Search Results (31)

Specialty agriculture, promoted in China to enhance rural revitalization and farmers’ wellbeing, depends heavily on local social–ecological conditions and land transformations. However, existing studies often emphasize socio-institutional successes while oversimplifying ecological complexity and neglecting failures. This study examines the rise and fall of rural specialty agriculture through a social–ecological land system perspective, using the cherry tomato industry in C Town, China, as a case study. Drawing on qualitative data from field investigations and interviews, we adapt an extended Social–Ecological Systems Framework (SESF) to analyze interactions among governance subsystems, land resources, and external shocks, and their role in social–ecological transitions. Our findings show that the shift from farmer-led self-organization to government-driven and enterprise-dominated governance significantly undermined system resilience and adaptability. Although external interventions initially spurred industrialization and scaling, they marginalized farmers, leading to the system’s collapse under stressors like market fluctuations and environmental challenges. Our findings highlight the importance of inclusive governance for sustaining land-based agricultural systems, and point to the need of prioritizing farmer autonomy, sustainable land use planning, and adaptive governance to ensure the resilience and long-term sustainability of specialty agriculture systems. Full article

The aim of this article is to reflect on the nature of the structural sins in the present times and to offer light on the structural virtues that are in urgent demand for sustainable development of persons and peoples. Our analysis begins in Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate. In the encyclical, the pope analyses oversimplification of the human reality by ideologies. The simultaneity of moral underdevelopment and a consumeristic super-development, epistemological gulf between faith and reason, erosion of social capital with the shifting of religion to the private sphere, and the collapse of the human ecology beneath the deterioration of environmental ecology are some of the social sins that Benedict XVI points out in the encyclical. Towards the end of the first section, we attempt to show how Benedict XVI understands that these social sins are also the sins of persons and how the personal is derived into the social. In the second section, we try to develop on the proposals for the structural virtues in Laudato Si’. The starting point is Pope Francis’ vision of integral ecology, which is in continuity with Benedict XVI’s finding that human ecology and environmental ecology are interconnected. After a brief analysis of Pope Francis’ thoughts about the current situation of epistemology, we try to understand the dimensions of the common good, law, and personalism in Laudato Si’, from which we can derive threads for the structural virtues. Full article

Ecosystem services (ESs) assessment plays a significant role in managing ecological resources. Uncovering the complex interdependencies between ESs and their key drivers is an essential preliminary step toward the coordinated management of ESs. Currently, a major challenge lies in precisely evaluating trade-offs and synergies among ESs across different spatial and temporal scales, particularly in capturing their dynamic evolution and determinants. This study focuses on the Tuo River Basin in China, quantifying four key ESs, namely, habitat quality (HQ), nitrogen export (NE), soil conservation (SC), and water yield (WY), and assessing their interactions from 2000 to 2020 at both grid and county scales. Moreover, this study explored the social-ecological driving factors influencing these ESs. The results showed that (1) SC and WY in the region exhibited an increasing trend, HQ and NE declined, and ESs at the county scale showed a central collapse feature; (2) synergies between HQ–NE, HQ–WY, and SC–WY pairs generally increased, the relationships between NE–SC and NE–WY pairs showed slight fluctuations, and there was a decline in the synergies within the HQ–SC pair; and (3) the interplay of all drivers positively affected ESs, with land use/land cover being the most significant and GDP exerting a lower influence. ES assessment results exhibited distinctive characteristics at two scales. Based on these findings, management strategies that incorporate both scales and cross policy boundaries are proposed to effectively meet management objectives. These results can facilitate improved synergy between regional ecological protection and economic development. Full article

Environmental degradation driven by human activities has heightened the need for sustainable development strategies that balance economic growth with ecological preservation. This study uses a compartmental model approach to examine the effects of global warming on ecosystem dynamics, focusing on how rising temperatures alter interactions across trophic levels. Three case studies of varying complexity, including a human ecosystem incorporating social and economic factors, were analyzed by integrating feedback loops between greenhouse gas emissions, temperature anomalies, and ecosystem responses. The results quantitatively demonstrate that even minor disruptions in one part of an ecosystem can cause significant instability across trophic levels, potentially driving the system to collapse in a short period. These findings from all case studies highlight the cascading impacts of global warming, underscoring the intricate relationship between climate change and ecosystem stability. Furthermore, this study offers qualitative insights into the potential consequences of climate change on biodiversity and resource availability in real ecosystems, highlighting the vulnerability of such systems and the importance of incorporating feedback mechanisms into environmental policy and decision-making processes. The approach employed in this study offers a more robust framework for understanding ecosystem responses and for developing strategies to enhance resilience against climate change, thereby protecting the long-term sustainability of ecosystems. Full article

Rural ecosystem health (REH) serves as an effective metric for assessing the damage degree and stability state within rural systems and their components. It reflects the interaction and the balance among rural subsystems, emphasizing the harmonious development of resources, agriculture, environment, economy, and society that are fundamental to sustainable rural development. Most regional-scale ecosystem health assessments primarily focus on either the natural state of the ecosystem or external disturbances affecting it, often neglecting human ecological systems characterized by economic and social dimensions. Taking Chongqing as an example, we established an improved REH assessment framework by integrating ecological integrity from the perspective of a social-economy-natural compound ecosystem. Furthermore, we innovatively incorporated the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into the formulation of the REH indicator system to quantitatively elucidate the spatiotemporal characteristics. The results indicated that: (1) The REH in Chongqing exhibited an evolutionary pattern characterized by a subsequent rise, maintaining values between 0.363–0.872 from 2000 to 2018. This trend reflected a distinct two-stage development characteristic, with the rural socio-economic subsystem contributing the most at 33.36%, followed closely by the rural environmental subsystem at 27.84%; (2) In 2018, the REH across the 36 districts and counties in Chongqing displayed spatial differentiation patterns described as “collapse in the west, high levels in the northeast, and localized surges”. The areas ranked from smallest to largest REH were metropolitan, western, southeastern, and northeastern areas; (3) Four levels (e.g., disease, single health, compound health, and comprehensive health) and twelve sub-levels of REH were defined using a dominant factors method. Finally, we analyzed the driving factors from four aspects of urbanization development: policy regulation, urban-rural factors flow, and regional differences. We also proposed differentiated planning and policies for sustainable rural development in Chongqing. Full article

Due to the high degree of weathering, the red clay slope has low anti-disintegration performance, and the clay easily becomes wet and disintegrates after soaking in water. It causes geological problems such as slope collapse caused by soil softening. To study the disintegration characteristics of modified red clay, the disintegration test of red clay modified by using lignin fiber, clay particles and lime was carried out, analyzing the disintegration characteristics of improved red clay from physical and chemical perspectives and analyzing the improvement mechanism of three modifiers with the scanning electron microscopy test. The analysis results show that the water-holding capacity and disintegration resistance of soil mixed with lignin fiber decrease; the disintegration time of reshaped red clay increases with the increase in clay content; and the average disintegration rate of the soil decreases with the increase in clay content. With the increase in lime content, the soil cement increases. The integrity of the soil is enhanced, and its anti-disintegration ability is improved; the saturated moisture content of reshaped red clay increases with the increase in lignin fiber and clay content, while the saturated moisture content of soil decreases with the increase in lime content. The damage analysis shows that the larger the damage factor of soil, the worse its anti-disintegration ability, and the easier the soil disintegrates. The purpose of this paper is to explore the essence of the soil disintegration phenomenon, and on this basis, using high-quality improved materials, to improve the soil, which easily disintegrates. This move aims to significantly enhance the anti-disintegration ability of the soil, thereby improving its resistance to softening and disintegration, thereby effectively improving and maintaining the ecological environment. At the same time, the improved soil will help to improve the utilization rate of the slope and foundation soil, thereby reducing the economic cost of maintenance engineering. Against the current background of sustainable economic, social, and ecological development, it is of great strategic significance to ensure the sustainable availability of land resources in specific areas and maintain their productivity and ecological stability for a long time. The research into this subject not only helps to deepen the understanding of soil disintegration, but also provides strong technical support for the rational utilization of land resources and the protection of the ecological environment. Full article

In recent years, several global events have severely disrupted economies and social structures, undermining confidence in the resilience of modern societies. Examples include the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought unprecedented health challenges and economic disruptions, and the emergence of geopolitical tensions and conflicts that have further strained international relations and economic stability. While empirical evidence on the dynamics and drivers of past societal collapse is mounting, a process-based understanding of these dynamics is still in its infancy. Here, we aim to identify and illustrate the underlying drivers of such societal instability or even collapse. The inspiration for this work is Joseph Tainter’s theory of the “collapse of complex societies”, which postulates that the complexity of societies increases as they solve problems, leading to diminishing returns on complexity investments and ultimately to collapse. In this work, we abstract this theory into a low-dimensional and stylized model of two classes of networked agents, hereafter referred to as “laborers” and “administrators”. We numerically model the dynamics of societal complexity, measured as the fraction of “administrators”, which was assumed to affect the productivity of connected energy-producing “laborers”. We show that collapse becomes increasingly likely as the complexity of the model society continuously increases in response to external stresses that emulate Tainter’s abstract notion of problems that societies must solve. We also provide an analytical approximation of the system’s dominant dynamics, which matches well with the numerical experiments, and use it to study the influence on network link density, social mobility and productivity. Our work advances the understanding of social-ecological collapse and illustrates its potentially direct link to an ever-increasing societal complexity in response to external shocks or stresses via a self-reinforcing feedback. Full article

Currently, Chinese villages are grappling with the issue of regional value collapse within the long-standing ‘urban-rural dual system’ strategy. Characteristic villages, as integral components of the urban–rural hierarchical spatial system and pivotal agents in rural development, wield significant influence in addressing China’s rural crises. The construction practice of characteristic villages showcases the cognitive evolution of ‘element-industry-function-type’. Within the value perception of characteristic villages, these practices reflect fundamental orientations in the interaction between humans and land, emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between production, life, and ecology. In alignment with this value perception, and drawing upon the existing studies on the classification of characteristic village types in Jixi County, this paper establishes a comprehensive type knowledge graph of characteristic villages. The framework of this graph’s expression revolves around ‘spatial elements-spatial combination-spatial organization’. This graph delineates a knowledge progression encompassing ‘information-knowledge-strategy’, characterized by three levels: the factual knowledge graph, conceptual knowledge graph and regular knowledge graph. The type knowledge graph systematically accumulates insights derived from the spatiotemporal transmission path of the village spatial structure. It formulates a structured progression of knowledge as follows: cognition of the village entity information → analysis of the village landscape structure → examination of the village social relationships. This constructed graph translates type-data information into spatial strategy knowledge, serving as a pivotal process in amalgamating characteristic village spatial data with semantic networks, particularly in expressing authenticity inspection and gene transfer. Full article

The evolutionary paths of social-ecological systems comprise periods of structural continuity punctuated by moments of convulsive change. Various forms of systemic global shock could materialize in the coming decades, triggered by the climate crisis, social disruption, economic breakdown, financial collapse, nuclear conflict, or pandemics. The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic stands as a real-time example of an interruption of historic continuity. More hopefully, deep institutional and cultural shifts could rapidly usher in more resilient forms of global civilization. These plausible possibilities challenge scenario studies to spotlight discontinuous futures, an imperative that has not been adequately met. Several factors—for example, gradualist theories of change, scientific reticence, the lure of quantitative tractability, embeddedness in policymaking processes—have rendered mainstream scenario analysis ill-suited to the task. The emphasis on continuity fails to alert decision makers and the public to the risks and opportunities latent in our singular historical moment. A shift to a paradigm that foregrounds discontinuity is long overdue, calling for efforts to broaden the base of persons involved; devote more attention to balancing narrative storytelling and a broader range of quantitative methods; and apply and develop methods to explicitly consider discontinuities in global scenario development. Full article

The Project Planning, Monitoring, Systematizing, and Learning (PlaMSyL) method was developed in a period of ten years (1996–2005) and has expanded since then to improve the results of development and emergency projects in developing countries, focusing mainly on the monitoring and learning process of different local stakeholders beyond the deliverables into the changes and impacts of outcomes. It has been applied in different countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America between 2006 and 2016. Today, it is taught in universities to students of pre- and post-grade levels. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals are part of the UN Agenda 2030, signed by 193 governments in 2015, contain 169 Targets, and 232 indicators of social well-being (health, education, zero hunger, equality, and gender), and for economic (food production, industry, zero poverty, consumption, infrastructure, and technology), and ecological development (water, climate, governance, and biodiversity) preserving the planet from a collapse and ensuring the sustainable well-being of all. The SDGs provide the framework for a new circular economy based on clean energy and zero greenhouse gases. One basic principle of the SDG 2030 is “Leave No One Behind” and is what drives to work with the local governments and communities in a bottom-up approach, coordinating with the national level to set up appropriate policies. The PlaMSyL method has been practiced by different professional teams of education, health, engineering, agriculture, disaster risk reduction, and ecologists, and for this reason, the paper explains the use of the PlaMSyL method with the indicators and targets of the SDGs, and the resilience to facilitate local project teams and stakeholders to use the SDGs participatively as a framework, and as a metrics and communication tool. Full article

This study presents a strategy for environmental management that aims to enhance efforts to restore threatened ecosystems. We review the exploratory system and classify the stakeholders and driving forces behind nature exploitation. Based on successful environmental management cases, we propose practical modifications for adding economic value to restoring collapsed ecosystems, resulting in the development of blue management. Blue management isolates specific stakeholders such as nature exploiters, governmental bodies, and nature scientists. We propose the division of nature users into large footprinting companies (funders), natural resources exploiters industry (managers), and subsistence exploiters (workforce) and emphasize the importance of increasing the interaction between nature exploiters and natural scientists to accelerate the restoration of threatened natural resources. Blue Management offers stakeholders practical alternatives for improving collapsed/threatened natural assets (ecosystems) based on economic, social, and ecological theories. It provides a summarized pathway for decision-makers to restore unproductive resources, avoiding the migration of the exploratory system to new pristine resources. In summary, blue management is a practical approach that combines economic, social, and ecological theories to restore threatened ecosystems. It offers decision-makers a pathway to restore unproductive resources while avoiding the exploitation of new pristine resources. Additionally, blue management has the potential to improve the research and development of technologies and systems related to nature restoration. We believe that this approach can help achieve the goals of the UN decade of ecosystem restoration and contribute to the sustainable use of natural resources. Full article

Broadly speaking, the literary history of human–nonhuman metamorphoses conveys certain ethics regarding human-to-human relations by mediating these relations through metaphors of inhumanity. Where such transformations appear in the literature of the present, however, the human is often decentered, fostering an uneasy consort between human and nonhuman beings and ways of being. Taking the fiction of South Korean author, Han Kang, as a case study, this essay examines the political or civic value of reinvigorating vegetal or arboreal transformation in contemporary stories that unfold against a backdrop of global climate change and ecological collapse. I argue that Han’s work depicts the mimicry of or engagement with nonhuman forms of life as both passive strategies for resisting human acts of violence and exploitation and alternative models of sociality and care. Drawing especially on the unruliness of plants and non-animal organic matter, Han’s translated works invite readers to consider what human subjects can learn about both individual and networked, interspecies modes of protest from green subjectivity. Full article

Extreme wildfire events exceeding control capacity are becoming a major environmental, economic and social threat, not only in fire-prone regions in Southern Europe, America and Oceania, but also in new areas such as Central and Northern Europe. The EU H2020 FIRE-RES project aims to provide Europe with the necessary capacity to avoid collapse in the face of Extreme Wildfire Events (EWE), which are projected to increase as the result of a harsher climate. FIRE-RES is a 4-year project (2021–2025) whose scope is to effectively promote the implementation of a holistic fire management approach and support the transition towards more resilient landscapes and communities to EWE in Europe. FIRE-RES brings together a transdisciplinary, multi-actor consortium of 35 partners, formed by researchers, wildfire agencies, technological companies, industry and civil society from 13 countries, linking to broader networks in science and disaster reduction management. The project will deploy a total of 34 innovation actions across a set of eleven living labs representing different environments in Europe and Chile. Its final mission is to boost the socio-ecological transition of the European Union towards a fire-resilient continent by developing a stream of innovative actions. Full article

There is a vivid scientific debate on how climate change affects stability, resilience, and conflict dynamics of human societies. Environmental security and collapse theory are theoretical approaches that claim severe negative impacts of climatic disasters on political stability, allegedly through the vector of food insecurity. Yet there is a disconnect between this work and the rich body of knowledge on food insecurity and society. The literature is fairly unanimous that (a) drought does not necessarily lead to famines, since (b) famines have a political context that is often more important than other factors; in addition, (c) famines and the distribution of suffering reflect social hierarchies within afflicted societies, and (d) even large-scale famines do not necessarily cause collapse of a polity’s functioning, as (e) food systems are highly interconnected and complex. As an illustrative case, the paper offers a longitudinal study of Malawi. By combining environmental history and analysis of Malawi’s idiosyncratic (post-)colonial politics, it discusses the possible connections between droughts, food insecurity, and political crises in the African country. The single-case study represents a puzzle for adherents of the “collapse” theory but highlights the complex political ecology of food crises in vulnerable societies. This has implications for a formulation of climate justice claims beyond catastrophism. Full article

The large availability of both air pollution and COVID-19 data, and the simplicity to make geographical correlations between them, led to a proliferation of ecological studies relating the levels of pollution in administrative areas to COVID-19 incidence, mortality or lethality rates. However, the major drawback of these studies is the ecological fallacy that can lead to spurious associations. In this frame, an increasing concern has been addressed to clarify the possible role of contextual variables such as municipalities’ characteristics (including urban, rural, semi-rural settings), those of the resident communities, the network of social relations, the mobility of people, and the responsiveness of the National Health Service (NHS), to better clarify the dynamics of the phenomenon. The objective of this paper is to identify and collect the municipalities’ and community contextual factors and to synthesize their information content to produce suitable indicators in national environmental epidemiological studies, with specific emphasis on assessing the possible role of air pollution on the incidence and severity of the COVID-19 disease. A first step was to synthesize the content of spatial information, available at the municipal level, in a smaller set of “summary indexes” that can be more easily viewed and analyzed. For the 7903 Italian municipalities (1 January 2020—ISTAT), 44 variables were identified, collected, and grouped into five information dimensions a priori defined: (i) geographic characteristics of the municipality, (ii) demographic and anthropogenic characteristics, (iii) mobility, (iv) socio-economic-health area, and (v) healthcare offer (source: ISTAT, EUROSTAT or Ministry of Health, and further ad hoc elaborations (e.g., OpenStreetMaps)). Principal component analysis (PCA) was carried out for the five identified dimensions, with the aim of reducing the large number of initial variables into a smaller number of components, limiting as much as possible the loss of information content (variability). We also included in the analysis PM_2.5, PM₁₀ and NO₂ population weighted exposure (PWE) values obtained using a four-stage approach based on the machine learning method, “random forest”, which uses space–time predictors, satellite data, and air quality monitoring data estimated at the national level. Overall, the PCA made it possible to extract twelve components: three for the territorial characteristics dimension of the municipality (variance explained 72%), two for the demographic and anthropogenic characteristics dimension (variance explained 62%), three for the mobility dimension (variance explained 83%), two for the socio-economic-health sector (variance explained 58%) and two for the health offer dimension (variance explained 72%). All the components of the different dimensions are only marginally correlated with each other, demonstrating their potential ability to grasp different aspects of the spatial distribution of the COVID-19 pathology. This work provides a national repository of contextual variables at the municipality level collapsed into twelve informative factors suitable to be used in studies on the association between chronic exposure to air pollution and COVID-19 pathology, as well as for investigations on the role of air pollution on the health of the Italian population. Full article