It has become common for sustainability science and resilience theory to be considered as complementary approaches. Occasionally the terms have been used interchangeably. Although these two ...approaches share some working principles and objectives, they also are based on some distinct assumptions about the operation of systems and how we can best guide these systems into the future. Each approach would benefit from some scholars keeping sustainability science and resilience theory separate and focusing on further developing their distinctiveness and other scholars continuing to explore them in combination. Three areas of research in which following different procedures might be beneficial are whether to prioritize outcomes or system dynamics, how best to take advantage of community input, and increasing the use of knowledge of the past as a laboratory for potential innovations.
The emerging academic field focused on sustainability has been engaged in a rich and converging debate to define what key competencies are considered critical for graduating students to possess. For ...more than a decade, sustainability courses have been developed and taught in higher education, yet comprehensive academic programs in sustainability, on the undergraduate and graduate level, have emerged only over the last few years. Considering this recent institutional momentum, the time is seemingly right to synthesize the discussion about key competencies in sustainability in order to support these relatively young academic programs in shaping their profiles and achieving their ambitious missions. This article presents the results of a broad literature review. The review identifies the relevant literature on key competencies in sustainability; synthesizes the substantive contributions in a coherent framework of sustainability research and problem-solving competence; and addresses critical gaps in the conceptualization of key competencies in sustainability. Insights from this study lay the groundwork for institutional advancements in designing and revising academic programs; teaching and learning evaluations; as well as hiring and training faculty and staff.
Global Change and the Ecology of Cities Grimm, Nancy B; Faeth, Stanley H; Golubiewski, Nancy E ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
02/2008, Letnik:
319, Številka:
5864
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Urban areas are hot spots that drive environmental change at multiple scales. Material demands of production and human consumption alter land use and cover, biodiversity, and hydrosystems locally to ...regionally, and urban waste discharge affects local to global biogeochemical cycles and climate. For urbanites, however, global environmental changes are swamped by dramatic changes in the local environment. Urban ecology integrates natural and social sciences to study these radically altered local environments and their regional and global effects. Cities themselves present both the problems and solutions to sustainability challenges of an increasingly urbanized world.
Purpose - Academic sustainability programs aim to develop key competencies in sustainability, including problem-solving skills and the ability to collaborate successfully with experts and ...stakeholders. These key competencies may be most fully developed in new teaching and learning situations. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the kind of, and extent to which, these key competencies can be acquired in real-world learning opportunities.Design methodology approach - The paper summarizes key competencies in sustainability, identifies criteria for real-world learning opportunities in sustainability programs, and draws on dominant real-world learning models including project- and problem-based learning, service learning, and internships in communities, businesses, and governments. These components are integrated into a framework to design real-world learning opportunities.Findings - A "functional and progressive" model of real-world learning opportunities seems most conducive to introduce students (as well as faculty and community partners) to collaborative research between academic researchers and practitioners. The stepwise process combined with additional principles allows building competencies such as problem solving, linking knowledge to action, and collaborative work, while applying concepts and methods from the field of sustainability.Practical implications - The paper offers examples of real-world learning opportunities at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, discusses general challenges of implementation and organizational learning, and draws attention to critical success factors such as collaborative design, coordination, and integration in general introductory courses for undergraduate students.Originality value - The paper contributes to sustainability education by clarifying how real-world learning opportunities contribute to the acquisition of key competencies in sustainability. It proposes a functional and progressive model to be integrated into the (undergraduate) curriculum and suggests strategies for its implementation.
Infrastructure development is central to the processes that abate and produce vulnerabilities in cities. Urban actors, especially those with power and authority, perceive and interpret vulnerability ...and decide when and how to adapt. When city managers use infrastructure to reduce urban risk in the complex, interconnected city system, new fragilities are introduced because of inherent system feedbacks. We trace the interactions between system dynamics and decision-making processes over 700 years of Mexico City’s adaptations to water risks, focusing on the decision cycles of public infrastructure providers (in this case, government authorities). We bring together two lenses in examining this history: robustness-vulnerability trade-offs to explain the evolution of systemic risk dynamics mediated by feedback control, and adaptation pathways to focus on the evolution of decision cycles that motivate significant infrastructure investments. Drawing from historical accounts, archeological evidence, and original research on water, engineering, and cultural history, we examine adaptation pathways of humans settlement, water supply, and flood risk. Mexico City’s history reveals insights that expand the theory of coupled infrastructure and lessons salient to contemporary urban risk management: (1) adapting by spatially externalizing risks can backfire: as cities expand, such risks become endogenous; (2) over time, adaptation pathways initiated to address specific risks may begin to intersect, creating complex trade-offs in risk management; and (3) city authorities are agents of risk production: even in the face of new exogenous risks (climate change), acknowledging and managing risks produced endogenously may prove more adaptive. History demonstrates that the very best solutions today may present critical challenges for tomorrow, and that collectively people have far more agency in and influence over the complex systems we live in than is often acknowledged.
Urbanization is the most drastic form of land use change affecting biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and services far beyond the limits of cities. To understand the process of urbanization ...itself as well as its ecological consequences, it is important to quantify the spatiotemporal patterns of urbanization. Based on historical land use data, we characterize the temporal patterns of Phoenix and Las Vegas – the two fastest growing metropolitan regions in the United States – using landscape pattern metrics at multiple spatial resolutions. Our results showed that the two urban landscapes exhibited strikingly similar temporal patterns of urbanization. During the past several decades, urbanization in the two desert cities resulted in an increasingly faster increase in the patch density, edge density, and structural complexity at both levels of urban land use and the entire landscape. That is, as urbanization continued to unfold, both landscapes became increasingly more diverse in land use, more fragmented in structure, and more complex in shape. The high degree of similarity between the two metropolitan regions may be attributable to their resemblance in the natural environment, the form of population growth, and the stage of urban development. While our results corroborated some theoretical predictions in the literature, they also showed spatiotemporal signatures of urbanization that were different from other cities. Resolving these differences can certainly further our understanding of urban dynamics. Finally, this study suggests that a small set of landscape metrics is able to capture the main spatiotemporal signatures of urbanization, and that the general patterns of urbanization do not seem to be significantly affected by changing grain sizes of land use maps when the spatial extent is fixed. This landscape pattern analysis approach is not only effective for quantifying urbanization patterns, but also for evaluating spatial urban models and investigating ecological effects of urbanization.
We present 850 m polarization observations of the L1689 molecular cloud, part of the nearby Ophiuchus molecular cloud complex, taken with the POL-2 polarimeter on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope ...(JCMT). We observe three regions of L1689: the clump L1689N which houses the IRAS 16293-2433 protostellar system, the starless clump SMM-16, and the starless core L1689B. We use the Davis-Chandrasekhar-Fermi method to estimate plane-of-sky field strengths of 366 55 G in L1689N, 284 34 G in SMM-16, and 72 33 G in L1689B, for our fiducial value of dust opacity. These values indicate that all three regions are likely to be magnetically transcritical with sub-Alfvénic turbulence. In all three regions, the inferred mean magnetic field direction is approximately perpendicular to the local filament direction identified in Herschel Space Telescope observations. The core-scale field morphologies for L1689N and L1689B are consistent with the cloud-scale field morphology measured by the Planck Space Observatory, suggesting that material can flow freely from large to small scales for these sources. Based on these magnetic field measurements, we posit that accretion from the cloud onto L1689N and L1689B may be magnetically regulated. However, in SMM-16, the clump-scale field is nearly perpendicular to the field seen on cloud scales by Planck, suggesting that it may be unable to efficiently accrete further material from its surroundings.
Despite progress in interdisciplinary research, difficulties remain. In this paper, we argue that scholars, educators, and practitioners need to critically rethink the ways in which interdisciplinary ...research and training are conducted. We present epistemological pluralism as an approach for conducting innovative, collaborative research and study. Epistemological pluralism recognizes that, in any given research context, there may be several valuable ways of knowing, and that accommodating this plurality can lead to more successful integrated study. This approach is particularly useful in the study and management of social–ecological systems. Through resilience theory's adaptive cycle, we demonstrate how a focus on epistemological pluralism can facilitate the reorganization of interdisciplinary research and avoid the build-up of significant, but insufficiently integrative, disciplinary-dominated research. Finally, using two case studies—urban ecology and social–ecological research in Alaska—we highlight how interdisciplinary work is impeded when divergent epistemologies are not recognized and valued, and that by incorporating a pluralistic framework, these issues can be better explored, resulting in more integrated understanding.
Complexity of Coupled Human and Natural Systems Liu, Jianguo; Dietz, Thomas; Carpenter, Stephen R ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
09/2007, Letnik:
317, Številka:
5844
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Integrated studies of coupled human and natural systems reveal new and complex patterns and processes not evident when studied by social or natural scientists separately. Synthesis of six case ...studies from around the world shows that couplings between human and natural systems vary across space, time, and organizational units. They also exhibit nonlinear dynamics with thresholds, reciprocal feedback loops, time lags, resilience, heterogeneity, and surprises. Furthermore, past couplings have legacy effects on present conditions and future possibilities.
Urbanization is a global multidimensional process paired with increasing uncertainty due to climate change, migration of people, and changes in the capacity to sustain ecosystem services. This ...article lays a foundation for discussing transitions in urban governance, which enable cities to navigate change, build capacity to withstand shocks, and use experimentation and innovation in face of uncertainty. Using the three concrete case cities— New Orleans, Cape Town, and Phoenix—the article analyzes thresholds and cross-scale interactions, and expands the scale at which urban resilience has been discussed by integrating the idea from geography that cities form part of “system of cities” (i.e., they cannot be seen as single entities). Based on this, the article argues that urban governance need to harness social networks of urban innovation to sustain ecosystem services, while nurturing discourses that situate the city as part of regional ecosystems. The article broadens the discussion on urban resilience while challenging resilience theory when addressing human-dominated ecosystems. Practical examples of harnessing urban innovation are presented, paired with an agenda for research and policy.
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