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The text discusses the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which was adopted in December 2022 to guide international biodiversity conservation efforts until 2030. The framework aims to address the decline in biodiversity and emphasizes the importance of including diverse perspectives and knowledge systems in conservation efforts. The text highlights the relevance of the GBF targets to the journal Ecosystems and People and provides examples of recent research that aligns with these targets. The targets discussed include biodiversity inclusive spatial planning, effective restoration, protected areas, conservation of species, sustainable use and trade of wild species, and invasive alien species management. The given text discusses the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) and its targets, focusing on the relevance of these targets to the journal Ecosystems and People. The text highlights specific targets that are of particular interest to the journal, including sustainable management in agriculture, aquaculture, fisheries, and forestry; restoring and maintaining nature's contributions to people; green and blue urban spaces; mainstreaming biodiversity and its multiple values; representation and participation of Indigenous Peoples and local communities; and gender equity. The text also references recent studies published in the journal that address these targets, emphasizing the need for diverse perspectives and knowledge systems in biodiversity conservation. The authors encourage further research and contributions that can help achieve the targets outlined in the GBF. [Extracted from the article]

Cities need to take swift action to deal with the impacts of extreme climate events. The co-production of positive visions offers the potential to not only imagine but also intervene in guiding change toward more desirable urban futures. While participatory visioning continues to be used as a tool for urban planning, there needs to be a way of comparing and evaluating future visions so that they can inform decision-making. Traditional tools for comparison tend to favor quantitative modeling, which is limited in its ability to capture nuances or normative elements of visions. In this paper, we offer a qualitative method to assess the resilience, equity, and sustainability of future urban visions and demonstrate its use by applying it to 11 visions from Phoenix, AZ. The visions were co-produced at two different governance scales: five visions were created at the village (or borough) scale, and six visions were created at the regional (or metropolitan) scale. Our analysis reveals different emphases in the mechanisms present in the visions to advance resilience, sustainability, and equity. In particular, we note that regional future visions align with a green sustainability agenda, whereas village visions focus on social issues and emphasize equity-driven approaches. The visions have implications for future trajectories, and the priorities that manifest at the two scales speak of the political nature of visioning and the need to explore how these processes may interact in complementary, synergistic, or antagonistic ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many challenges posed by the current Anthropocene epoch require fundamental transformations to humanity's relationships with the rest of the planet. Achieving such transformations requires that humanity improve its understanding of the current situation and enhance its ability to imagine pathways toward alternative, preferable futures. We review advances in addressing these challenges that employ systematic and structured thinking about multiple possible futures (futures-thinking). Over seven decades, especially the past two, approaches to futures-thinking have helped people from diverse backgrounds reach a common understanding of important issues, underlying causes, and pathways toward optimistic futures. A recent focus has been the stimulation of imagination to produce new options. The roles of futures-thinking in breaking unhelpful social addictions and in conflict resolution are key emerging topics. We summarize cognitive, cultural, and institutional constraints on the societal uptake of futures-thinking, concluding that none are insurmountable once understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstreaming of ecosystem service approaches has been proposed as one path toward sustainable development. Meanwhile, critics of ecosystem services question if the approach can account for the multiple values of ecosystems to diverse groups of people, or for aspects of inter- and intra-generational justice. In particular, an ecosystem service approach often overlooks power dimensions and capabilities that are core to environmental justice. This article addresses the need for greater guidance on incorporating justice into ecosystem services research and practice. We point to the importance of deep engagement with stakeholders and rights holders to disentangle contextual factors that moderate justice outcomes on ecosystem service attribution and appropriation in socio-political interventions. Such a holistic perspective enables the integration of values and knowledge plurality for enhancing justice in ecosystem services research. This broadened perspective paves a way for transformative ecosystem service assessments, management, and research, which can help inform and design governance structures that nourish human agency to sustainably identify, manage, and enjoy ecosystem services for human wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Better integration of resilience and climate change adaptation can help building climate-resilient development. Yet, resilience and adaptation to climate change have evolved largely along parallel paths with little cross-fertilization. Conceptual vagueness around resilience makes it challenging to ascertain what elements of resilience thinking have the greatest potential to enhance climate change adaptation and contribute to broader sustainable development goals. This article distills nine principles from the resilience literature to build a framework to assess 224 climate change adaptation strategies proposed by researchers and practitioners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Our analysis concludes that adaptation strategies in this data set emphasize initiatives that increase social and ecological diversity, strengthen learning processes, build functional redundancy, enhance connectivity between social and ecological elements, pay attention to the management of slow variables, and provide mechanisms for increasing participation and polycentric governance. At the same time, the adaptation options examined generally lacked a system's perspective, suggesting that there is still important work ahead to move toward a climate-resilient development model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increased interest in managing resilience has led to efforts to develop standardized tools for assessments and quantitative measures. Resilience, however, as a property of complex adaptive systems, does not lend itself easily to measurement. Whereas assessment approaches tend to focus on deepening understanding of system dynamics, resilience measurement aims to capture and quantify resilience in a rigorous and repeatable way., We discuss the strengths, limitations and trade-offs involved in both assessing and measuring resilience, as well as the relationship between the two. We use a range of disciplinary perspectives to draw lessons on distilling complex concepts into useful metrics., Measuring and monitoring a narrow set of indicators or reducing resilience to a single unit of measurement may block the deeper understanding of system dynamics needed to apply resilience thinking and inform management actions., Synthesis and applications. Resilience assessment and measurement can be complementary. In both cases it is important that: (i) the approach aligns with how resilience is being defined, (ii) the application suits the specific context and (iii) understanding of system dynamics is increased. Ongoing efforts to measure resilience would benefit from the integration of key principles that have been identified for building resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Watersheds are settings for health and well-being that have a great deal to offer the public health community due to the correspondence between the spatial form of the watershed unit and the importance to health and well-being of water. However, managing watersheds for human health and well-being requires the ability to move beyond typical reductionist approaches toward more holistic methods. Health and well-being are emergent properties of inter-related social and biophysical processes. This paper characterizes points of connection and integration between watershed management and public health and tests a new conceptual model, the Watershed Governance Prism, to determine the prevalence in peer-reviewed literature of different perspectives relating to watersheds and public health. We conducted an initial search of academic databases for papers that addressed the interface between watershed management (or governance) and public health themes. We then generated a sample of these papers and undertook a collaborative analysis informed by the Watershed Governance Prism. Our analysis found that although these manuscripts dealt with a range of biophysical and social determinants of health, there was a tendency for social factors and health outcomes to be framed as context only for these studies, rather than form the core of the relationships being investigated. At least one cluster of papers emerged from this analysis that represented a cohesive perspective on watershed governance and health; 'Perspective B' on the Watershed Governance Prism, 'water governance for ecosystems and well-being,' was dominant. Overall, the integration of watershed management/governance and public health is in its infancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human well-being is intricately connected to ecosystem services. A keystone contribution to the ecosystem service literature has been the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, MA, (Ecosystems and human well-being: a framework for assessment, Island Press, Washington, DC; , ). Much of the work on ecosystem services to date has focused on the assessment and classification of environmental functions. The need for inclusion of community perspectives in ecosystem assessments has been widely recognized in order to better understand the distribution of impacts and benefits resulting from natural resource use. Communities can offer a direct route to understanding the complex relationships between ecosystems and human well-being and how environmental management affects their livelihoods. Photovoice has been made popular as a tool for participatory needs assessment but it has had limited use in ecosystem assessments to date. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to present the results of a community-level assessment of environmental services in a watershed dominated by pineapple monoculture in Costa Rica; and (2) to evaluate the strengths and the limitations of photovoice as a tool for mapping the relationship between ecosystems and people. I argue that photovoice is an underutilized methodology that has the potential to complement biophysical ecosystem service assessments in the context of impoverished and resource-dependent communities, particularly, since assessing ecosystem services and acting upon that information requires integrating the knowledges of diverse stakeholders, recognizing power imbalances, and grappling with the complexity of social-ecological systems. Processes such as photovoice have the potential to catalyze community self-organization, which is a critical component for empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]