Land degradation: Addressing the vulnerability of local people through the lens of transformative change

Land degradation (LD) is driven by many factors resulting from the intricate interplay between natural and socio-economic systems, which adds dynamism and complexity to this phenomenon. The study highlights LD as a source of social vulnerability in the Baragan Plain (Romania), often called the "granary of Europe" due to its century-long history of industrial crop production. We explore the community's perceptions of vulnerability due to LD and the community-based solutions to sustainable transformations through governance using a community-based causal-effect analysis (CBCEA). CBCEA is a participatory approach that uses systems thinking, engages key informants, and generates qualitative causal-effect diagrams to illustrate the system structure. Two workshops with local key informants revealed their views on the direct and indirect causes and effects of LD, strategies they proposed to reduce the community's vulnerability, and the conditions for making the agricultural land decision-making integrative, inclusive, adaptive, and participatory (IIAP). IIAP decision-making was considered a key to transformative governance. Key informants identified "Windbreaks construction" and "(Resilient) Irrigation system" as two effective, context-specific measures to address the causes and effects of LD. We advise caution when implementing the "Irrigation system" measure, as it may risk constraining the system to an undesirable state, commonly referred to as a "trap".

Transdisciplinary deficit in large carnivore conservation funding in Europe

Achieving coexistence between humans and large carnivores in human-shaped landscapes is a complex challenge. Addressing this challenge requires the revaluation of the approaches academia uses to foster carnivore conservation and human-large carnivore coexistence. In this forum paper, we provide a brief overview of the three archetypical approaches of knowledge generation for large carnivore conservation in human dominated landscapes (disciplinary, interdisciplinary and emerging transdisciplinary approaches) and highlight the need for more explicit consideration of transdisciplinarity in large carnivore conservation funding. We refer to transdisciplinary deficit (TDD) for those situations when the context allows the implementation of transdisciplinarity but research and practice remains disciplinary or interdisciplinary. We identify drivers of this TDD and provide a brief overview of current and past conservation funding programmes at the European level in terms of their capacity to promote transdisciplinary approaches for large carnivore conservation. We show that current funding programmes favour sectorial and disciplinary approaches, resulting in low transdisciplinary substance in large carnivore conservation projects. TDD can be overcome by transforming the character of public funding towards multi-stakeholder collaboration, designing and nurturing effective communities of practice, and reducing co-financing rates for large, integrated projects.