IMSET publishes position paper on long-term sustainability

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Fabio Silva of the Institute for the Modelling of Socio-Environmental Transitions, together with a group of co-authors from 32 other institutions, has led the publication of a landmark position paper in the journal Sustainability entitled Developing Transdisciplinary Approaches to Sustainability Challenges: The Need to Model Socio-Environmental Systems in the Longue Durée.

Stemming from a transdisciplinary workshop held online during 2020, the paper argues that current crises – in land use, biodiversity, novel pathogens, water management – can only be fully understood by doing research over timescales that greatly exceed the lifespan of any individual human. This so-called longue durée is the key to fully understanding the full extent of socio-environmental processes and their implications.

 

The spatial and temporal scales of key social and environmental processes of interest

 

As well as identifying key processes and challenges, IMSET and colleagues set out how key issues may be addressed by fully integrating humans into environmental modelling and planning. By including ancient human activity and future outcomes in our mission statement, we aim to provide a manifesto for developing an integrated approach towards socio-ecological systems in the long term.

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Silva, Fabio, Fiona Coward, Kimberley Davies, Sarah Elliott, Emma Jenkins, Adrian C. Newton, Philip Riris, Marc Vander Linden, Jennifer Bates, Elena Cantarello, Daniel A. Contreras, Stefani A. Crabtree, Enrico R. Crema, Mary Edwards, Tatiana Filatova, Ben Fitzhugh, Hannah Fluck, Jacob Freeman, Kees Klein Goldewijk, Marta Krzyzanska, Daniel Lawrence, Helen Mackay, Marco Madella, Shira Yoshi Maezumi, Rob Marchant, Sophie Monsarrat, Kathleen D. Morrison, Ryan Rabett, Patrick Roberts, Mehdi Saqalli, Rick Stafford, Jens-Christian Svenning, Nicki J. Whithouse, and Alice Williams. 2022. “Developing Transdisciplinary Approaches to Sustainability Challenges: The Need to Model Socio-Environmental Systems in the Longue Durée“ Sustainability 14: 10234. DOI: 10.3390/su14161023

 

 

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