Ambio最新文献

Successful outcomes of community-based conservation, both ecological and social, rely on local actors being motivated to engage at the outset of the programme and to sustain their motivation over time. Using semi-structured interviews, we explore the motivations of 22 community Conservation Officers who have participated in marine turtle conservation in Tanzania for more than two decades. We focus on factors that motivated initial participation, as well as those that contributed to sustaining their participation over the past 20 years. Our study reveals the intricate dynamics of motivational processes, including the influence of values, identities, autonomy, agency, and power, which are shaped by relationships between nature, people, and place. With these findings, we challenge dominant assumptions about economic motivations and highlight the risk of over-reliance on monetary incentives to drive participation in community-based conservation.

Sustainability research routinely treats inertia as the obstacle that explains why interventions fail to embed in everyday life. This Perspective argues that what is labelled as inertia is often patterned persistence-signal rather than noise-carrying moral commitments, ecological knowledge and potentially protective strategies. I define social inertia (SI) as the patterned continuation of social trajectories shaped by historical pathways, embodied routines, institutional arrangements and cultural attachments, and propose a five-part typology (institutional, embodied, narrative, ritual and infrapolitical) giving the concept analytical depth beyond the mechanistic vocabularies of lock-in, regime stability and behavioural habit. A methodological orientation drawn from the humanities and interpretive social sciences-archival reading against the grain, oral history, and Future Design-reads SI across past, present and imagined-future registers. The reconceptualisation reframes the field's diagnostic starting point: not "why does change fail" but what the patterning of continuity reveals about the lives interventions seek to alter.

As biodiversity decline continues, there is a critical need to document, monitor, and protect species equitably across the tree of life. However, both scientific research and societal perceptions of biodiversity are often biased toward large, colorful, charismatic, familiar, or otherwise "useful" species. We conducted a global meta-analysis encompassing 905 effect sizes from 78 studies across three decades of research assessing drivers of taxonomic bias. Positive biases were widespread across study designs, regions, and taxonomic scopes, with plants and invertebrates typically receiving disproportionately less attention than vertebrates. However, the magnitude of bias was generally small (Pearson's r < 0.5), suggesting mild impacts on research agendas. Concerningly, conservation priority emerged as the only dimension not consistently associated with positive bias, suggesting a misalignment between research attention, funding, public interest, and conservation needs. We conclude that while biases are pervasive across taxonomic groups, they are subtle-but their conservation consequences warrant urgent correction.

Human-wildlife coexistence increasingly requires approaches that make diverse value perspectives explicit. We introduce the Beaver Futures Framework (BFF), which integrates intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values, as well as instrumental damages of beavers, to support more inclusive discussions on beaver management in the Netherlands. We applied the BFF in a workshop with beaver professionals to examine how participants valued beavers and how these values related to their self-placement within the framework. The BFF proved effective for systematically exploring and collecting beaver values, stimulating mutual understanding among participants, and revealing both shared and divergent perspectives within the group. These findings demonstrate the framework's potential to support inclusive stakeholder engagement and to map value plurality in ways that inform coexistence strategies. Because of its generic structure, the BFF can be adapted to other species or ecosystems, offering a promising tool for navigating complex human-wildlife interactions in increasingly anthropogenic landscapes.

The seafood sector faces multiple challenges that threaten its contribution to food security. For developing effective governance strategies in response to those transformations, this study proposes a theoretical framework grounded in Actor-Network Theory (ANT), applied to the construction of a Social-Ecological Network (SEN), to better understand the structural complexity of the seafood sector SES in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Europe's leading seafood processing hub. Through semi-structured interviews, direct observations, and participatory workshops, we identified 227 nodes and 595 links across environmental, economic, productive, and social categories framing the seafood sector. The descriptive analysis of the network reveals that operational production entities constitute the network's core, shaping how environmental resources, economic support, and social regulations are organized. By making visible the diversity of components, their multi-layer interactions, and interdependencies within this system, our approach provides decision-makers with evidence-based insights for developing strategies that align with the seafood sector's systemic reality and sustainability challenges.

Seaweed aquaculture is increasingly promoted within blue economy strategies, but evidence for the Mekong River Delta (MRD), Vietnam, remains fragmented. This PRISMA-informed narrative integrative review screened 460 records after duplicate removal and retained 85 evidence sources. The synthesis compared species suitability, farming systems, value chains, economic evidence, and governance constraints. Gracilaria tenuistipitata had the strongest support for brackish shrimp-pond integration; MRD studies reported standing biomass of 2.13-11.78 t fresh weight ha^-1 and associations with higher shrimp yield and profit. Kappaphycus, Eucheuma, Ulva, and Caulerpa required site- or market-specific validation. Shrimp-seaweed IMTA was better aligned with variable salinity than near-shore carrageenophyte systems, whereas IMTA-RAS remained pilot-scale and capital-intensive. Reported NPV and IRR values were too heterogeneous for valid pooling, and no standardized MRD-specific estimates were available. Thus, evidence supports selected pathways, particularly Gracilaria integration, but not a mature or quantitatively documented MRD-wide sector.

A 1.5 °C world and healthy stratospheric ozone layer is impossible to achieve without ambitious action to reduce nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions. While N₂O is currently controlled under the international climate regime, only a handful of countries have committed to reduction targets. We argue that the international community should consider controlling N₂O under the Montreal Protocol, the international ozone agreement. The Montreal Protocol is widely considered the most successful international environmental agreement ever. The Protocol's focus on production and consumption is well suited to nitrogen pollution, and it has a successful track record in the agricultural sector-N₂O's dominant source. A special report from the Protocol's assessment panels could provide the scientific foundation for action, and an initial focus on industrial N₂O could be a springboard to address additional sectors. In short, the international ozone agreement creates a unique opportunity for action on a multifaceted threat that we can no longer ignore.

The current ecological crisis asks for system-wide transformation toward more sustainable views, structures and practices. Recognition and integration of the plural ways people value nature, including intrinsic, instrumental and relational values, is one of the key aspects of this transformative change. To achieve this, diverse societal actors should participate in decision-making processes of environmental policies. We highlight a form of participation that thus far has not been explicitly linked to plural valuation: citizen science. In this perspective, we demonstrate that citizen science-diverse initiatives where citizens participate in knowledge generation processes-is a space where plural values of nature are articulated, practiced and fostered. Based on four values-centered leverage points, we show potential benefits and areas of advance that integrating citizen science in plural valuation offers for required system-wide transformative change. Finally, we provide recommendations toward fully leveraging the potential of citizen science for plural valuation of nature.