Browsing by Author "Gardner, Toby"

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Solution Scanning as a Key Policy Tool: Identifying Management Interventions to Help Maintain and Enhance Regulating Ecosystem Services
(2014) Sutherland, William J.; Gardner, Toby; Bogich, Tiffany L.; Bradbury, Richard B.; Clothier, Brent; Jonsson, Mattias; Kapos, Val; Lane, Stuart N.; Möller, Iris; Schroeder, Martin; Spalding, Mark; Spencer, Tom; White, Piran C. L.; Dicks, Lynn V.
"The major task of policy makers and practitioners when confronted with a resource management problem is to decide on the potential solution(s) to adopt from a range of available options. However, this process is unlikely to be successful and cost effective without access to an independently verified and comprehensive available list of options. There is currently burgeoning interest in ecosystem services and quantitative assessments of their importance and value. Recognition of the value of ecosystem services to human well-being represents an increasingly important argument for protecting and restoring the natural environment, alongside the moral and ethical justifications for conservation. As well as understanding the benefits of ecosystem services, it is also important to synthesize the practical interventions that are capable of maintaining and/or enhancing these services. Apart from pest regulation, pollination, and global climate regulation, this type of exercise has attracted relatively little attention. Through a systematic consultation exercise, we identify a candidate list of 296 possible interventions across the main regulating services of air quality regulation, climate regulation, water flow regulation, erosion regulation, water purification and waste treatment, disease regulation, pest regulation, pollination and natural hazard regulation. The range of interventions differs greatly between habitats and services depending upon the ease of manipulation and the level of research intensity. Some interventions have the potential to deliver benefits across a range of regulating services, especially those that reduce soil loss and maintain forest cover. Synthesis and applications: Solution scanning is important for questioning existing knowledge and identifying the range of options available to researchers and practitioners, as well as serving as the necessary basis for assessing cost effectiveness and guiding implementation strategies. We recommend that it become a routine part of decision making in all environmental policy areas."
Understanding Indicators and Monitoring for Sustainability in the Context of Complex Social-Ecological Systems
(De Gruyter, 2015) Haider, Jamila L.; Iribarrem, Alvaro; Gardner, Toby; Latawiec, Agniezka E.; Alves-Pinto, Helena; Strassburg, Bernardo
"It is widely accepted that ecosystems across the world are increasingly affected by humans. Many earth system scientists contend that we have entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans exert a dominating influence on many key earth system processes. Research on the characteristics of this new era emphasizes that a) the world is interconnected and thinking of a given study system as being made up of both social and ecological attributes that interact in complex and adaptive ways can help us make sense of these interactions; and b) the speed of environmental change introduces novel institutional challenges, such as the need to grapple with cross-scale interactions where the activities of one community or society can have far reaching effects on another, thousands of kilometers away.This perspective provides the starting point for why and how, in our view, sustainability indicators should be developed in a way that takes account of the complex and continuously changing nature of the systems they are trying to assess. This chapter begins with a general introduction to some of the key concepts that have emerged from thinking about complex adaptive systems. These concepts highlight some of the considerations that should underpin any attempt to monitor changes in a set of focal attributes that cannot be disentangled from the wider system within which they exist. We then provide a brief introduction to social- ecological systems thinking that explicitly recognizes the highly interdependent and cross-scale nature in which social and ecological attributes of a system are often connected. We posit that social-ecological systems thinking can provide invaluable guidance in designing monitoring and evaluation systems for assessing how different (interconnected) social and ecological attributes of a system are changing as we monitor progress towards, or away from, sustainability. In adopting such a systems approach we conclude with a discussion on the ways in which sustainability indicators themselves, as interdependent parts of the system they are designed to measure, can ultimately change perceptions of values and goals (for better or worse) regarding how that system should be managed."