Declining resilience of ecosystem functions under biodiversity loss

The composition of species communities is changing rapidly through drivers such as habitat loss and climate change, with potentially serious consequences for the resilience of ecosystem functions on which humans depend. To assess such changes in resilience, we analyse trends in the frequency of species in Great Britain that provide key ecosystem functions-specifically decomposition, carbon sequestration, pollination, pest control and cultural values. For 4,424 species over four decades, there have been significant net declines among animal species that provide pollination, pest control and cultural values. Groups providing decomposition and carbon sequestration remain relatively stable, as fewer species are in decline and these are offset by large numbers of new arrivals into Great Britain. While there is general concern about degradation of a wide range of ecosystem functions, our results suggest actions should focus on particular functions for which there is evidence of substantial erosion of their resilience.

The evolution of green leases: towards inter-organizational environmental governance

Improving the environmental performance of non-domestic buildings is a complex and ‘wicked’ problem due to conflicting interests and incentives. This is particularly challenging in tenanted spaces, where landlord and tenant interactions are regulated through leases that traditionally ignore environmental considerations. ‘Green leasing’ is conceptualized as a form of ‘middle-out’ inter-organizational environmental governance that operates between organizations, alongside other drivers. This paper investigates how leases are evolving to become ‘greener’ in the UK and Australia, providing evidence from five varied sources on: (1) UK office and retail leases, (2) UK retail sector energy management, (3) a major UK retailer case study; (4) office leasing in Sydney, and (5) expert interviews on Australian retail leases. With some exceptions, the evidence reveals an increasing trend towards green leases in prime offices in both countries, but not in retail or sub-prime offices. Generally introduced by landlords, adopted green leases contain a variety of ambitions and levels of enforcement. As an evolving form of private–private environmental governance, green leases form a valuable framework for further tenant–landlord cooperation within properties and across portfolios. This increased cohesion could create new opportunities for polycentric governance, particularly at the interface of cities and the property industry.

Local authorities as niche actors: the case of energy governance in the UK

This paper draws from work conducted under the NERC-funded project 'Understanding energy governance at local and community levels'(Project Reference: NE/H013598/1). This project was a 24 month study carried out in collaboration with the UK Energy Research Council which began in April 2010. The particular workpackage from which these interviews were drawn specifically explores the role of local authorities in emerging energy and environmental responsibilities, paying particular attention to current institutional structures and how external forces and actors influence local authorities on their decision making and practices. It is concluded that whilst the role of local authorities has been changing in response to energy and environmental ‘landscape’ issues, their influence on the design and implementation of energy policy in the UK will correspondingly remain as an emerging process for the foreseeable future, with the more progressive local authorities continuing to exert political, social/cultural and technological influence over ways of designing, articulating, and engaging with energy governance at the local level.

'More-than-human’ resilience(s)? Enhancing community in Finnish forest farms

Community resilience is widely understood as a critical element in the relatively under-explored concept of social resilience. Through engaging with ‘more-than-human’ literatures, a more expansive view of the ‘social’ emerges, which repositions individuals as networked and agency as relational. This moves resilience away from its hegemonic positioning as a neoliberal strategy of individualisation and responsibilisation, with it instead emerging as an everyday ‘doing’ embedded in the human and non-human networks of relationality that we form and are formed by. The paper develops this socio-cultural conceptualisation through an original and empirically grounded discussion of Finnish farm communities and the role of the forest in developing, maintaining and enhancing these essential, connective assemblages. Resilience becomes conceptualised as dynamic, uneven, multiple and contextual performances or resiliences. While this further problematizes the comparative measurement and operationalisation of resilience, its networked and relational nature arguably offers a more inclusive and ethically grounded concept that, furthermore, negates the socio-ecological divide that persists in resilience thinking.

The role of big data in governance: a regulatory and legal perspective of analytics in global financial services

This paper discusses how global financial institutions are using big data analytics within their compliance operations. A lot of previous research has focused on the strategic implications of big data, but not much research has considered how such tools are entwined with regulatory breaches and investigations in financial services. Our work covers two in-depth qualitative case studies, each addressing a distinct type of analytics. The first case focuses on analytics which manage everyday compliance breaches and so are expected by managers. The second case focuses on analytics which facilitate investigation and litigation where serious unexpected breaches may have occurred. In doing so, the study focuses on the micro/data to understand how these tools are influencing operational risks and practices. The paper draws from two bodies of literature, the social studies of information systems and finance to guide our analysis and practitioner recommendations. The cases illustrate how technologies are implicated in multijurisdictional challenges and regulatory conflicts at each end of the operational risk spectrum. We find that compliance analytics are both shaping and reporting regulatory matters yet often firms may have difficulties in recruiting individuals with relevant but diverse skill sets. The cases also underscore the increasing need for financial organizations to adopt robust information governance policies and processes to ease future remediation efforts.

Environmentalities of urban climate governance in Maputo, Mozambique

Interest in the role that cities can play in climate change as sites of transformation has increased but research has been limited in its practical applications and there has been limited consideration of how policies and technologies play out. These challenges necessitate a re-thinking of existing notions of urban governance in order to account for the practices that emerge from governments and a plethora of other actors in the context of uncertainty. We understand these practices to constitute adaptive governance, underpinned by social learning guiding the actions of the multiplicity of actors. The aim here is to unpack how social learning for adaptive governance requires attention to competing understandings of risk and identity, and the multiplicity of mechanisms in which change occurs or is blocked in urban climate governance. We adopt a novel lens of 'environmentalities' which allows us to assess the historical and institutional context and power relations in the informal settlements of Maputo, Mozambique. Our findings highlight how environmental identities around urban adaptation to climate change are constituted in the social and physical divisions between the formal and informal settlements, whilst existing knowledge models prioritise dominant economic and political interests and lead to the construction of new environmental subjects. While the findings of this study are contextually distinct, the generalizable lessons are that governance of urban adaptation occurs and is solidified within a complex multiplicity of socioecological relations.

Interacting effects of change in climate, human population, land use, and water use on biodiversity and ecosystem services

Human population growth and resource use, mediated by changes in climate, land use, and water use, increasingly impact biodiversity and ecosystem services provision. However, impacts of these drivers on biodiversity and ecosystem services are rarely analyzed simultaneously and remain largely unknown. An emerging question is how science can improve the understanding of change in biodiversity and ecosystem service delivery and of potential feedback mechanisms of adaptive governance. We analyzed past and future change in drivers in south-central Sweden. We used the analysis to identify main research challenges and outline important research tasks. Since the 19th century, our study area has experienced substantial and interlinked changes; a 1.6°C temperature increase, rapid population growth, urbanization, and massive changes in land use and water use. Considerable future changes are also projected until the mid-21st century. However, little is known about the impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services so far, and this in turn hampers future projections of such effects. Therefore, we urge scientists to explore interdisciplinary approaches designed to investigate change in multiple drivers, underlying mechanisms, and interactions over time, including assessment and analysis of matching-scale data from several disciplines. Such a perspective is needed for science to contribute to adaptive governance by constantly improving the understanding of linked change complexities and their impacts.

Resilience in crisis reconsidered: the need for values against relativist ethics

The need for a reconsideration of resilience from both a positive and a normative point of view can be discussed using some of the lessons and conclusions drawn from individual resilience studied by psychologists in an educational context. The main point made in this article is that unless we want to approach resilience as a feature which is exogenously given in each population and society and whose dynamics, if any, are not subject to deliberate actions and policies, we need a framework for the evaluation of resilience as a social good. Relying on the hope that resilience is necessarily built in our societies as a force guaranteeing convergence to a socially desirable point of social evolution may be too optimistic and even counterproductive, because it may lead us to an inefficient or biased political and regulatory decision making. When the effect of policies and actions at a national or international level take into account the dynamic effect of such actions on resilience itself, one cannot blindly rely on the goodness of the process any more. This is mainly because resilience is not uniformly embodied in all societies and it does not have a globally positive social value by itself. The issue of socially valuing the options available beyond market-price valuations becomes fundamental in this context.

Resilience of protein-protein interaction networks as determined by their large-scale topological features

The relationship between the structure and function of biological networks constitutes a fundamental issue in systems biology. Particularly, the structure of protein-protein interaction networks is related to important biological functions. In this work, we investigated how such a resilience is determined by the large scale features of the respective networks. Four species are taken into account, namely yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, worm Caenorhabditis elegans, fly Drosophila melanogaster and Homo sapiens. We adopted two entropy-related measurements (degree entropy and dynamic entropy) in order to quantify the overall degree of robustness of these networks. We verified that while they exhibit similar structural variations under random node removal, they differ significantly when subjected to intentional attacks (hub removal). As a matter of fact, more complex species tended to exhibit more robust networks. More specifically, we quantified how six important measurements of the networks topology (namely clustering coefficient, average degree of neighbors, average shortest path length, diameter, assortativity coefficient, and slope of the power law degree distribution) correlated with the two entropy measurements. Our results revealed that the fraction of hubs and the average neighbor degree contribute significantly for the resilience of networks. In addition, the topological analysis of the removed hubs indicated that the presence of alternative paths between the proteins connected to hubs tend to reinforce resilience. The performed analysis helps to understand how resilience is underlain in networks and can be applied to the development of protein network models.

Wickedness, Governance and Collective Sanctions: : Can Corruption be Tamed?

Tackling a problem requires mostly, an ability to read it, conceptualize it, represent it, define it, and then applying the necessary mechanisms to solve it. This may sound self-evident except when the problem to be tackled happens to be “complex, “ “ill-structured,” and/or “wicked.” Corruption is one of those kinds of problems. Both in its global and national manifestations it is ill-structured. Where it is structural in nature, endemic and pervasive, it is perhaps even wicked. Qualities of the kind impose modest expectations regarding possibilities of any definitive solution to this insidious phenomenon. If so, it may not suffice to address the problem of corruption using existing categories of law and/or good governance, which overlook the “long-term memory” of the collective and cultural specific dimensions of the subject. Such socio-historical conditions require focusing on the interactive and self-reproducing networks of corruption and attempting to ‘subvert’ that phenomenon’s entire matrix. Concepts such as collective responsibility, collective punishment and sanctions are introduced as relevant categories in the structural, as well as behavioral, subversion of some of the most prevalent aspects of corruption. These concepts may help in the evolving of a new perspective on corruption fighting strategies.