Agricultural land accounts for 37% of the world’s terrestrial area, and the multiple functions of agroecosystems—providing food, soil and water retention, and various cultural services—are of great importance for sustainable land management. To ensure that multifunctionality, payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes have been developed for heterogeneous agroecosystems. However, the effects of the schemes have not been fully measured because, in most cases, they have been implemented as action-oriented programs rather than outcome-based payments. This study examines the effect of a community-based PES (CB-PES) program on the prevention of farmland abandonment to assess the agricultural outcomes of PES implementation in hilly and mountainous areas in Japan. We interviewed farmers in enrolled communities, mapped enrolled plots, and analyzed agricultural census data on the socioeconomic characteristics and farmland management conditions of 12,261 farmers in 960 agricultural communities in a typical hilly and mountainous area of Noto Peninsula in northern Japan. The results confirm that direct payments are effective in enhancing community management and in preventing additional farmland abandonment. In addition, we found that several socioeconomic and environmental factors at both the community and farmer levels—including geographical conditions, collective management activities, absence of successors, farm scale, and off-farm income dependency—simultaneously affected the farmland abandonment process. Specifically, collective practices within and between communities is a significant factor in preventing farmland abandonment more than collaboration with outsiders. Considering the depopulation and aging of rural communities throughout Japan, intercommunity enrollment could improve the effectiveness of CB-PES by upscaling the current payment scheme to maintain community functions.

Achieving just, equitable, and effective sustainability transformations requires diverse social engagement. This paper identifies five key roles played by Indigenous Peoples and local communities as agents of transformative change: embodying sustainable lifeways, resisting harm and defending rights, extending their practices to influence broader systems, and offering foundational models for care-oriented economies and governance. Through illustrative examples, we show how Indigenous Peoples and local communities actively contribute to global transformation. We emphasize the importance of engaging with a wide range of actors in supporting, expanding, and deepening these contributions to realize meaningful, systemic change toward a sustainable and just future.

This systematic review focused on the benefits of invasive alien plant species (IAPS) for human well-being. It examines the intellectual structure of knowledge of these benefits to identify knowledge gaps for future research and explore sustainable management practices to manage IAPS. The screening of bibliometric data from 1601 publications in Scopus based on the PRISMA protocol resulted in the identification of 69 publications for detailed review. The findings show an increasing trend in studies on IAPS benefits for human well-being since 2009. These benefits include provisioning services (food, medicines, fodder, bioenergy, and construction materials), regulating services (bioagents and shades), cultural services (aesthetics and ornamentals) and supporting services (soil and land reclamation). Additionally, the findings reveal geographical disparity in the distribution of research produced by researchers from different regions, with most research produced in Europe and limited to Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. The findings also show skewness in the management practices of IAPS, though some of them enhance IAPS benefits. Furthermore, there are limited applications of interdisciplinary approaches to investigate the benefits of IAPS for human well-being. Employing interdisciplinary mixed methodologies may help to generate new knowledge with a better understanding of complex interactions between IAPS and human well-being. Given the unique sociocultural, economic, and ecological settings of the IAPS, future research is expected to include comparative perspectives on how different countries and regions use the IAPS for their benefit while considering both the positive and negative impacts of the IAPS on human well-being to develop sustainable management practices.

This paper explores the use of power and politics in empirical literature on social-ecological traps. Social-ecological traps describe conditions where self-reinforcing interactions between social and ecological elements perpetuate a system in an unfavorable or undesirable state. Researchers across disciplines have theorized the nature and composition of social-ecological traps. In this connection, critical viewpoints on resilience have recognized a growing need to investigate political context, power relations, and the unequal distribution of risks and benefits contributing to the capacity of communities to manage changing conditions. However, it remains unclear to what extent empirical studies support any theorized way of power and politics influencing trap dynamics. This paper reviews power dynamics in the existing literature and offers insight into how power influences the emergence and persistence of social-ecological traps. Through a systematic literature review, we examined how the concept of power has been used, explicitly and implicitly, in empirical social-ecological trap research. The review identified 40 publications, focusing mainly on coastal ecosystems and cultivated areas within Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. Our results suggest that power is still poorly understood from both a conceptual and operational perspective within the social-ecological trap literature. A few studies that do center power in their analyses demonstrate that despite limited attention, there are clear instances where power intersects with social-ecological system dynamics to perpetuate resilient, yet undesirable outcomes. We point to the absence of empirical studies that systematically analyze power relationships and dynamics and highlight the need for further research that bridges socio-political and ecological analyses.

This chapter synthesises major findings from the eleven case studies from different countries across the world (i.e. Kenya and Madagascar from Africa; Chinese Taipei, India, Nepal and the Philippines from Asia; Italy, Spain and UK from Europe; Antigua and Barbuda and Colombia from Latin America) concerning SEPLS management in relation to transformative change. It distils key messages in regard to how to understand, assess and take action on transformative change. Implications for science, policy and practice, as well as interfaces between them, are drawn out to address the following questions: (1) what is transformative change? (2) how do we know if we are moving towards a sustainable society? and (3) what are challenges, opportunities and “seeds of change” in the SEPLS context to bring about transformative change? The chapter concludes with five common principles identified across the case studies, while revising the notion of transformative change to reconceptualise it as a radical change that is built on niche innovations of local initiatives and can be fostered through adaptive co-management in the SEPLS context.