Search

Archetype analysis is a promising approach in sustainability science to identify patterns and explain mechanisms shaping the sustainability of social-ecological systems. Although considerable efforts have been devoted to developing quality standards and methodological advances for archetype analysis, archetype validation remains a major challenge. Drawing on the insights from two international workshops on archetype analysis and on broader literature on validity, we propose a framework that identifies and describes six dimensions of validity: conceptual; construct; internal; external; empirical; and application validity. We first discuss the six dimensions in relation to different methodological approaches and purposes of archetype analysis. We then present an operational use of the framework for researchers to assess the validity of archetype analysis and to support sound archetype identification and policy-relevant applications. Finally, we apply our assessment to 18 published archetype analyses, which we use to describe the challenges and insights in validating the different dimensions and suggest ways to holistically improve the validity of identified archetypes. With this, we contribute to more rigorous archetype analyses, helping to develop the potential of the approach for guiding sustainability solutions.

Achieving sustainability and resilience transformations under climate change requires transformative and multi-scale visions to stimulate coherent thinking and action towards radically alternative futures. We present our approach to co-produce transformative visions contextualised in different regions across Europe, while exploring emergent ‘pan-European’ vision elements to guide transformative climate action across scales. We co-produced visions with stakeholders in four case studies: European, national (Scotland), transboundary river basin (Iberia) and two municipalities (Hungary). All visions share core aspirations for good living, justice and social and environmental wellbeing in Europe, while allowing contextualised interpretation to remain meaningful in view of context-specific needs, priorities, cultural perceptions and aspirations. The visions point to areas where deep transformations are required: in service provisioning from critical infrastructures like energy, food, health and education, and in lifestyles and governance. We discuss two key methodological considerations for the co-production of transformative visions across multiple scales. Firstly, the application of a systematic and comprehensive framework across all scales provided a guide to compare and ensure coherence between visions across multiple scales. Secondly, the creation of transformative spaces to co-produce the visions with stakeholders supported critical reflections and learning about the radical and multi-dimensional changes necessary in different regions in Europe.

In African small-scale agriculture, sustainable land and water management (SLWM) is key to improving food production while coping with climate change. However, the rate of SLWM adoption remains low, suggesting a gap between generalized SLWM advantages for rural development across the literature, and the existence of context-dependent barriers to its effective implementation. Uganda is an example of this paradox: the SLWM adoption rate is low despite favorable ecological conditions for agriculture development and a large rural population. A systemic understanding of the barriers hindering the adoption of SLWM is therefore crucial to developing coherent policy interventions and enabling effective funding strategies. Here, we propose a cross-scale archetype approach to identify and link barriers to SLWM adoption in Uganda. We performed 80 interviews across the country to build cognitive archetypes, harvesting stakeholders’ perceptions of different types of barriers. We complemented this bottom-up perspective with a spatial archetype analysis to contextualize these results across different social-ecological regions. We found poverty trap, overpopulation, risk aversion, remoteness, and post-conflict patriarchal systems as cognitive archetypes that synthesize the different dynamics of barriers to SLWM adoption in Uganda. Our results reveal both specific and cross-cutting barriers. Ineffective extension services emerges as a ubiquitous barrier, whereas gender inequality is a priority barrier for large supported farms and farms in drier lowlands in northern Uganda. The combination of cognitive and spatial archetypes proposed here can help to overcome ineffective “one-size-fits-all” solutions and support context-specific policy plans to scale up SLWM, rationing resources to support sustainable intensification of agriculture.

While the majority of assessments of future heat-related health risk are based on projections of heat hazards superimposed on current socioeconomic conditions only, the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) appear to have the potential to enhance the integration of future socioeconomic conditions in assessments of future heat-related health risk. That is, to account for the influence that changes in socioeconomic vulnerability and exposure have on future heat-related health challenges. In this presentation, we report the findings of two studies in which we combined extended SSPs with RCPs to provide spatially explicit projections of heat-related health risk and mortality that account for multiple changes in both socioeconomic and climatic conditions. In this study, we paid a particular attention to the quantification of the diversity of drivers of vulnerability – such as pre-existing medical conditions, social isolation, age, education, income, and land use – under different SSPs. Case-studies are the European Union and the city of Houston, Texas. We emphasize here that socioeconomic development pathways should not be viewed solely as potential means to reach a given level of radiative forcing, but also as key determinants of future climate risks, particularly when considering their impact on future populations’ vulnerability at the local scale. This sheds light on the undeniable necessity to consider the future state of vulnerability – and its uncertainties under a number of locally relevant extended SSPs – when assessing future heat-related health challenges and designing health adaptation strategies.

International audience

The overwhelming majority of assessments of future heat-related health impacts is based on projections of heat hazards superimposed on current socioeconomic conditions only, making the implicit assumption that drivers of heat stress risk other than climate change will remain the same. This leads to systematic bias in health adaptation. To address such drawback, the climate change research community has developed a new scenario framework, made of distinct sets of climate and socioeconomic scenarios. The few assessments of future heat-related health impacts that employed this new framework have focused on changes in exposure but have not accounted for future populations’ adaptive capacity. We aim at providing the first European projections of heat-related health impacts that account for multiple changes in both socioeconomic and climatic conditions. By doing so, we also aim at addressing the challenge of accounting for projections of the wide array of determinants of adaptive capacity, exploring the full range of uncertainties through the use of multiple combinations of socioeconomic and climate scenarios, and determining the influence of varying levels of socioeconomic development on future heat-related health impacts, through changes in adaptive capacity and vulnerability. We used European Shared Socioeconomic Pathways to project a wide array of determinants of vulnerability, including adaptive capacity. We then employed the new scenario framework to assess future heat stress risk in Europe under multiple combinations of heat hazard (under the climate scenarios) and socioeconomic vulnerability (under the socioeconomic scenarios), at high spatial resolution (0.1°), up to 2050. We particularly focus on areas where people are concentrated, such as urban areas. Findings Heat-related health impacts will show a steady increase in three of the four most plausible futures. Spatial distribution of future risk is highly uneven, with Scandinavia and the Mediterranean region showing respectively low and high risk under all scenario combinations. Although mainly driven by changes in heat hazard, future heat-related health impacts are significantly influenced by varying levels of socioeconomic development, which largely affect future populations’ vulnerability and adaptive capacity. In many regions, changes in future adaptive capacity can have a larger contribution to future heat stress risk than climate change. Socioeconomic development pathways should not be viewed solely as potential ways to reach a given level of radiative forcing, but also as significant and direct determinants of future climate risk, particularly when considering their impact on future populations’ adaptive capacity. There is an undeniable necessity to consider the future state of vulnerability and adaptive capacity – and their uncertainties under varying levels of socioeconomic development – when assessing future heat-related health impacts and designing health adaptation strategies.