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1. Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability

   https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10124  

   Chan, Kai M. A. ; Boyd, David R. ; Gould, Rachelle K. ; Jetzkowitz, Jens ; Liu, Jianguo ; Muraca, Barbara ; Naidoo, Robin ; Olmsted, Paige ; Satterfield, Terre ; Selomane, Odirilwe ; et al ( July 2020 , People and Nature)

   Humanity is on a deeply unsustainable trajectory. We are exceeding planetary boundaries and unlikely to meet many international sustainable development goals and global environmental targets. Until recently, there was no broadly accepted framework of interventions that could ignite the transformations needed to achieve these desired targets and goals.

   As a component of the IPBES Global Assessment, we conducted an iterative expert deliberation process with an extensive review of scenarios and pathways to sustainability, including the broader literature on indirect drivers, social change and sustainability transformation. We asked, what are the most important elements of pathways to sustainability?

   Applying a social–ecological systems lens, we identified eight priority points for intervention (leverage points) and five overarching strategic actions and priority interventions (levers), which appear to be key to societal transformation. The eightleverage pointsare: (1) Visions of a good life, (2) Total consumption and waste, (3) Latent values of responsibility, (4) Inequalities, (5) Justice and inclusion in conservation, (6) Externalities from trade and other telecouplings, (7) Responsible technology, innovation and investment, and (8) Education and knowledge generation and sharing. The five intertwinedleverscan be applied across the eight leverage points and more broadly. These include: (A) Incentives and capacity building, (B) Coordination across sectors and jurisdictions, (C) Pre‐emptive action, (D) Adaptive decision‐making and (E) Environmental law and implementation. The levers and leverage points are all non‐substitutable, and each enables others, likely leading to synergistic benefits.

   Transformative change towards sustainable pathways requires more than a simple scaling‐up of sustainability initiatives—it entails addressing these levers and leverage points to change the fabric of legal, political, economic and other social systems. These levers and leverage points build upon those approved within the Global Assessment's Summary for Policymakers, with the aim of enabling leaders in government, business, civil society and academia to spark transformative changes towards a more just and sustainable world.

   A freePlain Language Summarycan be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

    

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2. Redesigning the Trading Zone between Systematics and Conservation: Insights from Malagasy mouse lemur classifications, 1982 to present

   https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59234  

   Franz, Nico ; Sterner, Beckett ; Upham, Nathan ; Cortés Hernández, Kevin ( October 2020 , Biodiversity Information Science and Standards)

   Translating information between the domains of systematics and conservation requires novel information management designs. Such designs should improve interactions across the trading zone between the domains, herein understood as the model according to which knowledge and uncertainty are productively translated in both directions (cf. Collins et al. 2019). Two commonly held attitudes stand in the way of designing a well-functioning systematics-to-conservation trading zone. On one side, there are calls to unify the knowledge signal produced by systematics, underpinned by the argument that such unification is a necessary precondition for conservation policy to be reliably expressed and enacted (e.g., Garnett et al. 2020). As a matter of legal scholarship, the argument for systematic unity by legislative necessity is principally false (Weiss 2003, MacNeil 2009, Chromá 2011), but perhaps effective enough as a strategy to win over audiences unsure about robust law-making practices in light of variable and uncertain knowledge. On the other side, there is an attitude that conservation cannot ever restrict the academic freedom of systematics as a scientific discipline (e.g., Raposo et al. 2017). This otherwise sound argument misses the mark in the context of designing a productive trading zone with conservation. The central interactional challenge is not whether the systematic knowledge can vary at a given time and/or evolve over time, but whether these signal dynamics are tractable in ways that actors can translate into robust maxims for conservation. Redesigning the trading zone should rest on the (historically validated) projection that systematics will continue to attract generations of inspired, productive researchers and broad-based societal support, frequently leading to protracted conflicts and dramatic shifts in how practioners in the field organize and identify organismal lineages subject to conservation. This confident outlook for systematics' future, in turn, should refocus the challenge of designing the trading zone as one of building better information services to model the concurrent conflicts and longer-term evolution of systematic knowledge. It would seem unreasonable to expect the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List Index to develop better data science models for the dynamics of systematic knowledge (cf. Hoffmann et al. 2011) than are operational in the most reputable information systems designed and used by domain experts (Burgin et al. 2018). The reasonable challenge from conservation to systematics is not to stop being a science but to be a better data science. In this paper, we will review advances in biodiversity data science in relation to representing and reasoning over changes in systematic knowledge with computational logic, i.e., modeling systematic intelligence (Franz et al. 2016). We stress-test this approach with a use case where rapid systematic signal change and high stakes for conservation action intersect, i.e., the Malagasy mouse lemurs ( Microcebus É. Geoffroy, 1834 sec. Schüßler et al. 2020), where the number of recognized species-level concepts has risen from 2 to 25 in the span of 38 years (1982–2020). As much as scientifically defensible, we extend our modeling approach to the level of individual published occurrence records, where the inability to do so sometimes reflects substandard practice but more importantly reveals systemic inadequacies in biodiversity data science or informational modeling. In the absence of shared, sound theoretical foundations to assess taxonomic congruence or incongruence across treatments, and in the absence of biodiversity data platforms capable of propagating logic-enabled, scalable occurrence-to-concept identification events to produce alternative and succeeding distribution maps, there is no robust way to provide a knowledge signal from systematics to conservation that is both consistent in its syntax and acccurate in its semantics, in the sense of accurately reflecting the variation and uncertainty that exists across multiple systematic perspectives. Translating this diagnosis into new designs for the trading zone is only one "half" of the solution, i.e., a technical advancement that then would need to be socially endorsed and incentivized by systematic and conservation communities motivated to elevate their collaborative interactions and trade robustly in inherently variable and uncertain information. 

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3. “Caring as Class: Resolving the Emotional Paradox of Climate Change Education.” Journal of Sustainability Education.”

   Lyles W., K. Overstreet ( January 2021 , Journal of sustainability education)

   What will it take to create a transformation in human society to coexist with our human and more-than-human earth kin?” – Journal of Sustainability Education call for papers 2021 The question of what it will take to induce societal transformation in the face of climate change is daunting to consider, intimidating to try and answer in the abstract, and potentially paralyzing to try and address through teaching, research, and practice. That is, in response to the JSE editors’ question, we may be tempted to simply curl up in a ball and rock back and forth in search of temporary comfort and escape. Yet, in crafting the subtitle for this issue on climate change, JSE’s editorial team has pointed to multiple paths forward: resistance, recuperation, and resilience. Each of those terms have their roots in sustained action, with the Latin meaning of the ‘re’ prefix based in doing again and again (dictionary.com, 1995). The same implication is present with kindred concepts often used in the realm of grappling with climate change like regeneration, reparations, restoration, recentering, and renewal. Altogether the emphasis on sustained actions, with each term in its own way looking both backwards and forwards in time and knowledge, raises a very direct challenge for educators: how do we help students (and ourselves) prepare to engage in sustained action in the face of climate change and its root causes of extraction, inequity, racism and colonialism? In this article, we describe our response to this question, admittedly very much a work in progress. We first elaborate on the conceptual and practical challenges in preparing students for sustained action to imagine and enact the future. Paramount among these challenges is acknowledging that climate change cannot be addressed in an equitable way without also addressing its roots in colonization, racism, sexism, and extractive capitalism. Next, we discuss our integrated teaching-research-engagement approach, developed as part of a US National Science Foundation CAREER award project aimed at examining the potential role of compassion as a transformative practice for reducing long-term risks from natural hazards and climate change. Then, we provide summaries of and reflections on a pair of courses taught in 2019 and 2020 that explored, respectively the inner personal dimensions and external relational dimensions of professional work to reduce climate risks. Finally, we detail some of the lessons we’ve learned in the processes of convening these courses and look to future opportunities for growth and sustained action as educators ourselves. 

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4. Chinese cities as digital environmental governance innovators: Evidence from subnational low-Carbon plans

   https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083231186622  

   Hsu, Angel ; Lili, Li ; Schletz, Marco ; Yu, Zhitong ( July 2023 , Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science)

   Research examining the rise of digital environmental governance, particularly at the subnational scale in China, is fairly limited. Critical questions regarding how digital technologies applied at the subnational level may shape or transform environmental governance are only beginning to be explored, given cities’ increasing role as sustainability experimenters and innovators. In this study, we investigate how smart city initiatives that incorporate big data, artificial intelligence, 5G, Internet of Things, and information communication technologies, may play a role in the transformation towards a “digital China.” We conceptualize three major pathways by which digital technology could transform environmental governance in China: through the generation of new data to address existing environmental data gaps; by enhancing the policy analytical capacity of environmental actors through the use of automation, digitalization, and machine learning/artificial intelligence; and last, through reshaping subnational-national, and state-society interactions that may shift balances of power. With its dual prioritization of digital technologies and climate change, China presents an opportunity for examining digitalization trends and to identify gaps in governance and implementation challenges that could present obstacles to realizing the transformative potential of digital environmental management approaches.

    

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5. Open Hardware in Science: The Benefits of Open Electronics

   https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icac043  

   Oellermann, Michael ; Jolles, Jolle W. ; Ortiz, Diego ; Seabra, Rui ; Wenzel, Tobias ; Wilson, Hannah ; Tanner, Richelle L. ( May 2022 , Integrative and Comparative Biology)

   Openly shared low-cost electronic hardware applications, known as open electronics, have sparked a new open-source movement, with much untapped potential to advance scientific research. Initially designed to appeal to electronic hobbyists, open electronics have formed a global “maker” community and are increasingly used in science and industry. In this perspective article, we review the current costs and benefits of open electronics for use in scientific research ranging from the experimental to the theoretical sciences. We discuss how user-made electronic applications can help (I) individual researchers, by increasing the customization, efficiency, and scalability of experiments, while improving data quantity and quality; (II) scientific institutions, by improving access to customizable high-end technologies, sustainability, visibility, and interdisciplinary collaboration potential; and (III) the scientific community, by improving transparency and reproducibility, helping decouple research capacity from funding, increasing innovation, and improving collaboration potential among researchers and the public. We further discuss how current barriers like poor awareness, knowledge access, and time investments can be resolved by increased documentation and collaboration, and provide guidelines for academics to enter this emerging field. We highlight that open electronics are a promising and powerful tool to help scientific research to become more innovative and reproducible and offer a key practical solution to improve democratic access to science.

    

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