A cautious approach to subsidies for environmental sustainability.

Transformational change is possible, but design and implementation must seek to avoid lock-in.

Connecting human behaviour, meaning and nature.

Much of the discourse around climate change and the situation of diverse human societies and cultures in the Anthropocene focuses on responding to scientific understanding of the dynamics of the biosphere by adjusting existing institutional and organizational structures. Our emerging scientific understanding of human behaviour and the mechanisms that enable groups to achieve large-scale coordination and cooperation suggests that incrementally adjusting existing institutions and organizations will not be sufficient to confront current global-scale challenges. Specifically, the transaction costs of operating institutions to induce selfish rational actors to consider social welfare in their decision-making are too high.

The planetary commons: A new paradigm for safeguarding Earth-regulating systems in the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene signifies the start of a no-analogue trajectory of the Earth system that is fundamentally different from the Holocene. This new trajectory is characterized by rising risks of triggering irreversible and unmanageable shifts in Earth system functioning. We urgently need a new global approach to safeguard critical Earth system regulating functions more effectively and comprehensively.

Evolution of the polycrisis: Anthropocene traps that challenge global sustainability.

The Anthropocene is characterized by accelerating change and global challenges of increasing complexity. Inspired by what some have called a polycrisis, we explore whether the human trajectory of increasing complexity and influence on the Earth system could become a form of trap for humanity. Based on an adaptation of the evolutionary traps concept to a global human context, we present results from a participatory mapping.

Earth stewardship: Shaping a sustainable future through interacting policy and norm shifts.

Transformation toward a sustainable future requires an earth stewardship approach to shift society from its current goal of increasing material wealth to a vision of sustaining built, natural, human, and social capital-equitably distributed across society, within and among nations. Widespread concern about earth's current trajectory and support for actions that would foster more sustainable pathways suggests potential social tipping points in public demand for an earth stewardship vision. Here, we draw on empirical studies and theory to show that movement toward a stewardship vision can be facilitated by changes in either policy incentives or social norms.

Governance in the Face of Extreme Events: Lessons from Evolutionary Processes for Structuring Interventions, and the Need to Go Beyond.

The increasing frequency of extreme events, exogenous and endogenous, poses challenges for our societies. The current pandemic is a case in point; but "once-in-a-century" weather events are also becoming more common, leading to erosion, wildfire and even volcanic events that change ecosystems and disturbance regimes, threaten the sustainability of our life-support systems, and challenge the robustness and resilience of societies. Dealing with extremes will require new approaches and large-scale collective action.

Rethinking resilience and development: A coevolutionary perspective.

The interdependence of social and ecological processes is broadly acknowledged in the pursuit to enhance human wellbeing and prosperity for all. Yet, development interventions continue to prioritise economic development and short-term goals with little consideration of social-ecological interdependencies, ultimately undermining resilience and therefore efforts to deliver development outcomes. We propose and advance a coevolutionary perspective for rethinking development and its relationship to resilience.

Corridors of Clarity: Four Principles to Overcome Uncertainty Paralysis in the Anthropocene.

Global environmental change challenges humanity because of its broad scale, long-lasting, and potentially irreversible consequences. Key to an effective response is to use an appropriate scientific lens to peer through the mist of uncertainty that threatens timely and appropriate decisions surrounding these complex issues. Identifying such corridors of clarity could help understanding critical phenomena or causal pathways sufficiently well to justify taking policy action.

Sustainability transformations: socio-political shocks as opportunities for governance transitions.

Faced with accelerating environmental challenges, research on social-ecological systems is increasingly focused on the need for transformative change towards sustainable stewardship of natural resources. This paper analyses the potential of rapid, large-scale socio-political change as a window of opportunity for transformative change of natural resources governance. We hypothesize that shocks at higher levels of social organization may open up opportunities for transformation of social-ecological systems into new pathways of development.

Coevolutionary Governance of Antibiotic and Pesticide Resistance.

Development of new biocides has dominated human responses to evolution of antibiotic and pesticide resistance. Increasing and uniform biocide use, the spread of resistance genes, and the lack of new classes of compounds indicate the importance of navigating toward more sustainable coevolutionary dynamics between human culture and species that evolve resistance. To inform this challenge, we introduce the concept of coevolutionary governance and propose three priorities for its implementation: (i) new norms and mental models for lowering use, (ii) diversifying practices to reduce directional selection, and (iii) investment in collective action institutions to govern connectivity.

Social dimensions of fertility behavior and consumption patterns in the Anthropocene.

We consider two aspects of the human enterprise that profoundly affect the global environment: population and consumption. We show that fertility and consumption behavior harbor a class of externalities that have not been much noted in the literature. Both are driven in part by attitudes and preferences that are not egoistic but socially embedded; that is, each household's decisions are influenced by the decisions made by others.

Anatomy and resilience of the global production ecosystem.

Much of the Earth's biosphere has been appropriated for the production of harvestable biomass in the form of food, fuel and fibre. Here we show that the simplification and intensification of these systems and their growing connection to international markets has yielded a global production ecosystem that is homogenous, highly connected and characterized by weakened internal feedbacks. We argue that these features converge to yield high and predictable supplies of biomass in the short term, but create conditions for novel and pervasive risks to emerge and interact in the longer term.