If at first you don’t succeed: Evaluating stakeholder engagement in global environmental assessments

2017 ◽  
Vol 77 ◽  
pp. 235-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Garard ◽  
Martin Kowarsch
Keyword(s):  
Stakeholder Engagement ◽  
Environmental Assessments ◽  
Global Environmental

scholarly journals Objectives for Stakeholder Engagement in Global Environmental Assessments

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 1571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Garard ◽  
Martin Kowarsch
Keyword(s):  
Stakeholder Engagement ◽  
Environmental Assessments ◽  
Global Environmental

scholarly journals Scenarios in Global Environmental Assessments: Key characteristics and lessons for future use

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 884-895 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detlef P. van Vuuren ◽  
Marcel T.J. Kok ◽  
Bastien Girod ◽  
Paul L. Lucas ◽  
Bert de Vries
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Assessments ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Key Characteristics

Our Coastal Futures: pathways to sustainable development

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Weiss ◽  
Valerie Cummins ◽  
Heath Kelsey ◽  
Sebastian Ferse ◽  
Anja Scheffers ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Coastal Zone ◽  
Technology Policy ◽  
Coastal Zone Management ◽  
World Ocean ◽  
Assessment Process ◽  
Environmental Assessments ◽  
Sea Levels ◽  
Zone Management ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Over Exploitation

<section class="push--ends"> <div class="formatted_content"> <div>The world’s sustainability opportunities and national security challenges converge in the coastal zone. Hundreds of millions of people face increasing pressure from population growth, over exploitation of natural resources, and escalating disaster-risk, as the climate changes and sea levels rise. Global Environmental Assessments have been a tool for international policy makers, and a particular favorite of UN bodies and can add value to national efforts. The first World Ocean Assessment concluded that without an integrated, coordinated, proactive, cross-sectoral and science-based approach to coastal and marine management, the resilience of coastal and marine ecosystems, and their ability to provide vital services, will continue to be reduced. The second World Ocean Assessment is currently under development and will build on the baselines established in the first assessment, by identifying key trends and relevance to the SDGs. However, global assessment processes, may be curtailed by bureaucracy and diplomatic legitimacy, whilst struggling to engage relevant stakeholders and institutions. As a result, there is a need to complement these important top-down, global environmental assessments, with more agile assessment processes, as well as facilitating bottom-up capacity building with stakeholders involved in coastal zone management. This requirement is articulated in the text of the “Our Coastal Futures Strategy”, launched in 2018 by Future Earth Coasts (FEC). We, the FEC program, observe that the assessment process is often not as inclusive as it could be, for example, by separating sectors, such as science and technology, policy, and public engagement throughout the assessment, with inter-sector connections usually made at a later stage in the process. Therefore, we stress the importance of co-designed synthesis that can reach into new knowledge, including tacit knowledge of diverse stakeholders, from the outset. Our Rapid Ocean Assessment Methodology Workshop will address this important issue and achieve a better understanding of the complexities and non-linearities of coastal-zone processes and interactions; fundamental to informing meaningful assessments and identifying potential sustainability pathways.</div> </div> </section>

A road map for global environmental assessments

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 379-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Kowarsch ◽  
Jason Jabbour ◽  
Christian Flachsland ◽  
Marcel T. J. Kok ◽  
Robert Watson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Assessments ◽  
Road Map ◽  
Global Environmental

scholarly journals Grounding global environmental assessments through bottom-up futures based on local practices and perspectives

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Pereira ◽  
Ghassem R. Asrar ◽  
Rohan Bhargava ◽  
Laur Hesse Fisher ◽  
Angel Hsu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Integrated Assessment Model ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Assessment Model ◽  
Environmental Assessments ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Local Practices ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Sustainability Challenges

AbstractFuture scenarios and pathways of potential development trajectories are powerful tools to assist with decision-making to address many sustainability challenges. Such scenarios play a major role in global environmental assessments (GEAs). Currently, however, scenarios in GEAs are mostly developed at the global level by experts and researchers, and locally imagined, bottom-up scenarios do not play a role in such assessments. In this paper, we argue that addressing future sustainability challenges for achieving more equitable development in GEAs requires a more explicit role for bottom-up inspired futures. To this end, this paper employs an innovative global assessment framework for exploring alternative futures that are grounded in local realities and existing practical actions, and that can be appropriately scaled to the required decision-making level. This framework was applied in the context of the UN’s Global Environment Outlook 6, a major example of a GEA. We developed novel methods for synthesizing insights from a wide range of local practices and perspectives into global futures. We collected information from crowdsourcing platforms, outcomes of participatory workshops in different regions of the world, and an assessment of reported regional outlooks. We analysed these according to a framework also used by an integrated assessment model in the same GEA. We conclude that bottom-up approaches to identify and assess transformative solutions that envision future pathways towards greater sustainability significantly strengthen current GEA scenario-development approaches. They provide decision makers with required actionable information based on tangible synergistic solutions that have been tested on the ground. This work has revealed that there are significant opportunities for the integration of bottom-up knowledge and insights into GEAs, to make such assessments more salient and valuable to decision makers.

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