showed four themes: challenges from within the family; relationships between parents, the school, and the community; scarcity and low accessibility of available resources and services; the culture of discriminating against people with disabilities and the loss of eligibility for welfare. The mismatch between the needs of families of children with ASD and the resources available in social-environmental systems is the major issue faced by parents. Conclusions Raising a child with ASD in rural southwest China is affected by the interactions between the families and the internal structures in different environmental systems. The culture of discriminating against people with disabilities formed in the macrosystem could be the essential factor that affects the smoothness of the parenting process of children with ASD.

Wind erosion in European agricultural landscapes: More than physics

Abstract Wind erosion from agricultural land is an underrated and understudied environmental challenge in Europe. Its societal and policy relevance will likely increase in the near future due to climate change and associated increases in the frequency, severity and patterns of atmospheric events such as droughts. We review the research on this issue and find it to be fragmented, siloed and dominated by natural sciences, leaving important research gaps. The most important gaps that circumscribe a research agenda for the future include specific effects of future climate change on wind erosion, the relevance of wind erosion for public health and ecosystem functioning, farmers' behaviour affecting erosion risk and feedback between land management and environmental change, and appropriate policy approaches to address wind erosion risks. Social science contributions are thus required to make wind erosion research relevant for addressing the related societally most pressing questions. We provide a social–environmental systems perspective to highlight the potential of inter‐ and transdisciplinary research into wind erosion in times of climate change and the increasingly recognized need to transform agriculture towards more sustainability and climate resilience. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Assessing the sustainability related concepts of urban development plans in Eastern Europe: A case study of Romania

• Urban Development Plans were analyzed for sustainability related terms for Romania. • Keyword matching and subsequent qualitative assessment was made for selected terms. • Several key terms were missing from the UDPs and the use of the terms is largely descriptive. • University-civil society-decision making partnerships are needed for future UDP developments. Urban sustainability relies on strategic documents such as the Urban Development Plans (UDPs). The major aim of this research is to use keyword matching to assess key sustainability terms in UDPs for Romanian urban areas. We found a low level of accessibility of the UDPs, with 11 counties (out of 42) having no available UDPs and 20% of the accessed UDPs being outdated. 83% of the 201 search terms were identified in the UDPs. The categories covering culture, economy, society, health, risks and hazards had the highest sustainability scores while the categories institutions, research and innovation, climate and waste had low scores. We found higher average sustainability scores for the topics nature, culture and system approach in recent UDPs compared to older UDPs. A qualitatative analysis of 10 terms showed that their actual use in the text had mostly low to moderate relevance for sustainability. There is an urgent need for strengthening the collaborative links between the urban area governing institutions and academic institutions addressing the sustainability of social-environmental systems in order to mainstream key and emerging sustainability concepts into UDPs and to enforce the sustainability of future urban development.

Containerization for creating reusable model code

Will you be able to run your computational models in the future? Even with well-documented code, this can be difficult due to changes in the software frameworks and operating systems that your code was built on. In this paper we discuss the use of containers to preserve code and their software dependencies to reproduce simulation results in the future. Containers are standalone lightweight packages of the original model software and their dependencies that can be run independent of the platform. As such they are suitable for reuse and sharing results. However, the use of containers is rare in the field of modeling social-environmental systems. We provide an introduction to the basic principles of containerization, argue why it would be beneficial if this tool became common practice in the field, describe a conceptual walkthrough to the process of containerizing a model, and reflect on near future directions of containerization workflows.

Soil Remediation: Towards a Resilient and Adaptive Approach to Deal with the Ever-Changing Environmental Challenges

Pollution from numerous contaminants due to many anthropogenic activities affects soils quality. Industrialized countries have many contaminated sites; their remediation is a priority in environmental legislation. The aim of this overview is to consider the evolution of soil remediation from consolidated invasive technologies to environmentally friendly green strategies. The selection of technology is no longer exclusively based on eliminating the source of pollution but aims at remediation, which includes the recovery of soil quality. “Green remediation” appears to be the key to addressing the issue of remediation of contaminated sites as it focuses on environmental quality, including the preservation of the environment. Further developments in green remediation reflect the aim of promoting clean-up strategies that also address the effects of climate change. Sustainable and resilient remediation faces the environmental challenge of achieving targets while reducing the environmental damage caused by clean-up interventions and must involve an awareness that social systems and environmental systems are closely connected.

Sedentarization as an adaptation to socio-environmental changes? Everyday herding practices in pastoralist communities in southern Ethiopia

As humanity is faced with various changes in social-environmental systems, adaptation efforts have become increasingly important. Significant effort and resources have been spent on devising overarching, large-scale strategies in response to climate change and associated socioeconomic challenges. However, the mechanisms of adaptation employed by individuals and households in ordinary, daily life have received insufficient scholarly examination. This research aims to demonstrate the significance of everyday adaptation strategies of smallholder pastoralists who are on the front lines of changing socioeconomic regimes in East African drylands. We analyzed the daily spatiotemporal patterns of livestock behavior to understand everyday adaptation practices. Two different pastoralist communities in the Borana Zone in southern Ethiopia were compared, one of which keeps the traditional mobile pastoralism livelihood, while the other has sedentarized because of socio-environmental changes and policy incentives. The mobile pastoralists have larger grazing areas, and their cattle spend more time on foraging and resting. In contrast, the sedentarized pastoralists utilize the land near their settlements intensively and the cattle travel longer distances on average. Our findings suggest that sedentarization is a constrained adaptation strategy at best because it increases the recursive use of rangeland and its fragmentation and forces livestock to move more intensively on a daily and seasonal basis.

Building Climate Resilience in Rainfed Landscapes Needs More Than Good Will

Rainfed smallholder farming is particularly vulnerable to climate change, which can greatly exacerbate existing poverty and livelihood challenges. Understanding the complexity of the systems that connect the environment, society and people can help us to reduce this vulnerability and increase the resilience of communities and households to climate perturbations. In recent years, resilience theory has proven a useful approach for exploring the complexity of development challenges. As a result, there has been an increase in the development of tools and frameworks for assessing resilience. Despite this increased focus, there is no consistent use of the resilience concept in development practice and little evidence as to the benefits of using the tools. This paper aims to bridge theory and practice by coupling research on resilience with its application in the international development field. The specific hypothesis we explore is if and how rural livelihoods build resilience toward increased climatic variability in already degraded agro-ecological landscapes? We present a resilience framework with indicators to assess the extent of community resilience to climate change through improved local agricultural production and natural resources management. Primary and secondary landscape and community data, together with development of participatory watershed action plans were used to populate 16 indicators in a resilience framework baseline for the two rainfed dominated watersheds in Ethiopia and Ghana respectively. Given community awareness of the challenges related to the watershed natural resources, local agriculture and extreme weather, the communities were very willing to develop action plans to improve their management of natural resources and build climate resilience. Nevertheless, our analysis of the watershed action plans revealed that strengthening resilience through local action alone, would likely not be sufficient to meet all climate -livelihood challenges identified. To address severity and recurrence of climate change related disturbances, such as droughts, floods and disease in poverty-affected rural communities, the capacity to improve resilience will depend on external factors, in addition to inherent action. New knowledge, infrastructure and social security mechanisms, including insurance and emergency assistance need to added to build resilience for poverty-affected communities in degraded watersheds. We conclude there are also challenges in the use of resilience framework for development and climate-action related to rural poverty affected and degraded livelihood systems. Populating complex social–environmental systems will also need further development, to understand progress in resilience building under changing climate. Special attention to systemic indicators that describe the coupling and interdependencies of social-ecosystem factors will be critical to take action.

Towards a Single Integrative Metric on the Dynamics of Social-Environmental Systems

Integrating the dynamics and interconnections of natural and human system properties into a single measure would make it simpler to reliably and repeatedly assess and compare different social-environmental systems (SES). We propose a novel metric to assess the magnitudes and variations in SES dynamics by integrating longitudinal gross domestic product, population, and ecosystem net primary production. We use annual public data across the Asian Drylands Belt (ADB) from 1992 through 2016 for 18 political entities as our testbed for assessing the efficacy of the metric. We perform cross-comparisons with existing natural and social science metrics to demonstrate the validity of the proposed metric, including the Human Development Index and the Palmer Drought Severity Index. The new metric demonstrates notable and meaningful differences in trends among the political entities that reflect major social, economic and environmental events over the 25-year period. It provides unique perspectives about the three pillar components (social, economic and environmental systems) in each of the 18 political entities (PE) of the ADB. The metric also shows meaningful associations with key economic and environmental indicators and great potential for broader application and evaluation, given additional testing in other countries, regions, and biomes.

Industry 4.0 impacts on responsible environmental and societal management in the family business

Technological innovations are critical for businesses to sustain a competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive globalised environment. Amongst other advances, Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies are having a growing impact on society; they have become a significant part of family business resources to create more sustainable environments and exploit new opportunities. However, few studies have analysed the impacts of I4.0 on responsible environmental management and society in the context of a family business. To take a step toward filling this gap, this study has employed a system dynamics model to evaluate the impacts of I4.0 on the clean production processes of family businesses in an emerging economy and to describe I4.0 practices on determinants of ethical behaviour and environmental management. Implementation is conducted in the packaging sector to analyse the impacts of I4.0 on CO2 emissions, total packaging waste recovery and societal responsibilities on family businesses in Turkey. The results show that ethical business development contributes toward enhancing corporate social responsibility and environmental management systems in an I4.0 context. The findings can inform the efforts of managers, governments and decision-makers to analyse and manage the societal and environmental impacts of their activities to create a more sustainable environment for family businesses.

Footprints from the Dust Bowl: Using Historical Geographic Information Systems to Explore Land and Resource Access, Use, and Survivability in “No Man’s Land,” Cimarron County, Oklahoma

Despite the importance of land legacy effects on land use/land cover change (LULCC), historical data remain underutilized in analyses of social–environmental systems (SES). Drought, a slow-onset disaster, serves as an ideal case study to examine how multitemporal LULCC provides context for contemporary land use patterns. We use historical geographic information systems (HGIS) to analyze land ownership change, resource access, and land use in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, the epicenter of the Dust Bowl. We digitize archival county plats covering 1931 through 2014 into an HGIS. Through analysis of ownership information, we trace changes in familial and corporate landholdings during this period, exploring how different landowner types have changed over time. Aerial photography analysis helps to quantify the adoption of irrigation in relation to family survivability. Results show that families with larger landholdings in the 1930s were significantly more likely to persist through the Dust Bowl and continue owning land in the present. Access to the Ogallala Aquifer also increased the duration of land ownership. Corporate operators were most aggressive in adopting irrigation. Results raise questions of sustainability and uneven access to resources. We argue that land legacy has profound impacts nearly a century later. Further, SES studies can benefit from incorporating HGIS into their repertoire.

Agent-based modelling of population dynamics of two interacting social communities: migrants and natives

This article presents a new agent-based approach to modeling migration and demographic processes based on computer simulation of the population dynamics of two interacting communities: migrants and native people implementing different decision-making strategies. The approach proposed in the article is based on the well-known model of interaction between ‘nomads’ and ‘plowmen’ and focused on studying the behavior of societies with more complex behavior patterns than in the original model: native people and migrants, as well as their impact on social and economic and environmental systems. Moreover, members of both communities (societies), i.e. agent-migrants (that can be considered as ‘nomads’) and agent–native people (that can be considered as ‘plowmen’) reproduce the resources (job places) necessary to increase personal welfare and realize the opportunities for marriage and childbirth. Agent-migrants create resources with the lowest level of return, such as ‘low-technological job places’ and agent–native people reproduce ‘high-technological job places’ that provide a greater contribution to the level of personal welfare and economic growth in a common. The total number of such job placements is restricted by the spatial and demographic characteristics of the system. The suggested model takes into account the influence of many parameters, in particular, the life expectancy, the share of new migrants in previously immigrants, minimum levels of personal welfare and other important characteristics that reflect the behavior of members of the studied communities. At the same time, the effect of such parameters on migration and demographic processes, and the macroeconomic and environmental characteristics associated with them are studied.

Water resources stewardship in an era of rapid change

Natural and anthropogenic changes in the earth systems impact human and environmental well-being. Water, as a critical component of social-environmental systems, has historically been managed in a way that prioritizes water supply and flood control; some side-effects include stressed ecosystems, water quality declines, and inequitable access to water. The pervasive nature of water issues, both emerging and persistent, reiterate the need for systematization of knowledge and re-envisioning of place-based planning and management of water systems. Here we develop a new conceptual framework for Water Resources Stewardship (WRS) with a focus on equitable and adaptive solutions under changing conditions. This framework organizes and fortifies existing knowledge on this topic and presents a systems-level view. A thematic analysis of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) based on published case studies is used to: (a) appraise elements of the WRS approach, and (b) identify opportunities for integration of a stewardship approach. WRS offers an adaptive and equitable approach that embraces risk-based approaches to steward water systems within an uncertain and changing environment.

A high-frequency mobile phone data collection approach for research in social-environmental systems: Applications in climate variability and food security in sub-Saharan Africa

Collecting high-frequency social-environmental data about farming practices in sub-Saharan Africa can provide new insight into environmental changes that farmers face and how they respond within smallholder agro-ecosystems. Traditional data collection methods such as agricultural censuses are costly and not useful for understanding intra-annual and real-time decisions. Short-message service (SMS) has the potential to transform the nature of data collection in coupled social-ecological systems. We present a system for collecting, managing, and synthesizing weekly data from farmers, including data infrastructure for management of big and heterogeneous datasets; probabilistic data quality assessment tools; and visualization and analysis tools such as mapping and regression techniques. We discuss limitations of collecting social-environmental data via SMS and data integration challenges that arise when linking these data with other social and environmental data. In combination with high-frequency environmental data, such data will help ameliorate issues of scale mismatch and build resilience in environmental systems.

Actors’ diversity and the resilience of social-ecological systems to global change

Biological diversity is known to enhance the resilience of ecosystems to environmental change. It is, however, unclear whether a high diversity of social actors analogously increases the capacity of social-ecological systems to maintain the provision of ecosystem services while undergoing socio-economic and climate changes. Here, using an empirically informed agent-based modelling approach, we demonstrate that both the number of actors (actors richness) and the diversity of the abilities and skills that characterize their management capabilities (actors’ functional diversity) are key determinants of the resilience of social-ecological systems to global change. A high complementarity of the actors’ functional diversity helps to buffer vulnerable mountain systems against socio-economic and climate change. Actors’ response diversity can mediate an abrupt shift in the social-ecological system, leading to new trade-offs in ecosystem services. Our results highlight the importance of considering both the diversity and the complementarity of actors’ management capabilities to ensure the provision of ecosystem services in the face of uncertain global change. Biodiversity enhances the resilience of ecosystems to environmental change. This study uses an agent-based model seeded with data from Swiss mountain-farming communities to show that the diversity of actors, such as farmers, enhances the resilience of social-environmental systems to economic and climate change.

The parallel trajectories and increasing integration of landscape ecology and land system science

ABSTRACTLandscape Ecology and Land Systems Science share a common concern for the dynamics of landscapes, their environmental and human drivers and consequences, and the sustainability of land as a coupled social-ecological system. Both scientific communities employ interdisciplinary approaches to monitoring, understanding and projecting changes in landscapes, and share important epistemic, thematic and methodological interests. Nonetheless, they are also distinguished by important differences in problem framing, base constituencies, core questions, methodologies employed, and engagement with governance and policy. We review these two scientific fields, highlighting key commonalities and differences. By mapping areas of convergence and divergence in these two foremost communities studying land use and landscapes, we highlight promising research areas where the relative strengths of each can be merged to foster new advances in an integrated human-environment science of land systems. Such advances are essential for improved assessments of social-environmental systems dynamics that underpin sustainability themes.

Seeking justice in Green Revolutions: Synergies and trade-offs between large-scale and smallholder agricultural intensification in Rwanda

Agricultural intensification has long been a core focus of agrarian change research. Work demonstrating the capacity of rural societies to innovate in the face of scarce resources has helped counter and complicate the neo-Malthusian narrative that scarcity causes land degradation. Intensification has also featured prominently in agricultural development programs and policies aiming to spur economic growth in the global South. Intensification agendas drove Green Revolutions in Asia and Mexico in the 1960s and underwrite ongoing development efforts throughout sub-Saharan Africa. These large-scale intensification programs rely on adoption of ‘improved’ seed, chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and agro-engineering to increase yields of staple crops. These external visions of intensification often fit poorly with cultural-ecological realities of smallholder farming systems where producers pursue locally-viable intensification strategies tailored to complex social-environmental systems. However, little work has explored how various intensification models can overlap and hybridize. In this paper, I explore intensification as a social-environmental process with empirical material from Rwanda, where a recent large-scale agricultural intensification campaign intersects with centuries of smallholder-led intensification. I demonstrate that these polarized strategies of intensification converge as tradeoffs for some and synergies for others, leading to uneven rural livelihood outcomes. Considering agricultural intensification as a plural, dynamic, and contested social-environmental process situated within broader currents of agrarian change helps nuance binary depictions of intensification programs as purely success or failure. Moreover, understanding how modes of intensification hybridize may help enhance justice in Green Revolutions by facilitating more constructive dialogue among smallholder communities, researchers, policymakers, and development practitioners.

Adaptation Tipping Points of a Wetland under a Drying Climate

Wetlands experience considerable alteration to their hydrology, which typically contributes to a decline in their overall ecological integrity. Wetland management strategies aim to repair wetland hydrology and attenuate wetland loss that is associated with climate change. However, decision makers often lack the data needed to support complex social environmental systems models, making it difficult to assess the effectiveness of current or past practices. Adaptation Tipping Points (ATPs) is a policy-oriented method that can be useful in these situations. Here, a modified ATP framework is presented to assess the suitability of ecosystem management when rigorous ecological data are lacking. We define the effectiveness of the wetland management strategy by its ability to maintain sustainable minimum water levels that are required to support ecological processes. These minimum water requirements are defined in water management and environmental policy of the wetland. Here, we trial the method on Forrestdale Lake, a wetland in a region experiencing a markedly drying climate. ATPs were defined by linking key ecological objectives identified by policy documents to threshold values for water depth. We then used long-term hydrologic data (1978–2012) to assess if and when thresholds were breached. We found that from the mid-1990s, declining wetland water depth breached ATPs for the majority of the wetland objectives. We conclude that the wetland management strategy has been ineffective from the mid-1990s, when the region’s climate dried markedly. The extent of legislation, policies, and management authorities across different scales and levels of governance need to be understood to adapt ecosystem management strategies. Empirical verification of the ATP assessment is required to validate the suitability of the method. However, in general we consider ATPs to be a useful desktop method to assess the suitability of management when rigorous ecological data are lacking.

Representing causal knowledge in environmental policy interventions: Advantages and opportunities for qualitative influence diagram applications.

This article develops and explores a methodology for using qualitative influence diagrams in environmental policy and management to support decision-making efforts that minimize risk and increase resiliency. Influence diagrams are representations of the conditional aspects of a problem domain. Their graphical properties are useful for structuring causal knowledge relevant to policy interventions and can be used to enhance inference and inclusivity of multiple viewpoints. Qualitative components of influence diagrams are beneficial tools for identifying and examining the interactions among the critical variables in complex policy development and implementation. Policy interventions on social-environmental systems can be intuitively diagrammed for representing knowledge of critical relationships among economic, environmental, and social attributes. Examples relevant to coastal resiliency issues in the US Gulf Coast region are developed to illustrate model structures for developing qualitative influence diagrams useful for clarifying important policy intervention issues and enhancing transparency in decision making. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2018;14:381-394. Published 2018. This article is a US Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.