The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) is a heuristic tool for co-creating positive futures for nature and people. It seeks to open up a diversity of futures through mainly three value perspectives on nature – Nature for Nature, Nature for Society, and Nature as Culture. This paper describes how the NFF can be applied in modelling to support decision-making. First, we describe key considerations for the NFF in developing qualitative and quantitative scenarios: i) multiple value perspectives on nature as a state space where pathways improving nature toward a frontier can be represented, ii) mutually reinforcing key feedbacks of social-ecological systems that are important for nature conservation and human wellbeing, iii) indicators of multiple knowledge systems describing the evolution of complex social-ecological dynamics. We then present three approaches to modelling Nature Futures scenarios in the review, screening, and design phases of policy processes. This paper seeks to facilitate the integration of relational values of nature in models and strengthen modelled linkages across biodiversity, nature’s contributions to people, and quality of life.

Over the last decade, hundreds of climate change adaptation projects have been funded and implemented. Despite the importance of these first-generation adaptation projects for establishing funders and implementors’ “best practices,” very little is known about how early adaptation projects have endured, to what ends, and for whom. In this article, I propose a community-based methodology for ex-post assessment of climate change adaptation projects. This methodology contributes to recognitional justice by asking the individuals and collectives tasked with sustaining adaptation initiatives to define adaptation success and what criteria for success should be assessed. I apply this subjective assessment approach in 10 communities across Ecuador that participated in an internationally funded adaptation project that concluded in 2015. My analysis draws together participatory mapping, walking interviews with local leaders, participant observation, and surveys with former project participants. The results highlight that even adaptation projects that were deemed highly successful at their closure have uncertain futures. I find that the sustainability mechanisms that were envisioned by project implementors have not functioned, and communities are shouldering the burden of reviving failing adaptation interventions. These findings highlight that the current model of episodic funding for climate change adaptation projects and evaluation processes needs to be revisited to acknowledge the long-term challenges faced by communities. This analysis also calls attention to the importance of ex-post assessment for adaptation projects and the potential of subjective assessment approaches for building more ontological and epistemological pluralism in understandings of successful climate change adaptation.

Zimbabwe intends to build resilience mechanisms against climate change while at the same time ensuring sustainable development in recognition of its climate change vulnerability and national circumstances, in line with the demands of the Paris Agreement of reducing emissions by 2030. The study examined the consistency of government policies in reducing emissions by 1278GgCO2 by 2030. The study reviewed government policies and environmental projects intended at reducing carbon emissions. The results indicated that, on paper, the government has promising targets; but in reality, there are inconsistencies indicating the release of more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The inconsistencies include the commissioned Hwange thermal power station and fossil fuel-powered locomotives. The study found that there is strategic coherence between policy objectives, aimed at building resilient and low-carbon human settlement, and objectives of international policies such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Paris Agreement and SENDAI Framework. The compulsory mixing of petrol and ethanol and the introduction of electric cars in the transportation sector demonstrated the limited but commendable efforts by the government in embracing renewable energy to reduce carbon emissions. The study established that poor policy implementation and lack of policy harmonisation have led to the failure of the Zimbabwean government to have policy consistency in terms of the decarbonisation roadmap resulting in policy conflicts and contradictions. An example of policy duplication is in, the Environmental Management Act and Forestry Act which can have sections dealing with climate change harmonised into the Climate Change Policy. The study recommends that the government establishes a National Climate Financing mechanism for cleaner technologies and practices to reduce emissions by 2030.

There is an urgent need to understand how anticipation processes such as scenario planning impact governance choices in the present. However, little empirical research has been done to analyze how anticipation processes frame possibilities for action. This paper investigates how assumptions about the future open up or close down anticipatory governance actions in a large number of climate-focused anticipation processes. We focused on four Global South regions: West Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Central America. We apply an analytical framework that identifies four diverse approaches to anticipatory governance and connect this to the notion of opening up or closing down of possibility spaces for action. Across the four regions, we find that many anticipation processes open up dialogue about deep uncertainties and pluralistic worldviews but end up informing mostly technocratic and linear planning actions in the present. We also observe that anticipation processes in the Central American context more often break this trend, particularly when transformative ambitions are formulated. The focus on more technocratic futures and linear planning strategies and reliance on a mostly North-based global futures industry may close down more culturally, socially and politically diverse and regionally relevant future worldviews in anticipation processes.

Drawing on ethnographic research with Indigenous Māori women in northern Aotearoa (New Zealand) we challenge the presumed benefits of neoliberal, infrastructural-focussed climate adaptation, and advocate for far greater engagement with multiple subjectivities and intersecting inequalities in the design of climate adaptation in Global North, settler colonial contexts. Focussing on a government-led water storage project that aims to enhance local communities’ economic wellbeing through climate-adapted horticulture, we demonstrate how interlinked forms of marginalisation and privilege mediate the distribution of benefits from climate adaptation and decrease rather than increase wellbeing for multiply marginalised subjectivities. Combining the concept of racial capitalism with intersectionality we advance a novel theoretical framework to advance insights about more equitable and nuanced adaptation in an under-researched, settler colonial context. Using this framework, we explore the maladaptive potential of the water project which grows regional economic resilience through violent climate-related alterations to low-income, single and/or older Māori women’s bodies. We demonstrate how settler colonial legacies, structures, and intergenerational traumas are lived through and collide with intersecting racial, class, gender, and age-based disadvantages, that together mediate local labour relations and decision-making processes that ultimately exacerbate climate vulnerability for particular groups of Māori women in the region.

Although climate policy diffusion is widely studied, we know comparatively little about how these global policies and the norms that surround them are used by various political actors seeking to advance their own agendas. In this article, we focus on how global climate norms are diffused differently at national and local scales and used to repoliticize or depoliticize climate change. We focus on the case of Turkey, which carries the stark contrast of showing willingness to achieve global climate goals in the international arena but less so in domestic politics and actions. The article employs a novel methodological approach, using topic modeling and network analyses on a range of climate change–related policy documents, and interviews with high-level officers, conducted at the three jurisdictional levels in Turkey. The findings reveal that although global climate policy is diffused to both national and local governments, it is used in different ways at these levels. The national government uses climate policy diffusion to depoliticize climate change by creating ad hoc climate coalitions and limiting local climate actions to seeking external climate-related funds. Meanwhile, the metropolitan municipalities replicate nationally adopted climate goals, whereas the district municipalities domesticate ambitious climate norms and repoliticize climate change via local climate entrepreneurs and civic action. The paper contributes to understanding how climate policy diffusion and norm domestication can have different political outcomes in achieving global climate goals and argues for increased policy attention to the strategic use of climate policy diffusion for the depoliticization of climate change.

By growing awareness for and interest in climate change, media coverage enlarges the window of opportunity by which research can engage individuals and collectives in climate actions. However, we question whether the climate change research that gets mediatized is fit for this challenge. From a survey of the 51,230 scientific articles published in 2020 on climate change, we show that the news media preferentially publicizes research outputs found in multidisciplinary journals and journals perceived as top-tier. An in-depth analysis of the content of the top-100 mediatized papers, in comparison to a random subset, reveals that news media showcases a narrow and limited facet of climate change knowledge (i.e., natural science and health). News media selectivity reduces climate change research to the role of a sentinel and whistleblower for the large-scale, observed, or end-of-century consequences of climate change for natural Earth system components. The social, economic, technological, and energy aspects of climate change are curtailed through mediatization, as well as local and short-term scales of processes and solutions. Reviewing the social psychological mechanisms that underlie behavioral change, we challenge the current criteria used to judge newsworthiness and argue that the consequent mediatization of climate change research fails to breed real society engagement in actions. A transformative agenda for the mediatization of climate change research implies aligning newsworthiness with news effectiveness, i.e., addressing the extent to which communication is effective in presenting research that is likely to produce behavioral change.

Fire management aims to change fire regimes. However, the challenge is to provide the optimal balance between the mitigation of risks to life and property, while ensuring a healthy environment and the protection of other key values in any given landscape. Incorporating cost-effectiveness and climate change impacts magnifies this task. We present an objective framework for quantitative comparison of the risk mitigation potential of alternative fuel treatment scenarios in south-eastern Australia. There is no single optimal strategy for all values in a given region, nor for any individual value in all regions. Trade-offs are required and cost-effectiveness is highly sensitive to the addition of management values. Climate change is likely to decrease prescribed burning effectiveness and increase total costs, therefore a rethink of best practice is required. Our study highlights the need for flexibility in the development and implementation of fire management strategies, which is something that risk-based approaches can provide. We discuss prospects of extending our framework to values for which we currently lack robust quantitative information and issues of compatibility with Aboriginal cultural burning and by implication other approaches that do not stem from within the prevailing fire management paradigm.

The majority of the world’s land is held in customary tenure systems, often with overlapping claims. Designing effective policy to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation requires understanding land management choices within these systems. Using a nation-wide random sample of over 300,000 hectares of forested land in Uganda from 2000 to 2019, we examine how deforestation trends across a system of overlapping rights, known as mailo land tenure, change in response to legal amendments intended to increase land tenure security. Graphical analysis reveals that mailo land has always had higher deforestation rates, compared to private and customary land, which increased relative to other tenure systems beginning in 2010 when a law was passed to protect tenants on mailo land. Statistical analysis controlling for spatial and time effects shows that prior to 2010, trends across tenure systems were similar. After 2010, deforestation increased significantly on land with overlapping rights and then began to decrease after 2017 relative to rates on customary or fully privatized land. We hypothesize that the uptick in deforestation resulted from unintended, increased uncertainty generated by the 2010 law, which changed owner/tenant relations on land with overlapping rights. The decrease in deforestation rates after 2017 was consistent with increased tenure security from an acceleration in the uptake of permanent certificates of occupancy. These findings demonstrate that outcomes under systems of overlapping rights can be destabilized by well-intentioned reform, and that securing tenant rights can reduce deforestation.

The production and trade of agricultural commodities, such as cocoa, have important impacts on farmer livelihoods and the environment, prompting a growing number of companies to adopt public commitments to address sustainability issues in their value chains. Though trading companies, who handle the procurement and export of these commodities, are key actors in corporate sustainability efforts, cross-country data on their identity, market share, and adoption of sustainability commitments is lacking. Here, we address this gap for the cocoa sector by compiling detailed shipping data from eight countries responsible for 80% of global cocoa exports, developing a typology of trader types, and assessing their adoption of sustainability commitments. We find that cocoa trading is a highly concentrated market: seven transnational companies handled 62% of the global cocoa trade, with even larger shares in individual cocoa producing countries. The remaining 38% of exports were handled by domestic trading companies and farmer cooperatives. Overall, the adoption of public sustainability commitments is low. We estimated that just over one quarter (26%) of cocoa is traded under some form of sustainability commitment, with gaps arising from their exclusion of indirect sourcing, low adoption rates by domestic traders, and commitment blind spots, notably on forest degradation and farmer incomes. Low rates of traceability and transparency pose a further barrier to the broadscale implementation and monitoring of these commitments: one-quarter of traders report being able to trace at least some of their cocoa back to farmer cooperatives and only half of them openly disclose the identity of their suppliers. We discuss the opportunities and limitations of voluntary sustainability commitments in a highly concentrated market and argue that, to realize visions of sustainable trade, the gaps in commitment coverage must be closed by extending current efforts to smaller traders and indirect suppliers. However, companies must support, coordinate and align with government efforts so that voluntary initiatives are ultimately rendered more transparent and accountable.

Fossil energy subsidies create a series of distortions that often have negative environmental and social consequences. Yet, since subsidies confer salient and tangible benefits in the form of cheaper prices, citizens are very resistant to reforms. This research investigates how to best communicate the removal of fossil subsidies using a highly powered, pre-registered study with 5,498 participants across 11 countries in Latin America. We assessed baseline knowledge and views about subsidies and randomly assigned participants to one of eight experimental conditions varying in both the aspects emphasized (e.g., environment, distributive justice, prospective fiscal benefits) and the form of providing the message (i.e., complete or summarized information). Our results show that citizens (a) display a generalized lack of knowledge about the existence of energy subsidies, (b) are very unwilling to remove these subsidies once they know of their existence, and (c) would like subsidies to actually increase rather than decrease. Despite these results, our experiment revealed that communication strategies can be tailored to increase the acceptance of energy reforms. Specifically, emphasizing the negative consequences of subsidies (e.g., overconsumption of natural resources and unfair allocation of resources to the wealthy) is more effective than highlighting the potential benefits to be obtained via their removal (e.g., higher investment in healthcare, education, public safety, or welfare programs). Further, providing complete information is more effective than offering summarized pieces of information. These findings provide guidance on how to effectively communicate energy reforms.

Climate engineering research attracts Slippery Slope concerns – the idea that initial research will inevitably lead to inappropriate deployment. Some have dismissed it as an unrealistic, unproductive critique. However, extant climate engineering discussions of the Slippery Slope discuss an unorganised set of different causal mechanisms with little detail. These range from technological cost reduction, to the creation of special interest lobby groups, to normalisation across society and policymakers. Dismissing the Slippery Slope may be premature if its causal nature is unclear, especially given the potentially high impacts and controversy of global climate engineering deployment. Disaggregating and clarifying the Slippery Slope can reduce unnecessary ambiguity, promote productive debate, and highlight risks that require further attention. Drawing on previous Slippery Slope literature and mechanisms of change from range of disciplines, this paper creates a typology of Slippery Slopes for application to stratospheric aerosol injection and other emerging technologies. Initial research can lead to deployment by 1) sparking price-performance improvements and sunk cost biases, 2) contributing to normalisation and legitimisation, 3) altering power structures, 4) sparking hype, and 5) incrementally progressing development. These feedback loops may currently seem unlikely, but unforeseen dynamics could still trigger rapid development and implementation of stratospheric aerosol injection. Conversely, there is no guarantee one of these Slippery Slopes will occur. The point is that they could – the future is too uncertain to fully dismiss non-linear change, particularly for high impact and accessible technologies like stratospheric aerosol injection. This can provide direction and clarity for effective technology governance and Slippery Slope discussion. Furthermore, this typology differentiates the Slippery Slope from lock-in and highlights their interaction points. Slippery Slope dynamics are processes that can (but are not guaranteed to) lead to different types of lock-in. Lock-in is when a technology is entrenched in existing sociotechnical systems. Given the risks of unchecked undesired lock-in, lock-in is a state to be encouraged instead of avoided.

Climate change poses threats to individuals, communities, and cities globally. Global conversations and scholarly debates have explored ways people adapt to the impacts of climate change including through migration and relocation. This study uses Lagos, Nigeria as a case study to examine the relationship between flooding events, migration intentions as a preferred adaptation, and the destination choices for affected residents. The study draws on a mixed-methods approach which involved a survey of 352 residents and semi-structured interviews with 21 residents. We use a capability approach to analyze mobility decisions following major or repetitive flood events. We found that the majority of affected residents are willing to migrate but the ability to do so is constrained by economic, social, and political factors leading to involuntary immobility. Furthermore, intra-city relocation is preferred to migration to other states in Nigeria or internationally. These findings challenge popular Global South-North migration narratives. Indeed, some residents welcome government-supported relocation plans but others remain skeptical due to lack of trust. Community-based relocation may therefore be preferred by some Lagosians. Overall, this study contributes a nuanced understanding of mobility intentions in response to climate-induced flooding in one of the world’s largest coastal cities.

On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, this principal supra-national institution remains paramount to the project of planetary climate planning and governance. Reflections on this anniversary should serve to recall the contestations through which this foundational institution was formed, and the delegate dynamics that continue to be reproduced in its wake. The contentious debates and political dynamics that afflicted the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee tasked with crafting the Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as dissension in the periphery, remain as relevant today as they were three decades ago. Reprising these dynamics through detailed historical and archival analysis, this article excavates the negotiations of the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, which met in 5 sessions during 1991–1992. The aim is to identify key fault-lines and conflicts in the lead-up to the finalization of the 1992 Convention, in order to demonstrate whose epistemic and normative commitments came to be reflected in the final outcome and to show how the legacy of this process endures to date. I seek to render visible actors and proposals peripheralized in the formation of planetary climate governance to extrapolate normative boundaries and proffer heterodox lessons from the margins.

Labor share is one of the most significant indicators for income distribution and social inequality. Many studies have documented its decline and provided explanations from various aspects in recent years. This study explores labor share decline through the lens of air pollution, which has been ignored in the literature. With the two-stage least square (2SLS) regression while using thermal inversion as an instrumental variable, we identify air pollution’s impact on firm-level labor share. The results show an increase of 1 μg/m3 PM2.5 concentration leads to a 0.17 percentage point decrease in firms’ labor share. We test two possible channels through which air pollution could influence labor share. The decreases in firms’ labor and production productivity, and average wage are the main channels from the intensive margin. For extensive margin, we mainly focus on the impact on employees, and capital usage and identify its different effects across different technology firms. We find no significant effects on capital usage. Meanwhile, low-tech firms hire more employment to offset production loss due to air pollution, whereas there is no significant effect on employment change in high-tech firms. For heterogeneity, the impact is larger for private firms, firms with lower education-level employees, firms without labor unions, and labor-intensive industries. Our results suggest that raising public awareness of air pollution could have contributed to reducing health damage and social inequality.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are key actors in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Their aggregate emissions are significant, and they are disproportionately affected by climate impacts, including extreme weather events. SMEs also play a vital role in shaping the environmental behaviours of individuals, communities, and other businesses. However, these organisations have been largely neglected by climate policies across all levels of government. A series of global crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, war in Europe and the Middle East, and energy price spikes, have posed an existential threat to millions of SMEs, while also acting as a catalyst for the reconfiguration of the social contract between business, society and the state, both temporary and more long-term. In this article, we make the case for increased focus on the governance of SME decarbonisation to address this turbulent context. We outline key challenges facing public policymakers and other governance actors, compare strategic options, identify evidence gaps that hinder effective interventions, and highlight implications for research. In doing so we set out key elements of a renewed social contract for business, society and state relations.

In the face of climate change and extreme weather events which continue to have significant impacts on agricultural production, climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has emerged as one important entry point in reducing the emission of greenhouse gases and building climate resilience while ensuring increases in agricultural productivity with ensuing implications on food and nutrition security. We examine the relationship between CSA, land productivity (yields), and food security using a survey of farm households in Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria. To understand the correlates of the adoption of these CSA practices as well as the association between CSA, yields, and food security, we use switching regressions that account for multiple endogenous treatments. We find a positive association between the adoption of CSA practices and yields. This increase in yields translate to food security as we observe a positive association between CSA and food consumption scores. Although we show modest associations between the independent use of CSA practices such as adopting climate-smart groundnut varieties, cereal-groundnut intercropping, and the use of organic fertilizers, we find that bundling these practices may lead to greater yield and food security gains. Under the different combinations, the use of climate-smart groundnut varieties exhibit the strongest association with yields and food security. We also estimate actual-counterfactual relationships where we show that the adoption of CSA practices is not only beneficial to CSA adopters but could potentially be beneficial to non-CSA adopters should they adopt. These results have implications for reaching some of the sustainable development targets, especially the twin goals of increasing agricultural productivity and maintaining environmental sustainability.

Assessments of pesticide impacts globally and holistic policies to address them require accurate pesticide use data, but good use data are difficult to find. For comparable estimates across countries, researchers and policymakers depend upon pesticide use data collected by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). We analyze the FAO database and find declines in data reporting and data quality since 2007. We present a novel method that uses bilateral paired mirror trade statistics and an index of reporter reliability to add, update and/or replace data for 137 countries. The resulting Global Pesticide Use and Trade (GloPUT) database shows pesticide use in low and lower-middle income countries has been substantially underestimated. Over the last decade, global pesticide use grew 20% by volume; use in low-income countries grew by 153% over the same period. GloPUT estimates more accurately reflect social science findings on recent agrichemical supply chain restructuring and agrarian development, which indicate substantial increases in pesticide use. Significant issues with data reporting and quality mean that the impacts of recent changes in pesticide production, availability and adoption were not reflected in the FAO database, and, as a result, neither are they reflected in high profile environmental assessments.

This research has applied an integrated norms model using place attachment, anti-littering descriptive and injunctive norms, and anti-littering personal norms to assess anti-littering behavioral intentions in a developing country. The research uses place attachment as a moderating factor to understand the influence of social norms on anti-littering behavioral intentions which has not previously been explored in detail. After a pre-test to validate scales, a survey was conducted among visitors at a beach in Pakistan. This main survey was performed among a sample of 634 respondents to assess direct, mediated, and conditional indirect effect relationships using structural equation modelling and PROCESS model 7. Place attachment was found to strengthen the effect of descriptive norms. The influence of both social norms (i.e., descriptive and injunctive) on anti-littering behavior was only consistent when mediated by personal norms, suggesting the importance of individuals’ own responsibility. Thus, it appears that role of both place attachment and personal norms are vital in discouraging littering. This perspective has important implications because littering in public places such as beaches has been determined as a substantial environmental problem requiring solutions focused on individuals.

The petrochemicals industry (mainly plastics and fertilizer production) is expanding, despite increasing attention to the environmental impact of petrochemicals. In our paper, we explore the role public finance plays in the petrochemicals industry. We do so by mapping the public and private financial flows into large-scale petrochemical projects for the decade 2010–20 and discuss the role of public financial institutions for the development of the industry globally. Secondly, we provide a detailed analysis of the roles international and national public finance has played in enabling two prominent petrochemical projects: namely the Sadara plant in Saudi Arabia and the Surgil plant in Uzbekistan. The cases are illustrative of the dynamics of state interest and involvement in fossil fuel producing countries as well as of lending and guarantees from foreign export credit agencies (ECAs) and development finance institutions, and how such public finance plays an important role in leveraging private finance. Our findings show how public finance for petrochemicals is highly globalized and to a large degree originates in developed countries. As petrochemical industrial infrastructures are designed to last decades, the public finance thus strongly contributes to the carbon lock-in of the sector and limits the possibilities for low-carbon investments needed to comply with the UN Paris Agreement.