The ocean moderates anthropogenic climate change at the cost of profound alterations of its physics, chemistry, ecology, and services. Here, we evaluate and compare the risks of impacts on marine and coastal ecosystems—and the goods and services they provide—for growing cumulative carbon emissions under two contrasting emissions scenarios. The current emissions trajectory would rapidly and significantly alter many ecosystems and the associated services on which humans heavily depend. A reduced emissions scenario—consistent with the Copenhagen Accord's goal of a global temperature increase of less than 2°C—is much more favorable to the ocean but still substantially alters important marine ecosystems and associated goods and services. The management options to address ocean impacts narrow as the ocean warms and acidifies. Consequently, any new climate regime that fails to minimize ocean impacts would be incomplete and inadequate.
Three key transitions leading to a “safe and just” operating space, with a focus on food systems, emerged during the development of a Foresight study promoted by SCAR (Standing Committee on Agricultural Research1): (a) sustainable and healthy diets for all; (b) full circularity in the use of resources; (c) diversity as a key component of stable systems. As consequence of COVID-19, food emerged again as a central element of life, along with health, after decades in which food security was taken for granted, at least in most developed countries. The COVID-19 outbreak offered the opportunity for a reflection on the importance of resilience in emergencies. Sustainable and healthy diets for all, was shown, during the pandemic, to depend much more on social and economic conditions than on technical aspects of food production and processing. Agriculture and the agro-industry have now a potential to absorb, at least temporarily, workers laid out in other sectors; the pandemic could be an opportunity to re-think and re-value labor relationships in the sector as well as local productions and supply chains. A full circularity in food systems also would benefit from stronger links established at the territorial level and increase the attention on the quality of the environment, leading to the adoption of benign practices, regenerating rather than impoverishing natural resources. Diversity is a key component of a resilient system, both in the biophysical sphere and in the social sphere: new business models, new knowledge-sharing networks, new markets. The three transitions would operate in synergy and contribute to the resilience of the whole food system and its preparation for a possible next emergency. Science can support policy making; however, science needs to be better embedded in society, to have a clear direction toward the grand challenges, to address the social, economic, behavioral spheres, to aim clearly at the common good. We need to re-think the conundrum between competition and cooperation in research, devising ways to boost the latter without sacrificing excellence. We need to improve the way knowledge is generated and shared and we need to ensure that information is accessible and unbiased by vested interests.
The shift from government to governance in European water policies conveys a pluralist conception of stakeholder participation in planning. This article argues that the current Driving forces-Pressures-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) approach to the planning of natural resource use, developed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Environmental Agency (EEA) is at odds with a pluralistic conception. The DPSIR approach consists in constructing a single socio-environmental model to address a specific problem in water management, while paying no attention to the existence of conflicts surrounding the definition of the issue at hand, the social, political and spatial delimitation of that issue, and the translation of stakes in terms of quantitative variables.Scenarios produced in this process therefore explore a limited range of policies, i.e. those 2 defining the problem in the same way, as illustrated here with the case of the Garonne River in France. This article presents an alternative method, combining knowledge in social science and natural determinisms to build contrasting socio-hydrological scenarios that do not share the same hypotheses regarding their respective key issues.The shift from government to governance in European water policies (Kaika, 2003) conveys a pluralistic conception of stakeholder participation in water management planning. It acknowledges that the allocation of water resources does not only revolve around hydrological expertise, but involves social and political considerations relating to the issue at hand, priorities, uses, compensations, restrictions, sanctions, etc. It requires that stakeholders who neither share the same values nor interests should have an opportunity to debate future options for the use of water. In this pluralistic perspective, scenarios can serve as strategic tools for discussing environmental water policies and plans of action, provided they do not presume a single definition of the issue.However, the prevailing approach to scenario building for water management planning in Europe often refers to the "Driving forces -Pressures -State -Impacts -Responses" (DPSIR) framework, which implies "the demarcation of a particular system of interest, with 1 The authors thank the journal DDT for authorising the publication of this amended translation of an earlier paper published in French: Fernandez, S., Bouleau, G., Treyer, S., 2011. Reconsidérer la prospective de l'eau en Europe dans ses dimensions politiques. Développement durable et territoires [Online], Vol. 2, n°3, December.
There is an increased understanding that the challenges of producing enough food and biomass while preserving soil, water and biodiversity necessary for ecosystem services can not be solved by prevalent types of conventional agriculture and that agro-ecological approaches and ecological intensification is fundamental for our future food production. FAO has stated that "Ecosystem services sustain agricultural productivity and resilience" and advocates production intensification through ecosystem management. Terminologies such as agro-ecology and ecological/ eco-functional/sustainable intensification are being proposed for agricultural development, which builds on higher input of knowledge, observation skills and management and improved use of agro-ecological methods. Contrary, increased global demand for food, and non-food biomass has increased the pressure for intensifying land use and increasing crop yields based on conventional inputs, while still aiming at reducing environmental impact. There is a battle of discourse between these approaches in competition foramong others -research and development funding. The examples of improved local food security from introducing agro-ecological and low external input agriculture practices among smallholder farmers are many. However, upscaling remains a challenge and the ability of such eco-functional intensification to feed the increased urban populations in emerging economies remains an open question. A broader view of what is organic and conventional farming is necessary and the use of new understandings from ecology and molecular biology will be needed to create and profit from synergies between preserving and building on eco-systems services and providing increased food and biomass.
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