National monitoring of forests is essential for tracking progress towards various global environmental goals, including those of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Paris Agreement. Inconsistent national definitions of “forest”, however, can complicate the tracking of global progress towards achieving these goals. The FAO’s...
The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) is a heuristic tool for co-creating positive futures for nature and people. It seeks to open up a diversity of futures through mainly three value perspectives on nature – Nature for Nature, Nature for Society, and Nature as Culture. This paper describes how the NFF can be applied in modelling to support decision...
Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) are non-material benefits that are indispensable for the health and well-being of communities. CES are often spatially explicit and fluctuate according to the knowledge, beliefs, and perception of users of the location. Therefore, understanding the spatial patterns of CES perceived by people from different...
Envisioning positive scenarios that recognize the multiple values of nature is fundamental for designing transformative changes in local socio-ecological systems. This study developed a protocol with three specifications for operationalizing the Nature Futures Framework (NFF) in a landscape scenario analysis using a multi-objective optimization...
In this study, we propose a method for downscaling ecological footprint (EF) and biocapacity (BC) to a 1-km square resolution for a spatially flexible analysis of environmental burden balance. To conduct EF downscaling (by land type and consumption category) for all terrestrial areas of Japan, the grid population was multiplied by the scaled EF per...
Innovation history analysis of the transformation of paddy rice system on Sado Island from 1999 to 2019, which progressed with the reintroduction of crested ibis (Nipponia nippon), identified three key levers, i.e. multi-stakeholder collaboration, integrated local policies, and incentives, which, interacting one another and with seven leverage...
Effective policies to halt biodiversity loss require knowing which anthropogenic drivers are the most important direct causes. Whereas previous knowledge has been limited in scope and rigor, here we statistically synthesize empirical comparisons of recent driver impacts found through a wide-ranging review. We show that land/sea use change has been...
This chapter contributes to a comprehensive understanding of the island socio-ecological system by a synthesis of the state and trend of, and the drivers of changes in ecosystems and their services, focusing on mangroves in Ishigaki Island. The current extent of mangroves on the Island is limited to small patches along a few river estuaries, which...
Forest ecosystems play an indispensable role in addressing various pressing sustainability and social-ecological challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss. However, global forest loss has been, and still is today, an important issue. Here, based on spatially explicit data, we show that over the past 60 years (1960–2019), the global...
Forest ecosystems play an indispensable role in addressing various pressing sustainability and social-ecological challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem services deterioration, hence the monitoring of the world's forests is crucial. As part of the global forest assessment workflow, a forest is generally classified and...