Publications

The South African energy sector is faced with competing priorities concerned with ensuring environmental sustainability, energy security, and balancing its citizens’ socio-economic needs. The decarbonisation agenda has put a spotlight [...]

The water–energy–food (WEF) nexus is recognised globally as a framework for sustainable resource management and a potential tool for building resilient social-ecological systems (SES). To verify this, we used a [...]

We are observing a significant increase in the deployment of large scale solar and wind technologies in the global south, and it is therefore a strategically and academically important focus [...]

This journal article highlights the relevance of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2022. The article emphasises the importance of the GBF in guiding international biodiversity conservation efforts until 2030, with the ultimate goal of achieving a harmonious coexistence with nature by 2050. It also acknowledges the role of the global scholarly community in contributing insights to support biodiversity strategies and action plans.

This article delves into the intricate dynamics of public opinion regarding "Just Transition" policies in South Africa's coal mining sector. As the world strives for decarbonization, the study explores how these policies, designed to compensate communities impacted by the shift away from fossil fuels, can garner political support. By conducting in-depth interviews with coal miners, power plant workers, and community members in Mpumalanga province, the researchers uncover key insights.

Despite a growing understanding of the importance of knowledge co-production for just and sustainable urban transformations, early career green infrastructure experts typically lack opportunities to practice transdisciplinary knowledge co-production approaches within their normal training and professional development. This paper explores how pedagogical designs can help create favourable conditions for transdisciplinary knowledge co-production.

This paper reflects on experiences in building the SAPECS community, with the aim of supporting the development of similar networks elsewhere in the world, particularly in the Global South.

This article discusses how conservation approaches to social-ecological systems have historically prioritised preserving nature for its instrumental societal benefits, neglecting the complex relationship between humans and nature and the impact of climate change. The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) offers an alternative perspective, which emphasises the diverse positive values of nature and its contribution to people.

How can countries satisfy their demands while jointly delivering the required transformative change to achieve global sustainability targets? Here, we present a collaborative approach developed with the FABLE—Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land, and Energy—Consortium to reconcile both global and national elements for developing national food and land-use system pathways.

Preserving biocultural diversity is central to ensure the nutrition, resilience, and adaptive capacity of indigenous peoples and local communities who collectively maintain the longest ongoing human experiences with the provision of food under environmental change; a core component of global food security.

Climate change poses one of the greatest threats to human societies, demanding immediate and coordinated actions across all sectors. Food systems are one of the most important contributors to climate change and could compromise efforts to achieve the 2015 Paris Agreement targets. At the same time, food systems themselves will also need to further adapt to climate change impacts.

The main goal in this paper is to further develop the notion of methodological agility at the methodical level. The need for being methodologically agile is rooted in the global challenges we are facing today in the context of the Anthropocene – which has been described as a new human-induced geological epoch introduced / caused by the net effect of multiple socio-technical human actions since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century in the global north.

There is increasing focus worldwide on the role of business in society today. Globally, sustainability concerns and shifting value systems are re-shaping expectations of socially responsible business, as seen with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), global corporate initiatives such as the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), and leading standards such as the King IV Report on Corporate Governance

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for mobilization across global and local levels, and involves academic actors and societal agents in an emergency response to the planetary challenges facing us in the context of the Anthropocene. Never before in human history have we been required to mobilize ourselves globally around a common set of goals, whilst facing the consequences of our own human actions on a truly planetary scale.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) reflect a growing global consensus on the need to address sustainability challenges. SDG 2 aims to end hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture. This outcome requires change across multiple domains, including health, development, and agriculture. Achieving this goal requires transformative change across the food system and the political will to effect such changes to recognize the integrated nature of food systems. In essence, food governance has to underpin the ability of present and future generations to meet their food and nutrition needs under extraordinary environmental pressures.

Putting the systems community more prominently on the map of correspondents to the current global problematique is the guiding strategy of the International Federation for Systems Research. 

The protection and sustainable use of ecosystem services (ES) are at the heart of human prosperity. This is the focus of national and international initiatives, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and post-2020 action on the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Urban food is regarded as a promising lever for transformative change towards sustainability. There are two main reasons for this. First, cities are considered hotbeds for alternative practices and experimentation, which are vital to address the urgent sustainability challenges cities face. Second, food links to diverse domains such as ecological, political, social, health and economic systems. Acknowledging this potential, a shift towards considering urban food practice (UFP) for the design of sustainable cities is visible in both research and policy.

In this study, we investigate effects of reforestation programs in China on countries supplying forest and agricultural commodities to China. Using case studies of rubber and palm oil production in Southeast Asian countries, soy production in Brazil and logging in South Pacific Island states, we investigate cross-sector effects of production for and trade to China in these exporting countries.

In this paper, four relational heuristic responses for re-imagining modes of engagement or patterns of activity that could enliven efforts of fostering systemic thinking and action to inform sustainability transitions towards more resilient and just Anthropocene futures are offered.

Five years into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) journey, the world is not on track to achieve the set goals (United Nations 2020b). With only minimal progress made, Sub-Saharan Africa countries are lagging in implementing these global goals. The COVID-19 pandemic presents another threat to the SDGs, negatively impacting economies and societies worldwide.

We present a practical approach to assess the outcomes of implementing natural open space plans in urban areas, especially for the local (municipal) level where resource challenges may hinder assessment.

The rapid pace and scale of societal and environmental changes in the anthropocene necessitate important changes in how integrated scientific assessments are carried out to account for such changes from local to regional and global levels. Contemporary global environmental assessments are shifting focus from only synthesizing the current state of knowledge towards understanding transformations and interventions needed to mitigate and manage environmental risks

This study synthesizes lessons from how twelve cases of social-ecological resilience practice are engaging with complexity. We assessed how each case engaged with complexity, according to a framework of six features of complex adaptive systems. The cases are situated in a diversity of contexts.

There is growing recognition of the potential for private land to contribute to global conservation efforts. Private land conservation areas (PLCAs) complement state-owned protected areas by increasing the total area available for biodiversity conservation, protecting species and habitats in threatened landscapes that are under-represented in state-owned protected areas and increasing the diversity of tenure types and conservation models that protect and manage biodiversity. Protected areas with different conservation models are likely to respond differently to social-ecological stressors.

Different regions, with different contexts and values, will follow different sustainability transformation pathways, giving rise to tensions and opportunities as the outcomes of regional pathways interact. To navigate these changes, we need a better understanding of how regional pathways interact to produce outcomes for people and nature.

Can enough healthy food for all be provided while sustaining the biosphere? What role do different technologies and actors play in achieving this goal? Can globalisation enhance inclusion and respect for bio-cultural diversity? How do abrupt events affect sustainable trajectories of development, and how do we anticipate their adverse impacts? These and other sustainability questions are complex and interconnected, and answering them requires bridging diverse sources of experience and knowledge.

Agriculture and food systems are in urgent need of transformation. They currently do not provide the needed food and nutrition security outcomes while having far-reaching environmental and social impacts. Many interrelated challenges obscure how to transform the agri-food system towards environmental, economic, and social sustainability.

We provide an overview of the peer-reviewed literature on recreational hunting of terrestrial birds and mammals between 1953 and 2020.

To incorporate more linguistic diversity into global ecosystem assessment processes, we present actionable steps for global science teams to recognize and incorporate non-English-language literature and contributions from non-Anglophones.

Given that marginalized communities are highly vulnerable to climate risk, it is important to build their capacity to adapt locally and to integrate their perspectives into higher level adaptation measures. Current adaptation policy does not pay sufficient attention to this. Using a Cape Town-based project on water governance in low income urban settlements, this paper explores how a transdisciplinary research project supported capacity building.

Water justice requires attention be paid to the range of everyday realities that exist in the spectrum from formal to informal settlements.

The Garden Route Interface and Networking (GRIN) Meeting was initiated in 2017 with the aim of creating a third place for dialogue on, and advancement of, research and practice dealing with the interactions between natural and social systems, and with how those interactions affect the challenge of sustainability. Held in the Garden Route over 3 days during September–October of each year

We interviewed grassroots food innovators in South Africa to explore the diverse ways in which their narratives expressed different capacities for resilience, such as dealing with surprise and shaping desirable change. We drew on key resilience themes of rootedness, resourcefulness and resistance (the 3Rs) as lenses through which to view their personal stories and efforts to build resilience and reshape the future. We used narrative and interpretative methods to connect the personal and context-specific experiences of food innovators to the 3Rs, exploring a new approach to uncovering resilience capacities. We suggest that this approach could be usefully employed to understand potential resilience capacities that could help address diverse sustainability challenges around the world.

Biodiversity research is replete with scientific studies depicting future trajectories of decline that have failed to mobilize transformative change. Imagination and creativity can foster new ways to address longstanding problems to create better futures for people and the planet.

In this perspectives paper, we highlight why land reform programmes could benefit from considering ecosystem services in their planning processes, to better achieve their goals of socioeconomic development and equity.

This study seeks to measure attributes of social capital in five marine dependent communities of Solomon Islands.

In southern Africa, where many PLCAs rely on trophy hunting as an income-generating strategy, a potential ban on trophy hunting locally or abroad holds unknown consequences for the future conservation of these lands. In this study, we investigate the consequences of a potential trophy hunting ban in private land conservation areas in two biodiversity hotspots in South Africa's Eastern and Western Cape provinces.

In our current context of global environmental change, the need for effective institutions (i.e., formal laws, rules, norms and customs) to moderate human impacts, through environmental governance and management, has never been greater.

In this paper, we demonstrate that adopting a process relational perspective, which focuses on nonequilibrium dynamics and relations between processes, provides novel opportunities to advance SES research.

This study explored the shift in land use from livestock farming to game farming in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, from a social‐ecological regime shift perspective.

It is increasingly apparent that a deep transformation in the way we produce and consume food is needed in order to ensure a more just and sustainable future.

Private land conservation areas are increasingly looked to for meeting the deficit left by state-owned protected areas in reaching global conservation targets.

Roughly eight hundred million youth are projected to enter the African job market by 2050. By training the youth in new practices and approaches, they could be central to creating new systems and African futures that are more sustainable and just.

In the rapidly changing and uncertain world of the Anthropocene, positive visions of the future could play a crucial role in catalysing deep social-ecological transformations to help guide humanity towards more sustainable and equitable futures.

We propose a set of four general principles that underlie high-quality knowledge co-production for sustainability research.

Efficient energy supply is a means for people to gain access to a wide range of energy-related services. In unmet energy markets where energy supply is inadequate or lacking, such [...]

South Africa's political history, unique demographic profile, and economic growth drivers, present a challenge in adopting universal strategies and business models to plan for the impact of battery electric vehicles [...]

The rapid growth of urban informal settlements, or slums, poses a particular challenge for balancing developmental and environmental goals. In South Africa, high levels of inequality, poverty, and unemployment contribute to widespread migration.

A series of processes is now converging to force the issue of sustainability to drive South Africa's low-carbon energy transitions. This raises the question of how a 'sustainability transition' framework [...]

This paper investigates how a change in a region’s energy cost share (ECS), a ratio of a region’s energy expenditure as a fraction of its gross domestic product (GDP), affects the region’s social and economic development.

Urban material resource requirements are significant at the global level and these are expected to expand with future urban population growth. However, there are no global scale studies on the [...]

The South African Department of Energy launched the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers Procurement Program (REIPPPP) in 2011 to secure additional renewable energy generation capacity for South Africa’s national electricity [...]

Having long depended on fossil fuels for energy generation, South Africa is now investing in renewable energy. Like its mining operations, its renewable energy plants will have local implications. Renewable [...]

This article explores how concepts from justice and ethics can inform energy decision-making and highlight the moral and equity dimensions of energy production and use. It defines “energy justice” as [...]

Responding to Kunneman’s argument that the notion of ‘ethical complexity’ introduces an existential and ethical turn in the field of complexity thinking, it is argued that Kunneman’s concept of ‘diapoiesis’ [...]

For many South Africans a healthy, balanced diet is elusive. Food security in both urban and rural South Africa is heavily dependent on cash incomes for household purchase of food [...]

An enabling environment for malnutrition reduction includes creating policy and political momentum, and converting momentum to implementation and impact. We used several qualitative data sources to investigate changes in policy [...]

Research efforts using system dynamics to understand and evaluate societal and policy‐related problems in Southern Africa are becoming essential. This paper undertook a systematic review to examine the extent of [...]

This paper assesses the different levels of uncertainty that affect the analysis of informal urban settlements and the implementation of upgrading policies, with a specific focus on electrification. The rapid [...]

Smallholder farmers in South Africa find it challenging to participate in the modern economy. Most of these farmers have limited access to credit and insurance, and to markets in which [...]

Shaping sustainable, equitable African cities requires strengthened investigations into the cities’ current resource flows, infrastructure systems, and future resource requirements. The field of urban metabolism (UM) offers multiple forms of [...]

Increasing urbanisation and the proliferation of slums require a holistic understanding of the urban metabolism of cities. However, existing urban metabolic analyses exclude a detailed understanding of how urban slums [...]

The national government instated a mandatory blending policy to facilitate the uptake and establishment of a biofuels sector in South Africa. Uncertainty exists, however, regarding the implications and effects of [...]

Studies for building designs exist both internationally and, to a lesser degree, in the South African context. However, there is limited understanding of the various types of low-cost buildings and [...]

Improved sustainability of cities requires equitably distributed and ecologically safe, if not restorative, infrastructure systems, as well as reduced reliance on resources from beyond urban boundaries. To shape infrastructure systems [...]

The Western Cape Province of South Africa has introduced a green economy plan called "Green is Smart". This initiative has the envisaged possibility of providing the Province with a sustainable [...]

As cities grow, their environmental and natural resource footprints also tend to grow to keep up with the increasing demand on essential urban services such as passenger transportation, commercial space, [...]

As cities grow, their environmental and natural resource footprints also tend to grow to keep up with the increasing demand on essential urban services such as passenger transportation, commercial space, [...]

This paper aims to present a new master’s programme for promoting energy access and energy efficiency in Southern Africa. A transdisciplinary approach called “participatory integrated assessment of energy systems” (PARTICIPIA) [...]

Humans all over the planet are struggling and aspiring to engage with the scale and scope of the challenge of achieving human well-being and environmental stewardship for all. This special [...]

Transdisciplinarity is not a new science per se, but a new methodology for doing science with society. A particular challenge in doing science with society is the engagement with non-academic actors [...]

Wide agreement exists that the “Anthropocene” demands new forms of engagement and responses to achieve sustainability, but different fields suggest quite different approaches. In this communication, we set out four perspectives that [...]

Relational biology relies heavily on the enriched understanding of causal entailment that Robert Rosen's formalisation of Aristotle's four causes has made possible, although to date efficient causes and the rehabilitation [...]

Targets for human development are increasingly connected with targets for nature, however, existing scenarios do not explicitly address this relationship. Here, we outline a strategy to generate scenarios centred on our [...]

Although policymakers and scientists are increasingly embracing the food system perspective, it has been poorly reflected in institutional terms. We aim to fill this gap by addressing the question as [...]

Social-ecological regime shifts involve large, often abrupt, reorganizations in interlinked social and ecological systems. The domestication of fire illustrates how physiological and social changes enabled humans to start actively controlling [...]

Humanity has emerged as a major force in the operation of the biosphere. The focus is shifting from the environment as externality to the biosphere as precondition for social justice, economic [...]

We take a social-ecological systems perspective to investigate the linkages between ecosystem services and human well-being in South Africa. A recent paper identified different types of social-ecological systems in the [...]

Feeding the world’s population a healthy, affordable and environmentally sustainable diet is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century and has been highlighted in Sustainable Development Goals 2 [...]

Although African agricultural systems are highly reliant on their environment, their diversity, context specificity, and the existing generations of traditional knowledge offer elements of resilience in the face of climate [...]

The scale, rate, and intensity of humans’ environmental impact has engendered broad discussion about how to find plausible pathways of development that hold the most promise for fostering a better [...]

Repeated food crises have resulted in increased recognition of the boundary-spanning nature of governing food systems and in consequent calls for more holistic food governance. An increasing number of governments [...]

Implementation of large-scale wind, solar and hydro projects in South African communities is intended to contribute to local economic development. Government policy, through the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement [...]

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