Introduction
Promoting sustainability and resilience in ecosystems is crucial for maintaining ecosystem services that support human well-being and environmental health. This synthesis explores various strategies and frameworks proposed in recent research to enhance the sustainability and resilience of ecosystems.
Key Insights
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Urban Ecosystem Services:
- Urban ecosystems should be integrated into city planning and governance to enhance resilience and sustainability. This includes safeguarding a resilient supply of ecosystem services to ensure livable cities.
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Agricultural Ecosystems:
- Agricultural systems, while essential for food production, can be managed to balance development and environmental conservation. A framework that integrates ecosystem services and resilience-based interventions can help achieve sustainability targets.
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Ecosystem Stewardship:
- Ecosystem stewardship involves strategies to reduce exposure to stresses, shape proactive policies, and avoid unsustainable traps. This approach leverages adaptive capacity and resilience to sustain ecosystem services and human well-being.
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Forest Ecosystems:
- Resilience-based stewardship in forest management can address changing disturbance regimes. This includes using the range of variability concept to measure resilience and incorporating social dimensions into management practices .
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Adaptive Management:
- Recognizing the nonlinear and complex nature of social-ecological systems is essential. Tools like structured scenarios and active adaptive management can enhance adaptive capacity and resilience in environmental management.
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Risk and Resilience Integration:
- Combining risk management with resilience-based stewardship can make ecosystem services more robust to future uncertainties. Anticipatory actions are useful when risks are predictable, while resilience measures are crucial when predictability is low.
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Legal and Governance Frameworks:
- Effective legal mechanisms that operate across multiple scales are necessary to protect ecosystems. Laws should promote behaviors that address ecological stressors and support resilience.
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Principles for Building Resilience:
- Key principles include maintaining diversity and redundancy, managing connectivity, focusing on slow variables and feedbacks, fostering complex adaptive systems thinking, encouraging learning, broadening participation, and promoting polycentric governance systems.
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Community Design:
- Sustainable community design should incorporate greenery, engage citizens in environmental stewardship, and encourage nonmotorized transit. These strategies reduce environmental costs, promote social cohesion, and enhance resilience.
Conclusion
Promoting sustainability and resilience in ecosystems requires a multifaceted approach that integrates urban planning, agricultural management, forest stewardship, adaptive management, risk and resilience integration, legal frameworks, and community design. By adopting these strategies, we can enhance the capacity of ecosystems to provide essential services and support human well-being in the face of environmental changes.