Resilience insights related to COVID-19

Pelling, M., Chow, W., Chu, E., Dawson, R., Dodman, D., Fraser, A., Hayward, B., Khirfan, L., McPhearson, T., Prakash, A., Ziervogel, G.. 2021. A climate resilience research renewal agenda: learning lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic for urban climate resilience. Climate and Development. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2021.1956411

Learning lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic opens an opportunity for enhanced research and action on inclusive urban resilience to climate change. Lessons and their implications are used to describe a climate resilience research renewal agenda. Three key lessons are identified. The first lesson is generic, that climate change risk coexists and interacts with other risks through overlapping social processes, conditions and dec...

Pihl, E., Alfredsson, E., Bengtsson, M., Bowen, K., Cástan Broto, V., Chou, K., et.al. 2021. Ten new insights in climate science 2020 – a horizon scan. Global Sustainability, 4, E5. doi:10.1017/sus.2021.2

We summarize some of the past year's most important findings within climate change-related research. New research has improved our understanding of Earth's sensitivity to carbon dioxide, finds that permafrost thaw could release more carbon emissions than expected and that the uptake of carbon in tropical ecosystems is weakening. Adverse impacts on human society include increasing water shortages and impacts on mental health. ...

Hentati-Sundberg, J., Berglund, P.A., Hejdström, A. and Olsson, O. 2021. COVID-19 lockdown reveals tourists as seabird guardians. Biological Conservation, p.108950. Vancouver. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2021.108950

The widespread lockdowns put in place to limit the spread of the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) offers a rare opportunity in understanding how human presence influence ecosystems. Using data from long-term seabird monitoring, we reveal a previously concealed guarding effect by tourist groups on an iconic seabird colony in the Baltic Sea. The absence of tourists in 2020 lead to a sevenfold increase in presence of white-tai...

Folke, C., Polasky, S., Rockström, J. et al. Our future in the Anthropocene biosphere. Ambio 50, 834–869 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-021-01544-8

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed an interconnected and tightly coupled globalized world in rapid change. This article sets the scientific stage for understanding and responding to such change for global sustainability and resilient societies. We provide a systemic overview of the current situation where people and nature are dynamically intertwined and embedded in the biosphere, placing shocks and extreme events as part of t...