Sustainable ecosystem governance under changing climate and land use: An introduction

Social-ecological system trajectories of peri-urban watersheds based on a spatial analysis of vulnerability components: A case study in Mexico City, 1999-2039

Urban periphery watersheds play a crucial role in providing diverse ecosystem services, especially hydrological services (HES), for society at different temporal and spatial scales; moreover, local populations directly influence ecosystem functionality through their decisions and actions. The interactions between social and ecological factors create social-ecological systems (SESs), whose trajectories continuously change in response to internal factors such as land use cover change (LUCC) and external factors such as climate change (CC). This situation influences the vulnerability of SESs in terms of exposure, sensitivity and adaptation capacity. In this study, the social-ecological vulnerability (SEV) of the periphery of Mexico City was investigated based on the Collaborative Protocol for Ecosystem Services Assessment and Social-ecological Vulnerability Mapping (ECOSER) and a quantitative method approach. For this purpose, spatial analysis was performed using the ecological and social spatial data for LUCC tendencies calculated for 1999-2019 and projected for short-term CC scenarios and using LUCC calculated for 2039 in trend-based (TREND) and restrictive (REST) scenarios. The results reveal that increases in the SEV in 2039 will be related to important decreases in the HES; furthermore, the REST scenario suggests decreases in the SEV due to decreases in the HES, assuming that environmental public policy instruments will be preserved in this region. The present work aims to contribute to decision-making for HES preservation at local and regional scales and to help develop adaptation strategies under LUCC and CC scenarios.

Managing Rather Than Avoiding “Difficulties” in Building Landscape Resilience

Building landscape resilience inspires the cultivation of the landscape’s capacity to recover from disruption and live with changes and uncertainties. However, integrating ecosystem and society within such a unified lens—that is, socio–ecological system (SES) resilience—clashes with many cornerstone concepts in social science, such as power, democracy, rights, and culture. In short, a landscape cannot provide the same values to everyone. However, can building landscape resilience be an effective and just environmental management strategy? Research on this question is limited. A scoping literature review was conducted first to synthesise and map landscape management change based on 111,653 records. Then, we used the Nuozhadu (NZD) catchment as a case study to validate our findings from the literature. We summarised current critiques and created a framework including seven normative categories, or common difficulties, namely resilience for “whom”, “what”, “when”, “where”, “why”, as well as “can” and “how” we apply resilience normatively. We found that these difficulties are overlooked and avoided despite their instructive roles to achieve just landscape management more transparently. Without clear targets and boundaries in building resilience, we found that some groups consume resources and services at the expense of others. The NZD case demonstrates that a strategy of building the NZD’s resilience has improved the conservation of the NZD’s forest ecosystems but overlooked trade-offs between sustaining people and the environment, and between sustainable development for people at different scales. Future researchers, managers, and decision-makers are thereby needed to think resilience more normatively and address the questions in the “seven difficulties” framework before intervening to build landscape resilience.