Landscapes are social-ecological systems, formed of complex relationships between people and the ecosystems they inhabit, alter, and manage for their livelihoods. These relationships are embedded in cultural values and behavioural norms, socio-economic systems, and social networks, meaning that to effectively trigger change landscape conservation or restoration initiatives must embrace social-ecological systems approaches. The relationships between human and ecological components of a system can form feedback loops that either operate to reinforce the status-quo, making it resistant to change, or which can amplify negative changes (vicious cycles) or positive changes (virtuous cycles). Where amplifying feedbacks are strong enough to drive self-propelling change away from the status-quo, they can drive rapid, cascading and sometimes irreversible change. Systems thinking approaches can help identify interventions that can trigger or accelerate rapid and self-propelling change towards sustainability and justice goals.
Example Activities
Oppenheimer-Turvill Doctoral Scholar Antony Emenyu is engaging closely with The International Small group and Tree planting program (TIST). TIST is a farmer-led programme promoting tree planting and conservation agriculture, enabling farmers access the payments for the carbon captured in the process. Over the last two decades, TIST has supported and impacted over 200,000 smallholder farmers across East Africa. Antony’s work focuses on understanding the factors and processes that have enabled TIST to effectively scale and impact so many lives in a landscape where many similar programs still struggle.
Oppenheimer-Lovelock Doctoral Scholar Therezah Achieng is leading a project on “Just tipping points for Africa: Towards reframing better transformations in the African landscape”, a central theme which explores the ethics and justice implications of scaling conservation areas among the marginalized others. It explores ideas of better changes by surfacing home-grown aspirations, opportunities, barriers, and interventions (social-ecological tipping points), through facilitated workshops (futures) and participatory systems mapping. The overarching aim is to reframe more just and positive transformations among protected areas related communities in marine and terrestrial conservation areas.
Exeter’s Global Systems Institute produced the first ‘Global Tipping Points Report’ for COP28. This report compiled state-of-the-art understanding of tipping point risks and impacts in climate, ecological, and social systems, and opportunities for ‘positive’ tipping points towards more sustainable futures. Oppenheimer Research Impact Fellow Dr Powell was a lead author of the positive tipping points section, which also featured contributions from OPALS scholars and colleagues across OGRC networks. This work provides a high-profile platform setting out pathways to deliver rapid, socially just scaling of nature-supporting activities called for in the recent reports on African Land and Oceans supported by OGRC.
Oppenheimer Programme in African Landscape Systems (OPALS) 