{"title":"Growing through transformation pains: integrating emotional holding and processing into competence frameworks for sustainability transformations","authors":"Fern Wickson , Lauren Lambert , Michael Bernstein","doi":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101525","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101525","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Current frameworks for sustainability competences give insufficient attention to competencies for holding and processing difficult emotions such as ecological grief and eco-anxiety. This is despite emotional distress caused by environmental crises becoming a rapidly growing field of investigation and the ability to cope with such emotions an increasingly apparent need within sustainability research, education, and practice communities. To effectively support the radical sustainability transformations required to avert (or adapt to) socioecological collapse, it is crucial that competences linked to emotional recognition, holding, processing, and integration be included in future frameworks. A synthesis framework of sustainability competences with a proposal for how to incorporate these additional emotional competences is presented, together with emphasis on how developing and implementing practices for cultivating such competences represents a significant growth edge for sustainability programmes, particularly within higher education.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":294,"journal":{"name":"Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"74 ","pages":"Article 101525"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143684079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christophe Christiaen, Philippa Lockwood, Alex Jackman, Ben Caldecott
{"title":"Location, location, location: asset location data sources for nature-related financial risk analysis","authors":"Christophe Christiaen, Philippa Lockwood, Alex Jackman, Ben Caldecott","doi":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101527","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101527","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Nature, the services it provides and the threats it is exposed to are inherently location-specific. Therefore, financial institutions will need to apply geospatial analysis to accurately assess nature-related financial risks. As a minimum, this requires knowing where a counterparty’s operations or supply chains are located. Asset location information is often cited by financial institutions as a major data gap for nature-related analysis. While granular supply chain data is notoriously hard to collect, location information about companies’ direct operational assets is available for various industries. We review different sources of asset location data, analyse their availability per industry and provide recommendations to reduce the location data barrier and address the ‘lack of data’ excuse to delay nature action.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":294,"journal":{"name":"Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"74 ","pages":"Article 101527"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143684078","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The paradox of climate resilience and elusive peace in the Lake Chad Basin: a case for an adaptive governance approach","authors":"Lembe Tiky , Melvis Ndiloseh","doi":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101523","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101523","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>For several decades, the Lake Chad Basin has served as a laboratory for scientific inquiries on anthropogenic security challenges in Africa. Between 1963 and the early 1990s, more than 90% of Lake Chad vanished, largely due to environmental stressors and overuse — for farming, fishing, livestock herding, and power generation. The receding Lake has been associated with a complex array of human security concerns, including food insecurity, loss of lives, biodiversity and livelihoods, poverty, droughts, enforced migration, violent conflicts, and terrorism. Since the 1990s, however, thanks in part to local climate resilience, the volume of the Lake has remained fairly stable despite rising temperatures and demography. Yet, trends reveal that armed conflicts and insecurity in the region continue to resurge periodically over the last two decades, derailing prospects for durable peace. The potential gains of adaptation are undermined by severe governance deficits. Drawing from relevant secondary sources, expert opinion interviews, a focus group discussion, and key informant interviews, this paper interrogates this paradox, highlighting the merits and limits of climate resilience for forging durable peace in the Lake Chad Basin. It builds the case for participatory adaptive governance as a more inclusive approach to sustainable conflict transformation in the Anthropocene.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":294,"journal":{"name":"Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"74 ","pages":"Article 101523"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143654732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Productivity versus sustainability: paradigms of climate-resilient development in South Asian smallholder agriculture","authors":"Gautam Prateek","doi":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101520","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101520","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The sixth IPCC report highlights the profound challenges climate change poses to smallholder agriculture, particularly in South Asia. This review critically examines pathways for climate-resilient development (CRD) in smallholder agriculture through a traditional literature review of 98 key studies/reports, supplemented by computational text analysis of 3822 SCOPUS abstracts. Two dominant paradigms emerge: the productivity-market-technology approach, emphasizing efficiency, and the sustainability-justice-community approach, focusing on equity. While the former dominates, critical gaps persist in addressing smallholder heterogeneity, diverse livelihoods, and the integration of smallholder-specific knowledge with climate and crop science. Structural vulnerabilities, gender equity, and community-led approaches are similarly underexplored. The review highlights tensions in the existing scholarship between equity and efficiency in conceptualizing resilience and calls for expanding the CRD-smallholder-agriculture discourse to better reflect the complexities and diverse realities of smallholder systems.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":294,"journal":{"name":"Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"74 ","pages":"Article 101520"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143619768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Emma Granqvist , Robert M Goodsell , Mats Töpel , Fredrik Ronquist
{"title":"The transformative potential of eDNA-based biodiversity impact assessment","authors":"Emma Granqvist , Robert M Goodsell , Mats Töpel , Fredrik Ronquist","doi":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101517","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101517","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Biodiversity impact assessments aim to enable market actors, regulators, and political agents to effectively steer human activities in a more sustainable direction. However, current biodiversity impact assessments often rely on biased, incomplete, or indirect data. We review the potential of addressing these shortcomings using emerging methods based on environmental DNA (eDNA). The eDNA technologies are developing rapidly, and DNA metabarcoding is now sufficiently mature to allow cost-effective, standardized recording of detailed local biodiversity data. The eDNA data allow computation of a wide range of the essential biodiversity variables, and open data reporting mechanisms are already in place. If companies were required to collect and openly report eDNA data documenting their impact, they could optimize biodiversity outcomes in relation to productivity and other factors in a fast development cycle. Simultaneously, publicly funded research could focus on analyzing the data and successively refining actionable metrics based on fundamental ecological principles.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":294,"journal":{"name":"Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"73 ","pages":"Article 101517"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143593453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rosemary Hill , Diane Jarvis , Kirsten Maclean , Diego O Melgar , Emma Woodward , Rodney Carter , Ewamian Limited , Whitney Rassip , Phil Rist , Edmundo Claro
{"title":"Community-based approaches to biodiversity finance","authors":"Rosemary Hill , Diane Jarvis , Kirsten Maclean , Diego O Melgar , Emma Woodward , Rodney Carter , Ewamian Limited , Whitney Rassip , Phil Rist , Edmundo Claro","doi":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101521","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101521","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Indigenous peoples and local communities live in, manage, and own large regions and require investment to finance their biodiversity management strategies. Their approaches are proactive and powerful, with clear agency to drive futures that include consistent biodiversity finance. Our literature review and illustrative case studies highlight five factors that influence how communities forge pathways based on their world views and knowledge systems, underpinned by recognition of rights, compensation for damage by colonizers, and establishment of organizations with culturally valid governance to leverage biodiversity finance. Global actors, such as the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, need to understand the history and characteristics of these pathways and tailor their finance to suit — for example, to finance governance and organizational development for some and protected area management for others.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":294,"journal":{"name":"Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"73 ","pages":"Article 101521"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143549340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Barriers and limits to adaptation in the Arctic","authors":"Ishfaq Hussain Malik , James D Ford","doi":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101519","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101519","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The Arctic is experiencing rapid environmental changes, adaptation challenges, and geopolitical competition. Indigenous Peoples inhabiting the Arctic particularly experience these impacts affecting livelihoods, culture, and the possibilities for long-term adaptation. This study examines the social barriers and limits to adaptation in the Arctic, highlighting the intricate relationship between different social factors. We showcase that these factors are not merely technical or isolated but are deeply political in nature, influenced by broader structural factors, power dynamics, and governance systems. Colonialism, global capitalism, and geopolitical interests intersect and affect resource extraction, Indigenous sovereignty, cultural continuity, and adaptation. We highlight how structural inequalities, exclusion, marginalisation, and systemic neglect impact Indigenous Peoples’ adaptation. We examine how social norms, individual values, psychosocial factors, and governance systems shape adaptation outcomes, distinguishing between barriers and limits.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":294,"journal":{"name":"Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"73 ","pages":"Article 101519"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143518950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Future-proofing our ports against biological invasion","authors":"Katherine Dafforn","doi":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101518","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101518","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Ports are growing globally with increases in throughput and associated infrastructure. While increased vessel throughput increases the chance of nonindigenous species (NIS) arriving in a port, the construction of new wharves and jetties increases the space available for their establishment. Here, I review links between ports and NIS and describe methods used to detect and protect from NIS in ports and how new technology can help to future-proof ports from biological invasion. Tools such as eDNA sampling and metabarcoding have the potential to speed up detection and response but suffer from a lack of standardised protocols and are limited by current global databases. Protecting artificial structures from NIS establishment using natural defences such as biological control and growth of native species is promising but remains constrained by port operational requirements. Detecting and protecting against biological invasion in commercial ports will be increasingly important, with capacity expected to double by 2030.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":294,"journal":{"name":"Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"73 ","pages":"Article 101518"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143454809","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The ethical foundations of biodiversity metrics","authors":"Eliza C Nobles","doi":"10.1016/j.cosust.2024.101503","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cosust.2024.101503","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Contemporarily, biodiversity loss is the prominent concern of the conservation movement. In reaction to the escalating depletion of biodiversity, governments and organizations are crafting policies and strategies with a central focus on biodiversity conservation. Assessing the extent of biodiversity loss and its relationship with human society necessitates reliable ecological metrics. However, the tools used to assess biodiversity encompass not only empirical dimensions but also normative values that shape conservation outcomes. This review examines the normative dialog implicit in our conceptualizations and measurements of biodiversity through the chronological framework of four conservation focal areas: Red Listing, species richness, environmental indicators, and the integration of human values. This investigation underscores the imperative to more clearly articulate the values of the conservation movement, a task that is even more pressing with the emergence of novel biodiversity finance tools.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":294,"journal":{"name":"Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"72 ","pages":"Article 101503"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143092459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The role of governance in limits to adaptation","authors":"Sirkku Juhola , Alexandra Malmström","doi":"10.1016/j.cosust.2024.101492","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cosust.2024.101492","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>There is a concern that limits to adaptation may be reached, meaning that adaptation to climate change is no longer possible. Limits in ecological systems indicate a collapse of that system, while in social systems, this may mean reorienting livelihoods or retreating from locations under threat. The role of governance with regard to limits has been largely unexplored so far. In this commentary, we examine limits from the perspective of governance, pointing out the ways in which governance can lead to limits emerging for actors in society. We further consider to what extent the governance system itself may have limits, which can have severe consequences to society.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":294,"journal":{"name":"Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"72 ","pages":"Article 101492"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143092456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}