New study advances network approaches to complex environmental problems
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Sustainable management of natural resources requires knowledge of complex dependencies between societies and ecological systems. A new study in Nature Sustainability identifies what these dependencies are, how they arise, and what the consequences are for sustainable management. "The study contributes to our understanding of how societies interact with ecosystems, which in turn can add new insights to research on disaster risk reduction," says Daniel Nohrstedt - associate professor at the Department of Political Science, research coordinator for CNDS and one of the researchers behind the study.
Contributing to a more sustainable management of the Earth's limited resources is one of the most important research tasks of our time. However, existing knowledge is based on studies of individual cases and there is a need for common theories and methods for developing a broader understanding as a basis for developing political solutions. The study shows how a network perspective - a description of a system consisting of a set of nodes and links (Fig a) - can be used to develop new knowledge about causes and consequences in social-ecological systems.
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Fig a. Example (from forest management in Madagascar) on social-ecological network with actors (red nodes) and forest areas (green nodes). Actors are linked to one another through kinship (red links), forest areas to one another via ecological dependencies through species spread in the landscape (green links) and actors to forest areas via ownership or administrative responsibility (blue links).
An important part of this research is to identify the most common challenges that arise in the management of common natural resources. One example is that management has to consider problems that require different time perspectives and different levels in society, which places great demands on actors’ ability to achieve collaboration and coordination.
“Our study provides important tools for analyzing complex problems in several areas. The work on disaster risk reduction is one area where theories and methods are needed to better understand how we can achieve effective collaboration. This is something we have been working on for a long time within CNDS, for example when it comes to collaboration in response to major forest fires,” says Daniel Nohrstedt.
The study is the result of an interdisciplinary international collaboration between 19 researchers, led by Örjan Bodin at the Stockholm Resilience Center.