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- Biodiversity; Climate change; Climate-change ecology; Conservation biology; Ecology; Ecosystem services; Invasive species; Policy (1)
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Institute
The Earth system and the human system are intrinsically linked. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have led to the climate crisis, which is causing unprecedented extreme events and could trigger Earth system tipping elements. Physical and social forces can lead to tipping points and cascading effects via feedbacks and telecoupling, but the current generation of climate-economy models do not generally take account of these interactions and feedbacks. Here, we show the importance of the interplay between human societies and Earth systems in creating tipping points and cascading effects and the way they in turn affect sustainability and security. The lack of modeling of these links can lead to an underestimation of climate and societal risks as well as how societal tipping points can be harnessed to moderate physical impacts. This calls for the systematic development of models for a better integration and understanding of Earth and human systems at different spatial and temporal scales, specifically those that enable decision-making to reduce the likelihood of crossing local or global tipping points.
Islands have unique vulnerabilities to biodiversity loss and climate change. Current Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement are insufficient to avoid the irreversible loss of critical island ecosystems. Existing research, policies, and finance also do not sufficiently address small islands’ social-environmental challenges. For instance, the new Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) mentions islands in the invasive species management target. This focus is important, as islands are at high risk to biological invasions; however, this is the only GBF target that mentions islands. There are threats of equal or greater urgency to small islands, including coastal hazards and overexploitation. Ecosystems such as coral reefs and mangroves are crucial for biodiversity, coastal protection, and human livelihoods, yet are unaddressed in the GBF. While research and global policy, including targeted financial flows, have a strong focus on Small Island Developing States (SIDS), the situation of other small islands has been largely overlooked. Here, through a review of policy developments and examples from islands in the Philippines and Chile, we urge that conservation and climate change policies place greater emphasis on acknowledging the diversity of small islands and their unique governance challenges, extending the focus beyond SIDS. Moving forward, global policy and research should include the recognition of small islands as metacommunities linked by interacting species and social-ecological systems to emphasize their connectivity rather than their isolation. Coalition-building and knowledge-sharing, particularly with local, Indigenous and traditional knowledge-holders from small islands, is needed to meet global goals on biodiversity and sustainable development by 2030.
Since the 1990s, Mongolia's capital city Ulaanbaatar has recorded steady and rapid population growth due to rural-urban migration. So far, little is known about how the social and ecological conditions of migration interact. Thus, in our study we investigated the rural-urban migration process from the countryside to the capital in the Eastern Steppe conducting semi-structured interviews. Our results show that this rural-urban migration often follows a stepwise process from smaller settlements to larger urban agglomerations. The results also demonstrate a complex interplay between the prevailing social, economic, and ecological factors. While social factors (kinship, education) show the same relevance at each step of migration, ecological factors such as the occurrence of dzud seem more relevant at the early stages, from the steppe to the sum centres. Ecological factors only seem to rank second in importance, after social reasons. Economic reasons are also revealed to be very significant but seem most relevant the closer the migrations are to the capital. These results are essential in order to cope with current and future challenges of population development and find solutions to enable traditional Mongolian nomadism even under a modern lifestyle.