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Abstract 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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Implementation resistance and the human dimensions of connectivity planning
Abstract Conserving species' ability to traverse the landscape is vital for maintaining biodiversity in the face of global change. Connectivity conservation requires identifying important pathways for species' movements and aligning societal support for conservation of those pathways. Contemporary connectivity analyses emphasize the impacts of topography, vegetation and human footprint on species' movements; but largely ignore the role that attitudes, economics and institutions play in practitioners' ability to conserve those movements.We introduce implementation resistance as an analogue of biophysical resistance that combines social, economic and institutional factors that promote or impede connectivity conservation. We demonstrate the utility of integrating implementation resistance as a means of choosing between competing connectivity conservation strategies using wolves in Colorado (USA) as a case study.Our analysis of five potential corridor locations based on biophysical costs revealed substantial differences in the social costs associated with implementing each corridor despite relatively minimal differences in the biophysical costs.Our comparison of hypothetical interventions to reduce implementation resistance illustrates that interventions that reduce conflicts between land use and wolves may substantially reduce overall resistance, those reductions are not as well aligned with connectivity priorities as those resulting from changes in land management agency policy.Our results highlight the need to design conservation interventions that fit both the social and ecological landscape and provide a framework for developing robust, interdisciplinary methods that facilitate implementable connectivity conservation. Read the freePlain Language Summaryfor this article on the Journal blog.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1757324
- PAR ID:
- 10480212
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- People and Nature
- Volume:
- 5
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 2575-8314
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 1922-1936
- Size(s):
- p. 1922-1936
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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