Sustainability within planetary boundaries requires concerted action by individuals, governments, civil society and private actors. For the private sector, there is concern that the power exercised ...by transnational corporations generates, and is even central to, global environmental change. Here, we ask under which conditions transnational corporations could either hinder or promote a global shift towards sustainability. We show that a handful of transnational corporations have become a major force shaping the global intertwined system of people and planet. Transnational corporations in agriculture, forestry, seafood, cement, minerals and fossil energy cause environmental impacts and possess the ability to influence critical functions of the biosphere. We review evidence of current practices and identify six observed features of change towards 'corporate biosphere stewardship', with significant potential for upscaling. Actions by transnational corporations, if combined with effective public policies and improved governmental regulations, could substantially accelerate sustainability efforts.
Alternative states on coral reefs Norström, Albert V.; Nyström, Magnus; Lokrantz, Jerker ...
Marine ecology. Progress series (Halstenbek),
02/2009, Volume:
376
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Degradation of coral reefs is often associated with changes in community structure where macroalgae become the dominant benthic life form. These phase shifts can be difficult to reverse. The debate ...on coral reef phase shifts has not focused on reports of coral reefs becoming dominated by other life forms following disturbance. A review of the primary and grey literature indicates that reefs dominated by corallimorpharia, soft corals, sponges and sea urchins can enter an alternative state as a result of a phase shift. Shifts can be triggered by pulse disturbances that cause large-scale coral mortality, and may become stable as a result of positive feedback mechanisms. However, they may differ from the archetypical coral–macroalgae shift, depending on the factors driving the shift; whereas coral–macroalgae and coral–urchin shifts seem to be driven by loss of top-down control through overfishing, shifts to corallimorpharian, soft coral and sponge dominance seem more associated with changes in bottom-up dynamics. Understanding the differences and similarities in mechanisms that cause and maintain this variety of alternative states will aid management aimed at preventing and reversing phase shifts of coral reefs.
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Nearly 40% of seafood is traded internationally and an even bigger proportion is affected by international trade, yet scholarship on marine fisheries has focused on global trends in stocks and ...catches, or on dynamics of individual fisheries, with limited attention to the link between individual fisheries, global trade and distant consumers. This paper examines the usefulness of fish price as a feedback signal to consumers about the state of fisheries and marine ecosystems. We suggest that the current nature of fisheries systems and global markets prevent transmission of such price signals from source fisheries to consumers. We propose several mechanisms that combine to weaken price signals, and present one example – the North Sea cod – to show how these mechanisms can be tested. The lack of a reliable price feedback to consumers represents a challenge for sustainable fisheries governance. We therefore propose three complimentary approaches to address the missing feedback: (i) strengthening information flow through improved traceability and visibility of individual fishers to consumers, (ii) capitalizing on the changing seafood trade structures and (iii) bypassing and complementing market mechanisms by directly targeting citizens and political actors regarding marine environmental issues through publicity and information campaigns. These strategies each have limitations and thus need to be pursued together to address the challenge of sustainability in global marine fisheries.
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DOBA, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Marine ecosystem science has developed since the 1940s, when humans obtained the ability to spend substantial time underneath the surface of the ocean. Since then, and drawing on several decades of ...scientific advances, a number of exciting research frontiers have emerged. We find: Understanding interacting drivers of change, Identifying thresholds in ecosystems, and Investigating social-ecological dynamics to represent particularly interesting frontiers, which we speculate will soon emerge as new mainstreams in marine ecosystem science. However, increasing human impacts on ecosystems everywhere and a new level of global connectivity are shifting the context for studying, understanding, and managing marine ecosystems. As a consequence, we argue that ecosystem scientists today also need to address a number of critical challenges and devote new energy and expertise to Modeling the Anthropocene, Operationalizing resilience, and Understanding social-ecological dynamics across scales. This new deep dive into unknown waters requires a number of strategies to be successful. We suggest that marine ecosystem scientists need to actively: Prepare for the unexpected, cross boundaries, and understand our cognitive limitations to further develop the exciting field of marine ecosystem science.
Coral reef ecology in the Anthropocene Williams, Gareth J.; Graham, Nicholas A. J.; Jouffray, Jean‐Baptiste ...
Functional ecology,
June 2019, Volume:
33, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We are in the Anthropocene—an epoch where humans are the dominant force of planetary change. Ecosystems increasingly reflect rapid human‐induced, socioeconomic and cultural selection rather than ...being a product of their surrounding natural biophysical setting. This poses the intriguing question: To what extent do existing ecological paradigms capture and explain the current ecological patterns and processes we observe?
We argue that, although biophysical drivers still influence ecosystem structure and function at particular scales, their ability to offer predictive capacity over coupled social–ecological systems is increasingly compromised as we move further into the Anthropocene.
Traditionally, the dynamics of coral reefs have been studied in response to their proximate drivers of change rather than their underlying socioeconomic and cultural drivers. We hypothesise this is limiting our ability to accurately predict spatial and temporal changes in coral reef ecosystem structure and function.
We propose “social–ecological macroecology” as a novel approach within the field of coral reef ecology to a) identify the interactive effects of biophysical and socioeconomic and cultural drivers of coral reef ecosystems across spatial and temporal scales; b) test the robustness of existing coral reef paradigms; c) explore whether existing paradigms can be adapted to capture the dynamics of contemporary coral reefs; and d) if they cannot, develop novel coral reef social–ecological paradigms, where human dynamics are part of the paradigms rather than the drivers of them.
Human socioeconomic and cultural processes must become embedded in coral reef ecological theory and practice as much as biophysical processes are today if we are to predict and manage these systems successfully in this era of rapid change. This necessary shift in our approach to coral reef ecology will be challenging and will require truly interdisciplinary collaborations between the natural and social sciences.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Resilience underpins the sustainability of both ecological and social systems. Extensive loss of reef corals following recent mass bleaching events have challenged the notion that support of system ...resilience is a viable reef management strategy. While resilience-based management (RBM) cannot prevent the damaging effects of major disturbances, such as mass bleaching events, it can support natural processes that promote resistance and recovery. Here, we review the potential of RBM to help sustain coral reefs in the 21st century. We explore the scope for supporting resilience through existing management approaches and emerging technologies and discuss their opportunities and limitations in a changing climate. We argue that for RBM to be effective in a changing world, reef management strategies need to involve both existing and new interventions that together reduce stress, support the fitness of populations and species, and help people and economies to adapt to a highly altered ecosystem.
•Guidance is needed to apply reef resilience to support coral reefs and the benefits reefs provide.•Resilience-based management supports stress tolerance, recovery and facilitates adaptation.•Evidence suggests that RBM plays an important role in supporting reefs and dependent communities.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
A major challenge for coral reef conservation and management is understanding how a wide range of interacting human and natural drivers cumulatively impact and shape these ecosystems. Despite the ...importance of understanding these interactions, a methodological framework to synthesize spatially explicit data of such drivers is lacking. To fill this gap, we established a transferable data synthesis methodology to integrate spatial data on environmental and anthropogenic drivers of coral reefs, and applied this methodology to a case study location-the Main Hawaiian Islands (MHI). Environmental drivers were derived from time series (2002-2013) of climatological ranges and anomalies of remotely sensed sea surface temperature, chlorophyll-a, irradiance, and wave power. Anthropogenic drivers were characterized using empirically derived and modeled datasets of spatial fisheries catch, sedimentation, nutrient input, new development, habitat modification, and invasive species. Within our case study system, resulting driver maps showed high spatial heterogeneity across the MHI, with anthropogenic drivers generally greatest and most widespread on O'ahu, where 70% of the state's population resides, while sedimentation and nutrients were dominant in less populated islands. Together, the spatial integration of environmental and anthropogenic driver data described here provides a first-ever synthetic approach to visualize how the drivers of coral reef state vary in space and demonstrates a methodological framework for implementation of this approach in other regions of the world. By quantifying and synthesizing spatial drivers of change on coral reefs, we provide an avenue for further research to understand how drivers determine reef diversity and resilience, which can ultimately inform policies to protect coral reefs.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Both coral-dominated and degraded reef ecosystems can be resistant to change. Typically, research and management have focused on maintaining coral dominance and avoiding phase shifts to other species ...compositions, rather than on weakening the resilience of already degraded reefs to re-establish coral dominance. Reversing degraded coral-reef states will involve reducing local chronic drivers like fishing pressure and poor water quality. Reversals will also require management of key ecological processes - such as those performed by different functional groups of marine herbivores - that both weaken the resilience of the degraded state and strengthen the coral-dominated state. If detrimental human impacts are reduced and key ecological processes are enhanced, pulse disturbances, such as extreme weather events, and ecological variability may provide opportunities for a return to a coral-dominated state. Critically, achieving these outcomes will necessitate a diverse range of integrated approaches to alter human interactions with reef ecosystems.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NMLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Facing a human-dominated world, ecologists are now reconsidering the role of disturbance for coral reef ecosystem dynamics. Human activities alter the natural disturbance regimes of coral reefs by ...transforming pulse events into persistent disturbance or even chronic stress, by introducing new disturbance, or by suppressing or removing disturbance. Adding these alterations to natural disturbance regimes will probably result in unknown synergistic effects. Simultaneously, humans are altering the capacity of reefs to cope with disturbance (e.g. by habitat fragmentation and reduction of functional diversity), which further exacerbates the effects of altered disturbance regimes. A disturbance that previously triggered the renewal and development of reefs might, under such circumstances, become an obstacle to development. The implications of these changes for reef-associated human activities, such as fishing and tourism, can be substantial.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
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