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The integrated and indivisible nature of the SDGs is facing implementation challenges due to the silo approaches. We present the three interconnected foci (SDG interactions, modeling, and tools) at the science-policy interface to address these challenges. Accounting for them will support accelerated SDG progress, operationalizing the integration and indivisibility principles.

Abstract During the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, many countries enacted clean energy policies as a part of their economic stimulus packages. These policies are believed to have contributed to a significant reduction in the CO2 intensity of electricity. Here we conduct a retrospective overview and evaluation of energy policies’ effectiveness in reducing the CO2 intensity of electricity. We utilize governance capacity as a measure of policy implementation stringency, and the interaction between governance capacity and the number of categorized policies to adjust policy variables for governance effectiveness. We distinguish between the short- and long-term effects of these policies to investigate the impacts of policy instruments on CO2 mitigation. The results suggest that the increased policy efforts, when executed with effective governance, have led to long-term cumulative effects. Our findings provide insights into the spatiotemporal dynamics of energy policies in CO2 mitigation, serving as a reference for policymakers in the post-COVID-19 era.

Abstract As China’s economic and population demands grow, the need for biomass imports rises, presenting challenges for sustainable development and global ecosystem protection. Here we examine China’s increasing influence on global ecosystems through its biomass product consumption and trade using the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Productivity framework, analyzing data from 2004 to 2017 with projections until 2050. In 2017, China was the world’s largest biomass consumer, consuming approximately 1.75 petagrams of carbon per year, projected to rise by 317.6% by 2050, highlighting China’s major role in global ecosystem stress. Our findings also show an increase in biomass imports from lower-middle-income and low-income countries between 2004 and 2017, and these imports are expected to continue increasing by 402.9% in 2050. The analysis reveals that domestic product demand and changes in foreign production efficiency are key drivers of this trend, suggesting the need for China to shift towards more efficient trade practices and support cleaner production methods internationally.

Abstract While the awareness of the corporate world toward sustainability is growing, how to assess corporate environmental performance objectively and efficiently remains an open question. Here we estimate the relationship between company size and four environmental indicators to understand the environmental performance of nearly 6500 companies, building on the concept of allometric scaling and using Thomson Reuters EIKON data for the year 2018. We highlight that carbon dioxide emissions, energy use, water and waste production scale with the size according to a power law. This can be used as a benchmark to assess unambiguously a company’s environmental performance. We find that the adopted Environmental, Social & Governance rating is uncorrelated with the environmental performance. Our results suggest that a fair and effective environmental policy should consider the nature of the scaling relationship. Scaling laws suggest the existence of a nexus between an underlying network and corporate metabolism, whose understanding would help in discerning the determinants of environmental impacts.

Abstract Decarbonized power systems are critical to mitigate climate change, yet methods to achieve a reliable and resilient near-zero power system are still under exploration. This study develops an hourly power system simulation model considering high-resolution geological constraints for carbon-capture-utilization-and-storage to explore the optimal solution for a reliable and resilient near-zero power system. This is applied to 31 provinces in China by simulating 10,450 scenarios combining different electricity storage durations and interprovincial transmission capacities, with various shares of abated fossil power with carbon-capture-utilization-and-storage. Here, we show that allowing up to 20% abated fossil fuel power generation in the power system could reduce the national total power shortage rate by up to 9.0 percentages in 2050 compared with a zero fossil fuel system. A lowest-cost scenario with 16% abated fossil fuel power generation in the system even causes 2.5% lower investment costs in the network (or $16.8 billion), and also increases system resilience by reducing power shortage during extreme climatic events.

Abstract Capital assets such as machinery and infrastructure contribute substantially to CO2 emissions over their lifetime. Unique features of capital assets such as their long durability complicate the assignment of capital-associated CO2 emissions to final beneficiaries. Whereas conventional approaches allocate emissions required to produce capital assets to the year of formation, we propose an alternative perspective through allocating required emissions from the production of assets over their entire lifespans. We show that allocating CO2 emissions embodied in capital assets over time relieves emission responsibility for the year of formation, with 25‒46% reductions from conventional emission accounts. This temporal allocation, although virtual, is important for assessing the equity of CO2 emissions across generations due to the inertia of capital assets. To re-allocate emission responsibilities to the future, we design three capital investment scenarios with different investment purposes until 2030. Overall, the existing capital in 2017 will still carry approximately 10% responsibilities of China’s CO2 emissions in 2030, and could reach more than 40% for capital-intensive service sectors.

New study finds geographical mismatch in cross-regional ranking between cost and benefit of carbon mitigation, as well as spatial mismatch between relative suitability of mitigation and mitigation ambition of emitters.

At a time when the links that bind the oil industry – both corporate and state-owned - to finance and governments seemed inextricable and unquestionable, some major changes have occurred that have prompted major financial players and governments to seek a separation strategy. From the Paris Agreement to the change of administration in the United States, the wind suddenly seems to be blowing in the opposite direction, and many banks change course. The UN-convened Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) is one prominent example of this new trend. However, banks are only one part of this complex and varied landscape of global finance, which, among institutional investors, includes investment funds, hedge funds, mutual funds, insurance funds, pension plans and ETFs (exchange-traded funds). Despite the promise to divest or reduce investments, global finance still holds profound ties with the fossil fuel sector. The high energy prices due to the war in the Ukraine and concerns over energy security are seemingly strengthening these ties. We provide an insight of the complexity of these interlinkages and explain to what extent the domain of public governance is trying to exert (still insufficient) control over the financial sector under the scope of climate mitigation policies.

Measurement(s) methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide emissions from municipal wastewater treatment facilities Technology Type(s) computational modeling technique Factor Type(s) influent and effluent chemical oxygen demand (COD) mass • influent and effluent total nitrogen (TN) mass • removed COD • electricity consumption • emisison factors • wastewater treatment technology Sample Characteristic - Organism None Sample Characteristic - Environment wastewater treatment facilities • physical treatment process • chemical treatment process • physicochemical treatment process • conventional activated sludge • enhanced activated sludge process • biofilm treatment process • anaerobic biological treatment process • stabilization pond, constructed wetland and land treatment • membrane bioreactor Sample Characteristic - Location China

Summary: Although China has developed the world’s largest carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS), there is no official documentation explaining how the current sectoral coverage plan was determined and what sectoral rollout plan is preferred. Here, we contribute to the policy development of the world’s largest carbon market by suggesting a priority list of industries be covered in the ETS. We estimated marginal abatement cost curves using a database of more than two million firms covering over 500 four-digit industries that account for more than 97% of total industrial emissions, and simulating various carbon market scenarios including thermal power, 13 designated, and an additional 50 industries that have high emissions or are covered in other ETSs. Our analysis suggests that the cement industry should be the next sector to be included in China’s ETS. In our revised list, the average abatement cost can be reduced by 39.5–78.3% compared with the business-as-usual scenario.

Activities in cities are important drivers of global carbon fluxes. Here the authors trace the carbon metabolism in 16 global cities in terms of both physical and virtual carbon inflows, stock changes and outflows in relation to the supply chains of urban production and consumption and show that the total carbon impacts of global cities are found to be highly varied in either per capita, intensity or density measures.

Abstract Energy and emission data are crucial to climate change research and mitigation efforts. The accuracy of energy statistics is essential for mitigation strategies and evaluating the performance of low carbon energy transition efforts. This study provides the most up‐to‐date emission inventories for China and its provinces for 2018 and 2019. We also update the carbon dioxide (CO2) emission inventories of China and 30 provinces since 2012 based on the newly revised energy statistics. The inventories are compiled in a combined accounting approach of scope 1 (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change territorial emissions from 17 types of fossil fuel combustion and cement production by 47 socioeconomic sectors) and scope 2 (emissions from purchased electricity and heat consumption). The most recent energy revision led to an increase in reported national CO2 emissions by an average of 0.3% from 2014 to 2017. The results show that data revisions raised China's carbon intensity mitigation baseline (in 2005) by 5.1%–10.8% and thus made it more challenging to fulfill the mitigation pledges. However, the 2020 carbon intensity mitigation target was achieved ahead of schedule in 2018. A preliminary estimate of China's national emissions for 2020 shows that the COVID‐19 pandemic and lockdown was not able to offset China's annual increase in CO2 emissions. These emissions inventories provide an improved evidence base for China's policies toward net‐zero emissions.

Decoupling economic growth from resource use and emissions is a precondition to stay within planetary boundaries. A number of countries have achieved a reduction in their production-based emissions in the past decade. However, the decline in PBE has often been achieved via outsourcing of emissions to other countries, which may even lead to higher emissions globally. Therefore, a consumption-based perspective that accounts for a country's emissions along global supply chains should also be employed when investigating progress in decoupling. Here we investigate the progress countries made in reducing their production-based and consumption-based emissions despite growth in gross domestic product (GDP). We found that 32 out of 116 countries (mainly developed ones) achieved absolute decoupling between GDP and production-based emissions in recent years (2015–2018), and 23 countries achieved absolute decoupling between GDP and consumption-based emissions. 14 countries have decoupled GDP growth from both production- and consumption-based emissions. Even countries that have achieved absolute decoupling are still adding emissions to the atmosphere thus showing the limits of ‘green growth’ and the growth paradigm. We also observed that decoupling can be temporary, and decoupled countries may switch back to increasing emissions, which means that continuous efforts are needed to maintain decoupling. An analysis of driving factors shows that whether a country can achieve decoupling mainly depends on reducing emission intensity along domestic and import supply chains. This highlights the importance of decarbonizing supply chains and international collaboration in controlling emissions.

Summary: Rapid urbanization has tremendously changed the global landscape with profound impacts on our society. Nighttime light (NTL) data can provide valuable information about human activities and socioeconomic conditions thus has become an effective proxy to measure urban development. By using NTL-derived urban measures from 1992 to 2018, we analyzed the spatiotemporal patterns of global urban development from country to region to city scales, which presented a distinct North-South divergence characterized by the rising and declining patterns. A global North-South division line was identified to partition the globe into the Line-North and the Line-South geographically, which accorded with the socioeconomic difference from the aspects of urban population and economy. This line may keep a certain degree of stability deriving from the trends of population and economic information but also bears uncertainties in the long term.

Robust estimates of either urban expansion worldwide or the effects of such phenomenon on terrestrial net primary productivity (NPP) are lacking. Here the authors used the new dataset of global land use to show that the global urban areas expanded largely between 2000 and 2010, which in turn reduced terrestrial NPP globally.

Carbon dioxide emissions and air pollution are often assessed on a national or regional level, but little is known about the role of trade structures. Here, a combination of models shows that trade restrictions can lead to massive reduction of gross domestic product in most countries, but also to a reduction of emissions and pollution.

A good understanding of household carbon emissions is an important part of forming climate mitigation strategies to achieve the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. Numerous studies have been carried out on emissions from household consumption and the inequality between urban and rural areas in high-income developed countries, but there is a lack of in-depth analysis of such differences in developing countries. Our research details household carbon footprints (CFs) of four urban and four rural income categories for 90 developing countries, by linking global expenditure data to the environmentally extended multi-regional input–output approach. We show that there are large inequalities between urban and rural areas in developing countries. The average per capita CF in urban areas tends to be larger than that of rural inhabitants ranging from twice as large to nine times larger. We find that electricity consumption and transport are the largest contributors to the total CF in all expenditure groups. High-income rural households have an average per capita CF of 12.38 t CO _2 which is 25% higher than the equivalent urban high-income group, which deviates from the literature looking at a subset of cases. Our study contributes to the existing research on CFs by providing knowledge on the consumption patterns and related carbon emissions of urban and rural populations in these understudied parts of the world.

The recent European Union Ship Recycling Regulation and other existing conventions aimed to reduce harmful environmental and health impacts of ship shipbreaking, may push the shipbreaking industry further to South Asian countries, where ecosystem and public health are threatened due to the lack of monitoring for dirty beaching methods for ship breaking. Such unsustainable patterns may continue to expand due to the mismatch of economic beneficiaries and environmental costs in the shipbreaking industry, the ineffectiveness of existing conventions and regulations, and the prospect of a large number of ships to be dismantled in the near future. Our study focuses on these emerging issues and raises the urgency of joint actions for the shipbreaking industry.

In order to deliver substantial reductions of U.S. residential emissions, cost-effective responses to climate change will need to recognize changes in consumer behavior and lifestyles as important mechanisms to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions. Marketing experts have long recognized the usefulness of developing composite variables to target specific consumer lifestyles and have subsequently developed market segmentation approaches to express relationships between geodemographics and consumer behavior. This paper represents the first use of detailed segmentation data to look at US footprint at high spatial resolution. We employ market segmentation data to delineate lifestyles for approximately 70 000 census tracts in the US and develop a spatial framework to better conceptualize lifestyles as location specific typologies of emission drivers. We find that lifestyles are not only very useful in explaining variations in emissions but in fact are as important as income, typically recognized as the major determinant of consumption emissions. Results from our analysis link the differences between suburban and urban footprints directly to lifestyle patterns and illustrate the geographic distribution of emissions resulting from households’ consumption. We find that statistical clustering and consumer classification methods provide a unique perspective for understanding how various CO _2 drivers interact and impact household emissions. Our proposed framework suggests that carbon mitigation strategies should move beyond a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach centered on income and account for community specific lifestyle impacts related to consumer preferences and demographic characteristics at fine spatial scale.

China has entered a new normal phase of economic development with a changing role in global trade. Here the authors show that emissions embodied in China’s exports declined from 2007 to 2012, while developing countries become the major destinations of China’s export emissions.

The consequences of poverty eradication on limiting warming to 2 °C are not fully clear. Here, Hubacek et al. find that while ending extreme poverty does not jeopardize the climate target, moving everybody to a modest expenditure level increases required mitigation rate by 27%

Participatory Modeling (PM) is becoming increasingly common in environmental planning and conservation, due in part to advances in cyberinfrastructure as well as to greater recognition of the importance of engaging a diverse array of stakeholders in decision making. We provide lessons learned, based on over 200 years of the authors’ cumulative and diverse experience, about PM processes. These include successful and, perhaps more importantly, not-so-successful trials. Our collective interdisciplinary background has supported the development, testing, and evaluation of a rich range of collaborative modeling approaches. We share here what we have learned as a community of participatory modelers, within three categories of reflection: a) lessons learned about participatory modelers; b) lessons learned about the context of collaboration; and c) lessons learned about the PM process. First, successful PM teams encompass a variety of skills beyond modeling expertise. Skills include: effective relationship-building, openness to learn from local experts, awareness of personal motivations and biases, and ability to translate discussions into models and to assess success. Second, the context for collaboration necessitates a culturally appropriate process for knowledge generation and use, for involvement of community co-leads, and for understanding group power dynamics that might influence how people from different backgrounds interact. Finally, knowing when to use PM and when not to, managing expectations, and effectively and equitably addressing conflicts is essential. Managing the participation process in PM is as important as managing the model building process. We recommend that PM teams consider what skills are present within a team, while ensuring inclusive creative space for collaborative exploration and learning supported by simple yet relevant models. With a realistic view of what it entails, PM can be a powerful approach that builds collective knowledge and social capital, thus helping communities to take charge of their future and address complex social and environmental problems.

Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be traced to five economic sectors: energy, industry, buildings, transport and AFOLU (agriculture, forestry and other land uses). In this topical review, we synthesise the literature to explain recent trends in global and regional emissions in each of these sectors. To contextualise our review, we present estimates of GHG emissions trends by sector from 1990 to 2018, describing the major sources of emissions growth, stability and decline across ten global regions. Overall, the literature and data emphasise that progress towards reducing GHG emissions has been limited. The prominent global pattern is a continuation of underlying drivers with few signs of emerging limits to demand, nor of a deep shift towards the delivery of low and zero carbon services across sectors. We observe a moderate decarbonisation of energy systems in Europe and North America, driven by fuel switching and the increasing penetration of renewables. By contrast, in rapidly industrialising regions, fossil-based energy systems have continuously expanded, only very recently slowing down in their growth. Strong demand for materials, floor area, energy services and travel have driven emissions growth in the industry, buildings and transport sectors, particularly in Eastern Asia, Southern Asia and South-East Asia. An expansion of agriculture into carbon-dense tropical forest areas has driven recent increases in AFOLU emissions in Latin America, South-East Asia and Africa. Identifying, understanding, and tackling the most persistent and climate-damaging trends across sectors is a fundamental concern for research and policy as humanity treads deeper into the Anthropocene.

Key targets of the sustainable development goals might be in contradiction to each other. For example, poverty alleviation may exacerbate air pollution by increasing production and associated emissions. This paper investigates the potential impacts of achieving different poverty eradication goals on typical air pollutants in China by capturing household consumption patterns for different income groups and locations, and linking it to China’s multi-regional input-output table and various scenarios. We find that ending extreme poverty, i.e. lifting people above the poverty line of USD 1.90 a day in 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP), increases China’s household emissions by only less than 0.6%. The contribution increases to 2.4%–4.4% when adopting the USD 3.20 PPP poverty line for lower-middle-income countries. Technical improvements in economic sectors can easily offset poverty-alleviation-induced emissions in both scenarios. Nevertheless, when moving all impoverished residents below the USD 5.50 PPP poverty line for upper-middle-income countries, household emissions in China would increase significantly by 18.5%–22.3%. Counteracting these additional emissions would require national emission intensity in production to decrease by 23.7% for SO _2 , 13.6% for NO _x , 82.1% for PM _2.5 , and 58.0% for PM _10 . Required synergies between poverty alleviation and emission reduction call for changes in household lifestyles and production.

Cities are at the front line of combating environmental pollution and climate change, thus support from cities is crucial for successful enforcement of environmental policy. To mitigate environmental problems, China introduced at provincial level the Environmental Protection Tax Law in 2018. Yet the resulting economic burden on households in different cities with significantly different affluence levels remains unknown. The extent of the economic impacts is likely to affect cities’ support and public acceptability. This study quantifies the economic burden of urban households from taxation of fine particle pollution (PM _2.5 ) for 200 cities nationwide from a ‘consumer’ perspective, accounting for PM _2.5 and precursor emissions along the national supply chain. Calculations are based on a multi-regional input–output analysis, the official tax calculation method and urban household consumption data from China’s statistical yearbooks. We find that the current taxation method intensifies economic inequality between cities nationally and within each province, with some of the richest cities having lower tax intensities than some of the poorest. This is due to the fact that taxes are collected based on tax rates of producing regions rather than consuming regions, that cities with very different affluence levels within a province bear the same tax rate, and that emission intensities in several less affluent cities are relatively high. If the tax could be levied based on tax rates of each city where the consumer lives, with tax rates determined based on cities’ affluence levels and with tax revenues used to support emission control, inter-city economic inequality could be reduced. Our work provides quantitative evidence to improve the environmental tax and can serve as the knowledge base for coordinated inter-city policy.

The complexity of economic development and humanitarian crises means that energy science and technology should be involved in actions that address almost every major challenges of ecosystem health and sustainability. Energy is the engine of the world economy and the key to ecosystems’ functioning, which also has a great impact on global warming. The energy crisis, environmental pollution, overuse of natural resources, water supply shortages, global climate disruption, and deteriorating ecosystems are major challenges to address in order to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In light of the frontiers in energy sciences and disruptive innovation in eco-tech, we recognize the need to review and establish working mechanisms that identify and examine issues that are critical to future sustainable development, to offer advice to decision-makers in different social sectors (public and private), to secure a shared future for mankind, and to achieve shared prosperity and common interests through international communications and collaborations.

China has achieved notable success in developing its economy with approximate 10 percent average annual GDP growth over the last two decades. At the same time, energy consumption and CO2 emissions almost doubled every five years, which led China to be the world top emitter in 2007. In response, China’s government has put forward a carbon mitigation target of 40%–45% reduction of CO2 emission intensity by 2020. To better understand the potential for success or failure of such a policy, it is essential to assess different driving forces such as population, lifestyle and technology and their associated CO2 emissions. This study confirms that increase of affluence has been the main driving force for China’s CO2 emissions since the late 1970s, which outweighs reductions achieved through technical progress. Meanwhile, the contribution of population growth to CO2 emissions was relatively small. We also found a huge disparity between urban and rural households in terms of changes of lifestyle and consumption patterns. Lifestyles in urban China are beginning to resemble Western lifestyles, and approaching their level of CO2 emissions. Therefore, in addition to the apparent inefficiencies in terms of production technologies there is also a lot of room for improvement on the consumption side especially in interaction of current infrastructure investments and future consumption.

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) is a global initiative aimed at curbing carbon emissions from forest cover change. Indonesia, one of the most biodiverse places on the planet with the third largest extent of tropical forest, has been extensively involved in REDD+. Despite commitments from the government of Indonesia and the international community, the deforestation rate has not stabilized or decreased in the years since REDD+'s introduction in 2007. As of 2012, it was arguably the highest in the world. Although there is an extensive body of literature on REDD+, the need for grounded observations from the field could clarify existing challenges and inform future pursuits. We present the results of a case study of three REDD+ project sites to identify important criteria at the root of success or failure: finance, community, boundary enforcement, monitoring, and outcomes of attempted carbon sequestration and biodiversity preservation. Challenges identified for each criteria include a lack of sufficient funding opportunities, inability to enforce boundaries due to corruption, and lack of a solid plan for involving communities. Carbon sequestration and biodiversity preservation results were mixed because of a lack of monitoring and problems with encroachment. We argue that changes must be made to Indonesian policy to help enable enforcement of project boundaries, monitoring technologies should be utilized, and stakeholders, particularly at the national level, need to address some of the challenges discussed to achieve effective REDD+ outcomes in the future.

Participatory scenario planning (PSP) is an increasingly popular tool in place-based environmental research for evaluating alternative futures of social-ecological systems. Although a range of guidelines on PSP methods are available in the scientific and grey literature, there is a need to reflect on existing practices and their appropriate application for different objectives and contexts at the local scale, as well as on their potential perceived outcomes. We contribute to theoretical and empirical frameworks by analyzing how and why researchers assess social-ecological systems using place-based PSP, hence facilitating the appropriate uptake of such scenario tools in the future. We analyzed 23 PSP case studies conducted by the authors in a wide range of social-ecological settings by exploring seven aspects: (1) the context; (2) the original motivations and objectives; (3) the methodological approach; (4) the process; (5) the content of the scenarios; (6) the outputs of the research; and (7) the monitoring and evaluation of the PSP process. This was complemented by a reflection on strengths and weaknesses of using PSP for the place-based social-ecological research. We conclude that the application of PSP, particularly when tailored to shared objectives between local people and researchers, has enriched environmental management and scientific research through building common understanding and fostering learning about future planning of social-ecological systems. However, PSP still requires greater systematic monitoring and evaluation to assess its impact on the promotion of collective action for transitions to sustainability and the adaptation to global environmental change and its challenges.

Should society have the right to freely available clean air and water, or should people be required to pay for these as commodities just as they do for many other goods or services that they consume? With this question and further questions on environmental governance in mind, we reviewed the paradigm shift in natural resource management from the polluter pays principle (PPP), which focuses on polluters and enforcement of thresholds, to the principle of payments for ecosystem services (PES), which emphasizes provider-based economic approaches. Given that there are conflicts of interest over natural resources and ecosystem services (ESs), these conflicts could be resolved through rights and/or cost assignments via third-party intervention, i.e., by the "state," or through private compensation beyond initial regulation and state-initiated assignments of cost. Our analysis includes an in-depth literature review and a description of existing policies on ESs. We also examine the so-called Coase theorem based on a "neutral" situation where no rights or costs are distributed in advance. This theorem provides room for the PPP approaches and the provider-gets approaches. Both of these approaches should ensure, given certain assumptions, an economically efficient allocation of resources; however, they still ignore two indispensable issues, namely, the ecologically sustainable scale and inherent qualities of ecosystems and the distributional effects. With regard to the relationship between these two sets of approaches and their respective relationship to the legal framework, PES programs can evolve instead of PPP where no regulations are in place, existing regulations are deemed to be insufficiently formulated, or regulations are not enforced at all. We also further address some critical issues that can arise when PES programs evolve instead of PPP in practice, such as the general necessity of PES to coexist with basic rights and legal obligations, inappropriate lexicographic claims from providers of ESs, alongside claims for potential damages and the relationship of PES with the intrinsic motivation of service providers. Critically, insufficient attention has been paid to the fact that by replacing the earlier PPP doctrine with the "provider-gets" principle, rights are redistributed from the public to the service provider with important distributional implications for society. Therefore, the replacement of PPP with PES includes obstacles as well as opportunities, in particular for the relationship between rich and poor, and developing and developed countries.

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) have received much praise and are increasingly perceived as a promising tool to ensure the protection of global ecosystems as well as being able to help alleviate poverty in areas rich in ecosystem services. Given current trends, the scale of payments is likely to grow, creating new circumstances within which ecosystem services will be managed. In this dynamic context, following a precautionary approach, one should focus on establishing systems to handle the risks involved. Based on an analogy to resources that have long been included in the system of market transactions, we suggest that the rapid development of PES can negatively influence regional and potentially national economies. Resource revenues are highly correlated with economic problems in poor countries that are not able to use those revenues to ensure sound development. Problems similar to those that affect resource-rich countries may emerge in the case of economies rich in ecosystem services once PES increase in spatial and monetary scale. The most prominent examples of such problems include rent seeking, unequal bargaining power of buyers and sellers, volatility of payments, which are all related to the quality of institutions. To ensure the long-term positive impacts of PES, such systems should be carefully designed paying particular attention to distribution of property rights and transparency, decentralization of revenues, and capacity building to ensure further development opportunities.

This paper shows how, with the aid of computer models developed in close collaboration with decision makers and other stakeholders, it is possible to quantify and map how policy decisions are likely to affect multiple ecosystem services in future. In this way, potential trade-offs and complementarities between different ecosystem services can be identified, so that policies can be designed to avoid the worst trade-offs, and where possible, enhance multiple services. The paper brings together evidence from across the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme's Sustainable Uplands project for the first time, with previously unpublished model outputs relating to runoff, agricultural suitability, biomass, heather cover, age, and utility for Red Grouse (Lagopus scotica), grass cover, and accompanying scenario narratives and video. Two contrasting scenarios, based on policies to extensify or intensify land management up to 2030, were developed through a combination of interviews and discussions during site visits with stakeholders, literature review, conceptual modeling, and process-based computer models, using the Dark Peak of the Peak District National Park in the UK as a case study. Where extensification leads to a significant reduction in managed burning and grazing or land abandonment, changes in vegetation type and structure could compromise a range of species that are important for conservation, while compromising provisioning services, amenity value, and increasing wildfire risk. However, where extensification leads to the restoration of peatlands damaged by former intensive management, there would be an increase in carbon sequestration and storage, with a number of cobenefits, which could counter the loss of habitats and species elsewhere in the landscape. In the second scenario, land use and management was significantly intensified to boost UK self-sufficiency in food. This would benefit certain provisioning services but would have negative consequences for carbon storage and water quality and would lead to a reduction in the abundance of certain species of conservation concern. The paper emphasizes the need for spatially explicit models that can track how ecosystem services might change over time, in response to policy or environmental drivers, and in response to the changing demands and preferences of society, which are far harder to anticipate. By developing such models in close collaboration with decision makers and other stakeholders, it is possible to depict scenarios of real concern to those who need to use the research findings. By engaging these collaborators with the research findings through film, it was possible to discuss adaptive options to minimize trade-offs and enhance the provision of multiple ecosystem services under the very different future conditions depicted by each scenario. By preparing for as wide a range of futures as possible in this way, it may be possible for decision makers to act rapidly and effectively to protect and enhance the provision of ecosystem services in the face of unpredictable future change.

A growing body of literature discusses the CO _2 emissions of cities. Still, little is known about emission patterns across density gradients from remote rural places to highly urbanized areas, the drivers behind those emission patterns and the global emissions triggered by consumption in human settlements—referred to here as the carbon footprint. In this letter we use a hybrid method for estimating the carbon footprints of cities and other human settlements in the UK explicitly linking global supply chains to local consumption activities and associated lifestyles. This analysis comprises all areas in the UK, whether rural or urban. We compare our consumption-based results with extended territorial CO _2 emission estimates and analyse the driving forces that determine the carbon footprint of human settlements in the UK. Our results show that 90% of the human settlements in the UK are net importers of CO _2 emissions. Consumption-based CO _2 emissions are much more homogeneous than extended territorial emissions. Both the highest and lowest carbon footprints can be found in urban areas, but the carbon footprint is consistently higher relative to extended territorial CO _2 emissions in urban as opposed to rural settlement types. The impact of high or low density living remains limited; instead, carbon footprints can be comparatively high or low across density gradients depending on the location-specific socio-demographic, infrastructural and geographic characteristics of the area under consideration. We show that the carbon footprint of cities and other human settlements in the UK is mainly determined by socio-economic rather than geographic and infrastructural drivers at the spatial aggregation of our analysis. It increases with growing income, education and car ownership as well as decreasing household size. Income is not more important than most other socio-economic determinants of the carbon footprint. Possibly, the relationship between lifestyles and infrastructure only impacts carbon footprints significantly at higher spatial granularity.

This paper explores approaches of applying the panarchy perspective to a case study of natural resource management in the cultural landscape of upland alpine pastures in northern Italy. The close interaction within the cultural landscape between alpine pasture ecology and the management regimes offers a strong fit with the concept of social-ecological systems and provides insights to appropriate and adaptive management of sites of conservation interest. We examine the limited literature available that offers a resilience understanding of such landscapes and address apparent gaps in the application through our interpretation and use of adaptive cycles and panarchy. We draft conceptual models of adaptive cycles considering ecological and socioeconomic information as acting in separate but interacting domains. Notwithstanding the difficulties in defining and measuring quantitative state variables, we found that a panarchy model can offer a powerful metaphor with practical implications for the maintenance of such alpine cultural landscapes. In effect, our panarchy interpretation of interacting adaptive cycles provides new insights into the description of and the future options for land use in our case study area. Some issues are only partly developed. We hypothesized measurable parameters that could be related to system resilience, such as alternative states, shifting thresholds, and regime stability, which are all dependent on adaptive processes; but we found quantification difficult even at a conceptual level. Nevertheless, we found it helpful to use nature conservation evaluation as a useful surrogate for measures of capital in adaptive cycles of vegetation. However, care is needed to distinguish between the descriptive metaphor using selective surrogate measures and real ecological behavior. Additionally we recognize the need to integrate this ecological understanding with cycles in socioeconomic domains and consider that interactions between the loss of both social and ecological capital would be interesting issues to explore further in our case study. We suggest that resilience theory, through its focus on adaptive cycles interacting at different speeds and across varying geographic scales, offers useful insights into resource management and in particular for nature conservation interest sites, by focusing more on dynamics than on an optimal state of species assemblages. This may help to define sites and to achieve the objectives of Natura 2000 through the European Habitats Directive, offering a basis to guide a conservation of processes, in which cultural tradition and local ecological knowledge are valued.

Over 40% of the earth's land surface are drylands that are home to approximately 2.5 billion people. Livelihood sustainability in drylands is threatened by a complex and interrelated range of social, economic, political, and environmental changes that present significant challenges to researchers, policy makers, and, above all, rural land users. Dynamic ecological and environmental change models suggest that climate change induced drought events may push dryland systems to cross biophysical thresholds, causing a long-term drop in agricultural productivity. Therefore, research is needed to explore how development strategies and other socioeconomic changes help livelihoods become more resilient and robust at a time of growing climatic risk and uncertainty. As a result, the overarching goal of this special feature is to conduct a structured comparison of how livelihood systems in different dryland regions are affected by drought, thereby making methodological, empirical, and theoretical contributions to our understanding of how these types of social-ecological systems may be vulnerable to climate change. In introducing these issues, the purpose of this editorial is to provide an overview of the two main intellectual challenges of this work, namely: (1) how to conceptualize vulnerability to climate change in coupled social-ecological systems; and (2) the methodological challenges of anticipating trends in vulnerability in dynamic environments.

What is social structure, and how does it influence the views and behaviors of land managers? In this paper, we unpack the term "social structure" in the context of current research on institutions, social networks, and their role(s) in resource management. We identify two different kinds of structure, formal and informal, and explore how these link to views of land management and management practice. Formal structures refer to intentionally designed organizations that arise out of larger institutional arrangements; informal ones refer to social networks, based on the communication contacts individuals possess. Our findings show significant correlations between respondents' views regarding land management and their social networks; it is these informal structures that have greater influence on what stakeholders perceive. These findings suggest that stakeholders are less influenced by their particular organizational affiliation or category (e.g., "conservationist" versus "farmer"), and more by whom they speak with on a regular basis regarding land management. We conclude with a discussion on the practical implications for resource managers wishing to "design" participatory management, arguing that, if "diversity" is the goal in designing such participatory processes, then diversity needs to translate beyond stakeholder categories to include consideration for the personal, social networks surrounding stakeholders.

Adaptive management has the potential to make environmental management more democratic through the involvement of different stakeholders. In this article, we examine three case studies at different scales that followed adaptive management processes, critically reflecting upon the role of stakeholder participation in each case. Specifically, we examine at which stages different types of stakeholders can play key roles and the ways that each might be involved. We show that a range of participatory mechanisms can be employed at different stages of the adaptive cycle, and can work together to create conditions for social learning and favorable outcomes for diverse stakeholders. This analysis highlights the need for greater reflection on case study research in order to further refine participatory processes within adaptive management. This should not only address the shortcomings and successes of adaptive management as a form of democratic environmental governance, but should also unpack the links between science, institutions, knowledge, and power.