Globally, mangrove forests are substantially declining, and a globally synthesized database containing the drivers of deforestation and drivers' interactions is scarce. Here, we synthesized the key social-ecological drivers of global mangrove deforestation by reviewing about two hundred published scientific studies over the last four decades (from 1980 to 2021). Our focus was on both natural and anthropogenic drivers with their gradual and abrupt impacts and on their geographic coverage of effects, and how these drivers interact. We also summarized the patterns of global mangrove coverage decline between 1990 and 2020 and identified the threatened mangrove species. Our consolidated studies reported an 8600 km(2) decline in the global mangrove coverage between 1990 and 2020, with the highest decline occurring in South and Southeast Asia (3870 km(2)). We could identify 11 threatened mangrove species, two of which are critically endangered (Sonneratia griffithii and Bruguiera hainseii). Our reviewed studies pointed to aquaculture and agriculture as the predominant driver of global mangrove deforestation though their impacts varied across global regions. Gradual climate variations, i.e., sea-level rise, long-term precipitation, and temperature changes and driven coastline erosion, salinity intrusion and acidity at coasts, constitute the second major group of drivers. Our findings underline a strong interaction across natural and anthropogenic drivers, with the strongest interaction between the driver groups aquaculture and agriculture and industrialization and pollution. Our results suggest prioritizing globally coordinated empirical studies linking drivers and mangrove deforestation and global development of policies for mangrove conservation.

Today’s societies face significant ecological and societal challenges, including climate change. Inthis context, forests can be a useful resource for new innovations and products which can leadto job opportunities, economic development in new sectors and greater sustainability. However,increased out-take of biomass also increase pressure on forest resources, ecosystems andbiodiversity. Conflicting interests increase between production and conservation of forests forrecreation, tourism and health. There is also a rural-urban imbalance with regards to the ruralforest resources. Many decisions regarding the use of the forests are made by decisionmakerseither in political bodies or companies located in urban areas often at considerable distancefrom the actual forests. Thus, there is a call for collaborative processes to identify and integrate arange of perspectives, interests and values in forests. This paper reports back from a project“Innovation for green transition in the forest” (www.ingoskog.org) where a collaborativeprocess for place-based development, landscape resource analysis (LRA), was used to addressthe social aspects of landscapes and to account for both material and immaterial values in theforest. LRA focuses on including stakeholders and local interests and knowledge. This methodwas applied to a small area, Norra Klarälvsdalen, in Värmland, Sweden where a workshopincluding 16 stakeholders resulted in the marking of subjective values on analogues maps. Thesemaps were digitized and together with data from geographical information systems (GIS) andArcGIS were used to visualize both material and immaterial values. Conflicting areas wereidentified and were discussed in a second workshop. This adapted LRA demonstrated thepotential to contribute local knowledge and thus add qualitative data to forest planning anddecision-making. It can also be used to address a wide range of stakeholder interests, including  95 | P a g eboth material and immaterial forest values, and is designed to capture cultural ecosystemservices that are often difficult to put a price on.

This report summarises the Interreg project Biocultural heritage and alternative foodproduction (Biokuma). The project, which ran from October 2020 to September 2022,is part of Interreg’s Sweden-Norway programme. The EU program provides supportfor Swedish-Norwegian project collaborations that develop society in various fields ofaction. In accordance with the purpose of the project, Biokuma has contributed to thebuilding of knowledge that shows that alternative modes of operation in agriculturesafeguard and continue a biocultural heritage. Alternative food production thus contri-butes to the transition to a sustainable society. However, the alternative food produ-cers are mainly interested in the green parts of the biocultural heritage. In other words,a strengthening of the cultural heritage perspective would be desirable for a moreefficient reproduction and management of the biocultural heritage. Also when it comes to knowledge transfer, both in the form of formal training and practice, the green partsof the biocultural heritage are often emphasized. Another problem, demonstrated inthe Biokuma project, is that the alternative food producers face a series of challengesin their business, and several of these challenges pose threats to the sustainability ofthis form of business. Something that in turn poses a threat to the reproduction of thebiocultural heritage that the alternative food producers stand for. Small-scale farming inharmony with nature is labour-intensive. The work provides societal natural and culturalenvironmental benefits for which the farmer usually does not get paid. The sales workis also often time-consuming and takes place in a variety of ways, for example throughRekoring, outdoor markets, recurring markets or food events, farm shops, egg sheds,subscription, self-picking, e-commerce, retail, own or others’ café or restaurant. Alsoby selling to processing companies and food artisans or for institutional kitchens. Thefarms can also get income from their farming in other ways, for example by renting outanimals for clearing and land preparation, as well as nature conservation work withcows in wetlands and goats at pastures.

While disaster risk management is an essential feature of sustainable development, the implementation of a disaster risk management strategy does not automatically contribute to all the facets of sustainable development and can even result in conflicting effects. Evaluating such contributions is essential to inform future choices in risk governance, and this chapter conceptually develops two mechanisms that should be taken into consideration in those evaluations: transfers of risks and path dependency. Transfers of risks happen when the actions to reduce one disaster risk increase the probability or the potential negative consequences of another one. Path dependency is about how past decisions frame current ones, and by extension, how future possibilities are limited by current strategies. Existing evaluation literature and frameworks offer avenues for tackling the complexity resulting from these two mechanisms when evaluating the contributions of disaster risk management to sustainable development. 

Background: Dual crises happen when an acute shock unfolds in the context of a creeping crisis. The July 2021 floods in the Vesdre river basin (Wallonia, Belgium) is a typical case of such dual crises in the context of climate change. This study is based on 16 semi-structured interviews (conducted in Spring 2023) with 10 mayors, 4 representatives of the Public Service of Wallonia, 1 person working for the federal government, and 4 project managers, coupled with a document analysis (n = 13). It investigates the temporal strategies that connect short and long-term considerations in the aftermath of this disaster (timing, futuring, pacing, cyclical adaptation, and determining time horizons), at two different governmental levels: river basin and municipal level. Results: In general, the window of opportunity to improve disaster resilience has been seized. Several studies were initiated by the Walloon region that shape the idea of an ideal future for the river basin and give recommendations for how to reach it. Unfortunately, those recommendations still come late compared to the temporal reality of the reconstruction process. Municipalities wish to strengthen disaster resilience as soon as possible, but they have to prioritize certain actions over others because of limited resources. The recommendations are considered flexible enough to adapt strategies to future contexts, but no monitoring and evaluation system for doing so has been implemented so far. In addition, clear policy agendas with transformational goals are scarce, and they diverge between the river basin and the municipalities. All these temporal strategies are shaped by elements of the institutional policy arrangement: resources, which affect them all, as well as actors, power, and formal rules, which affect some. These policy dimensions notably slow down the implementation of disaster resilience strategies and limit the determination of consensual time horizons. Conclusions: The temporal strategies are passively shaped by the policy arrangement dimensions to a greater extent than actively chosen by the stakeholders. A structural transformation of the institutional policy arrangement is therefore needed to enable more coherent temporal strategies between different governance levels and to facilitate the consideration of long-term resilience during the recovery process from disasters. 

Today's societies face significant ecological and societal challenges, including climate change and economic crises. In this context, forests can be a useful resource for new innovations and products. However, increased out-take of forest resources can raise the pressure on common forest resources and increase already existing conflicts between e.g. forestry and production versus conservation. Herein, the objective of this paper was to explore a collaborative process, namely landscape resource analysis (LRA), as a tool to identify a variety of values and sometimes conflicting interests and to improve communication about these among different stakeholders by using maps and GIS. The method was applied to a small forest area, Norra Klarälvsdalen, in Värmland County, Sweden. The area hosts a variety of forest owners, firms and companies in different sectors and several voluntary organisations with interest in the local forest. The study showed that LRA in combination with GIS has the potential to add value to collaborative processes in local planning and forest decision making processes. Even though it is difficult to guarantee broad representation in collaborative processes, the LRA served to identify a wide range of values and conflicting interests among the local participants including as well immaterial, e.g. cultural ecosystem services, as material and monetary values in the forest area. It also served as a tool for social learning and put focus on local citizens perspectives and experiences in addition to ‘experts’ of forest landscapes.

This paper reconsiders the roles of actors in regional innovation systems in the context of transformative industrial change. Empirically, it draws on evidence from the Värmland region of Sweden, where regional innovation system actors, with partial funding from the Swedish Innovation Agency, are striving to build a bioeconomy upon the traditional forest-related industries. The main findings include that transformative industrial change adds a variety of responsibilities to regional actors, including the provision of change legitimacy, influencing the industry’s innovation directionality and achieving social acceptance for change. A combined perspective on sociotechnical transitions and path development in regional innovation systems theoretically informs the case. 

The importance of the local community for the development of the school system during the 19th century has been touched upon by several researchers. However, interest in the changes to the school system in Sweden during the 1950s and 1960s has largely focused on developments at the national level. The picture has mostly been that the state, the formulating arena, set the rules and the municipalities, the realization arena, implemented nationally decided welfare policy. Here the interest is different; by focusing on municipal conditions and local interests, the implementation of political reforms, specifically the nine-year compulsory school, can be nuanced.

By a case study comparing two municipalities in the county of Värmland, Storfors and Arvika, with different local conditions and traditions of education, this study aims to investigate and analyse the establishment of the nine-year compulsory school at the local level, thereby making local interests and the importance of local conditions visible for the establishment of the compulsory school.

The processes in the two municipalities were affected by the state formulation arena's decisions but, as previous research has shown, there was a high degree of variation in how the school system was shaped locally. The same applies to local decision-making. It too was influenced and shaped based on local conditions. From the analysis of the process in Storfors and Arvika, three main results can be discerned: 1) the establishment of the primary school at the local level was largely about initiating and completing processes sideways, within and between municipalities, not only vertical processes between state and municipality. 2) The local tradition, which can also be called the local culture or the social mechanisms, influenced the processes in the two municipalities, and 3) the process in the local realization arena was largely driven by what we would call civil servants.

Over the last decade, the bioeconomy has been increasingly promoted as a strategy able to shift our economies away from fossil fuels and boost local economic growth, especially of rural areas in Europe. The bioeconomy is an important part of the European Union agenda, it is promoted through European wide strategies that are translated into local and regional policies. However, the bioeconomy does not unfold equally across regions; it has different implications influenced by the spaces and the narratives with which the policies are created and implemented. Amongst all the actors participating in the bioeconomy strategies, local practitioners play a crucial role in interpreting the narratives and implementing the policies in a way that makes sense for their local contexts. Hence, there is a need to understand how local and regional practitioners apply bioeconomy strategies to grasp how those are expressed in different regional contexts. Through the case studies of the forest-based bioeconomy in Catalonia and Finnish Lapland, this paper explains why economic narratives prevail in the local bioeconomy and how regional spatialities are affected by it. The cases show that the bioeconomy remains close to economic growth and is applied through regional economic development policies, thus focusing on specific economic sectors and hindering the role of the bioeconomy in a wider regional transformation. Understanding the narratives and how these reflect the spatialities help us to advance a spatially sensitive approach to the bioeconomy, this is, a bioeconomy practised according to the sociospatial conditions, closer to ideas of inclusivity, plurality and justice, and with a greater role in a wider regional transformation, rather than the greening of specific economic sectors.

This paper examines two atypical sparsely populated regions and their experience implementing a strategy of forest-based bioeconomy through smart specialization. Smart specialization is increasingly promoted as an opportunity for green transformations. Indeed, its recent evolution from S3 to S4 is an effort to address environmental sustainability challenges alongside regional development. In this paper, we argue that one of smart specialization's early stages, the entrepreneurial discovery process (EDP), can help establish a basis for the green transformation of traditional industries located in sparsely populated areas. The EDP is a participations facilitate that gathers diverse actors interested in developing a common economic sector, mostly through innovation. We explain how multi-actor participation facilitate understanding innovation as a problem-solving process requiring the input of actors outside (but including) the firms. As the cases show, this can unlock the potential of place-based multi-actor interventions to identify and mobilize pre-existing conditions and resources that, when combined with a common agenda, can influence green path renewal. In our cases, those pre-existing conditions are a culture of collaboration, knowledge, infrastructure and access to natural resources. The common agenda is to transform the regional economy into a forest-based bioeconomy.

Societal safety is often centred on handling or managing a single risk from the perspective of a particular at-risk group or individual, in a specific time and place. However, such linear and single-facetted processes are rare and the current approaches in societal risk management fail to comprehensively include and discuss the full range of outcomes and its inherent uncertainty and complexity. By combining different examples of known and unknown outcomes of societal risk management in the scientific literature, this paper aim to contribute to the risk and safety research field by presenting a conceptual model of risk transfer. The conceptual model shows how traditional societal risk management strategies often aim at reducing a targeted risk, considering the original actors affected by this risk, in a defined geographical area and for a decided time frame despite risk management also altering the landscape of risks for other actors, in other places, and at other times, as well as for the original actors, in the original place, and during the original time. Combining these aspects in a conceptual model that accepts and incorporates complexity, the underlying intention is to initiate a discussion regarding the current approaches and understandings of societal risk management and societal safety. 

The aim of the article is to explore whether and how local civil society–grounded in bottom-up activities–responds to a top-down initiative with expectations of sustainable transformation. The focus of our research is the possible role of civil society organizations as agents in collaborations aiming for a forest-based bioeconomy. The research was conducted in a local area within the sparsely populated Swedish region of Värmland, characterized by a strong tradition of forestry. The study is explorative and uses qualitative methods: interviews with representatives of local civil society actors, participant observations of local meetings and workshops, and document analyses. Our results suggest that general policy expectations concerning the inclusion of civil society become vague when operationalized in documents at the regional level, and lack clarity concerning the roles expected from civil society. Civil society organizations (CSOs) contribute in a multitude of ways to local social, economic, and environmental sustainability. However, the inclusion of CSOs as full actors in collaborations requires a greater knowledge of the traditions and structure of Swedish civil society, as well as its conditions and challenges in different local contexts. 

I projektet ”Biokuma – Biokulturellt arv och alternativ matproduktion” har vi undersökt om småskaligt, djur- och miljövänligt jordbruk kan vara en möjlig, vardaglig förvaltare av det biokulturella arvet. Vi har tittat närmare på några aspekter som rör dessa former av matproduktion i gränslandskapen Hedmark och Värmland. Projektet genomfördes under två år, oktober 2020 - september 2022, med stöd av Europeiska regionala utvecklingsfonden Interreg Sverige-Norge. Projektet var ett samarbete mellan Karlstads universitet, Norsk institutt for kulturminneforskning och Høgskolen i Innlandet. Samarbetsparter var även Länsstyrelsen i Värmland, Skogsstyrelsen (Värmland-Örebro), Förbundet Svensk Fäbodkultur och utmarksbruk, Föreningen Värmlands Säterkultur, Hedmarken Landbrukskontor, Innlandet fylkeskommune ved Jønsberg videregående skole samt en ressursperson innenfor norsk seterkultur.

The classic Scandinavian shieling consisted of a fenced site onoutlying lands with meadows and structures for dwelling,stabling livestock, and processing milk. Through dismantling ofrural, forested areas, competition for forest use andheritagization, shielings have been marginalized in today’sagrarian life and framed as relics of an outdated system. Shielingowners, like small-scale farmers all over Europe, face challengesincluding economic viability, loneliness in their work, anddifficulty recruiting new shieling workers. Surviving shielings (c.200 in Sweden) are valued as local development assets and areoften considered valuable for their rich biodiversity and heritage.As such, they are subject to conservation schemes that mayconflict with development ambitions. Heritagization has alsorecently been challenged by archaeological and palaeobotanicalresearch showing that shielings, in contrast to current relicframing, were highly adaptable to changing local economic andcommunity conditions over almost 2,000 years. Herein, researchwork, community development, nature conservation, andheritage management perspectives are synthesized in adiscussion of shielings’ past, present, and future, with a particularfocus on the shieling Kårebolssätern. Based on historical findings,suggestions include promoting silvopasture and retro-innovativefood production contributions to sustainable (post-)pandemicdevelopment and climate mitigation. The importance of apolitical ecology shift and fairer conditions for shielings, and themarginalized communities harboring them, are also highlighted.

The concept of vulnerability has obtained increased research interest due to the ongoing climate change. The concept has a broad and general meaning which makes it necessary to specify what it actually means in any specific context. In exposure to climate risks, it is important to highlight who and what is vulnerable to climate-related hazards. The concept of social vulnerability derives from ongoing research in disaster, developmental, and socio-geographic sciences. Social vulnerability emphasises the social dimension of vulnerability and how different factors in interaction contribute to influence who is vulnerable. This scoping review is part of a larger project that aimed at increasing the understanding of social vulnerability in a Swedish and Nordic context. The review explores what Nordic literature on vulnerability related to climate hazards has identified as relevant for social vulnerability. 32 articles were included and underwent content analysis. The analysis process was characterised by the involvement of the project group in an iterative cross-disciplinary approach to the topic. This study concludes that social vulnerability is a dynamic process in both time and space; the degree of spatial resolution of vulnerability assessments impacts the possibility to detect vulnerable groups; it is in the combination of factors that social vulnerability emerges; and that the finding of risk perception re-emphasises the agency of the individual.