• European Marine Science
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• 11. Sustainability close

Urban areas are the primary habitat for a majority of the global population. The development of cities not only entails a fundamental change in human settlement patterns but also a dramatic transformation of the physical environment. Thus, urban areas and their development are at the centre of all discussions on sustainability and/or sustainable development. This review essay introduces the notion of Urban Metabolism (UM), a term that provides a conceptual framework to study how a city functions, and hence, a way to address the sustainability issue of a city. Due to the significance and scope of the subject, the notion of UM is interpreted and thus approached differently across diverse disciplines from both the natural and social science fields. In order to comprehend the commonalities and controversies between them, the present review also briefly introduces the historical roots of the term. This review reveals the increasing significance of a rich and rapidly evolving field of research on the metabolism of urban areas.

Developed decades ago for spatial choice problems related to zoning in the urban planning field, multicriteria analysis (MCA) has more recently been applied to environmental conflicts and presented in several documented cases for the creation of protected area management plans. Its application is considered here for the development of zoning as part of a proposed marine protected area management plan. The case study incorporates specially-explicit conservation features while considering stakeholder preferences, expert opinion and characteristics of data quality. It involves the weighting of criteria using a modified analytical hierarchy process. Experts ranked physical attributes which include socio-economically valued physical features. The parameters used for the ranking of (physical) attributes important for socio-economic reasons are derived from the field of ecosystem services assessment. Inclusion of these feature values results in protection that emphasizes those areas closest to shore, most likely because of accessibility and familiarity parameters and because of data biases. Therefore, other spatial conservation prioritization methods should be considered to supplement the MCA and efforts should be made to improve data about ecosystem service values farther from shore. Otherwise, the MCA method allows incorporation of expert and stakeholder preferences and ecosystem services values while maintaining the advantages of simplicity and clarity.

We assess climate impacts of global warming using ongoing observations and paleoclimate data. We use Earth’s measured energy imbalance, paleoclimate data, and simple representations of the global carbon cycle and temperature to define emission reductions needed to stabilize climate and avoid potentially disastrous impacts on today’s young people, future generations, and nature. A cumulative industrial-era limit of ∼500 GtC fossil fuel emissions and 100 GtC storage in the biosphere and soil would keep climate close to the Holocene range to which humanity and other species are adapted. Cumulative emissions of ∼1000 GtC, sometimes associated with 2°C global warming, would spur “slow” feedbacks and eventual warming of 3–4°C with disastrous consequences. Rapid emissions reduction is required to restore Earth’s energy balance and avoid ocean heat uptake that would practically guarantee irreversible effects. Continuation of high fossil fuel emissions, given current knowledge of the consequences, would be an act of extraordinary witting intergenerational injustice. Responsible policymaking requires a rising price on carbon emissions that would preclude emissions from most remaining coal and unconventional fossil fuels and phase down emissions from conventional fossil fuels. PLoS ONE, 8 (12) ISSN:1932-6203

Poster presented during the H2020 "MUSES" project stakeholder workshop ’Embracing opportunities – Ocean Multi-Use Action Plan development workshop’ (Venice - June 27th, 2018). The poster analyses the potential for development of Multi-Use in the Northern-Adriatic coastal waters by combining existing and innovative touristic services with other traditional economic sectors and assets on the area. Drivers, added values, barriers, and impacts of Multi-Use have been identified integrating desk analysis and stakeholders perception. The results show the existence of a good potential for Multi-Use development and Blue-Growth in the area, still limited by barriers, particularly in the field of legislation, administrative processes and stakeholders capacity. Needed actions at local and regional (sub-national) level are highlighted in order to exploit this potential.

Abstract Transdisciplinary research is a promising approach to address sustainability challenges arising from global environmental change, as it is characterized by an iterative process that brings together actors from multiple academic fields and diverse sectors of society to engage in mutual learning with the intent to co-produce new knowledge. We present a conceptual model to guide the implementation of environmental transdisciplinary work, which we consider a “science with society” (SWS) approach, providing suggested activities to conduct throughout a seven-step process. We used a survey with 168 respondents involved in environmental transdisciplinary work worldwide to evaluate the relative importance of these activities and the skills and characteristics required to implement them successfully, with attention to how responses differed according to the gender, geographic location, and positionality of the respondents. Flexibility and collaborative spirit were the most frequently valued skills in SWS, though non-researchers tended to prioritize attributes like humility, trust, and patience over flexibility. We also explored the relative significance of barriers to successful SWS, finding insufficient time and unequal power dynamics were the two most significant barriers to successful SWS. Together with case studies of respondents’ most successful SWS projects, we create a toolbox of 20 best practices that can be used to overcome barriers and increase the societal and scientific impacts of SWS projects. Project success was perceived to be significantly higher where there was medium to high policy impact, and projects initiated by practitioners/other stakeholders had a larger proportion of high policy impact compared to projects initiated by researchers only. Communicating project results to academic audiences occurred more frequently than communicating results to practitioners or the public, despite this being ranked less important overall. We discuss how these results point to three recommendations for future SWS: 1) balancing diverse perspectives through careful partnership formation and design; 2) promoting communication, learning, and reflexivity (i.e., questioning assumptions, beliefs, and practices) to overcome conflict and power asymmetries; and 3) increasing policy impact for joint science and society benefits. Our study highlights the benefits of diversity in SWS - both in the types of people and knowledge included as well as the methods used - and the potential benefits of this approach for addressing the increasingly complex challenges arising from global environmental change.

Summary Vegetation vertical structure is important for biodiversity and ecosystem service provision. In cities, however, while variation in the spatial extent and distribution of vegetation has been widely investigated, vertical vegetation structure and its potential drivers have not. Understanding how vegetation vertical structure varies across cities and identifying the potential drivers of this variation will improve the management of urban vegetation for biodiversity and ecosystem services. We used light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data to quantify the vertical structure of vegetation across Brisbane, Australia, at 1‐km2 and 1‐ha spatial scales and investigated how this structure varied in response to biophysical, socioeconomic, urban form and landscape structure variables. Using model selection techniques, we found that landscape structure variables related to tree cover (tree cover extent and spatial configuration) best explained the vegetation vertical structure at both spatial scales. Biophysical and urban form variables were also important, but only in combination with landscape structure. Mean vegetation vertical complexity, foliage projective cover and canopy height at a site all decreased as the treed proportion of the surrounding urban landscape decreased. In general, these vertical structure variables also increased where patches of vegetation were clustered together spatially. Synthesis and applications. Using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data and model selection techniques, we show that the extent and vertical structure of urban vegetation are not independent and that reduced extent and increased fragmentation of urban vegetation are associated with simplification of its vertical structure. If common, this relationship means that managing urban vegetation for biodiversity and ecosystem services should not focus solely on the amount of tree cover or green space present across cities, but also on identifying where interventions to improve vegetation vertical complexity are required. Our study provides important insights into where these locations may be in cities.

Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere – the "global carbon budget" – is important to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe data sets and methodology to quantify the five major components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties. CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry (EFF) are based on energy statistics and cement production data, respectively, while emissions from land-use change (ELUC), mainly deforestation, are based on land-cover change data and bookkeeping models. The global atmospheric CO2 concentration is measured directly and its rate of growth (GATM) is computed from the annual changes in concentration. The ocean CO2 sink (SOCEAN) and terrestrial CO2 sink (SLAND) are estimated with global process models constrained by observations. The resulting carbon budget imbalance (BIM), the difference between the estimated total emissions and the estimated changes in the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere, is a measure of imperfect data and understanding of the contemporary carbon cycle. All uncertainties are reported as ±1σ. For the last decade available (2007–2016), EFF was 9.4 ± 0.5 GtC yr−1, ELUC 1.3 ± 0.7 GtC yr−1, GATM 4.7 ± 0.1 GtC yr−1, SOCEAN 2.4 ± 0.5 GtC yr−1, and SLAND 3.0 ± 0.8 GtC yr−1, with a budget imbalance BIM of 0.6 GtC yr−1 indicating overestimated emissions and/or underestimated sinks. For year 2016 alone, the growth in EFF was approximately zero and emissions remained at 9.9 ± 0.5 GtC yr−1. Also for 2016, ELUC was 1.3 ± 0.7 GtC yr−1, GATM was 6.1 ± 0.2 GtC yr−1, SOCEAN was 2.6 ± 0.5 GtC yr−1, and SLAND was 2.7 ± 1.0 GtC yr−1, with a small BIM of −0.3 GtC. GATM continued to be higher in 2016 compared to the past decade (2007–2016), reflecting in part the high fossil emissions and the small SLAND consistent with El Niño conditions. The global atmospheric CO2 concentration reached 402.8 ± 0.1 ppm averaged over 2016. For 2017, preliminary data for the first 6–9 months indicate a renewed growth in EFF of +2.0 % (range of 0.8 to 3.0 %) based on national emissions projections for China, USA, and India, and projections of gross domestic product (GDP) corrected for recent changes in the carbon intensity of the economy for the rest of the world. This living data update documents changes in the methods and data sets used in this new global carbon budget compared with previous publications of this data set (Le Quéré et al., 2016, 2015b, a, 2014, 2013). All results presented here can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.18160/GCP-2017 (GCP, 2017) 44 pages, 9 tables, 9 figures.-- Corinne Le Quéré ... et al.-- This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License Peer reviewed