Responding to 21 st century environmental challenges

Consequently, the impact of human activities on the environment from local to global scales is drawing considerable attention. Towards the end of the 20th _{century, the state} of the environment began to attract international interest as people became increasingly aware of risks associated with environmental degradation (United Nations, 1992; Hoffman and Ashwell, 2001). Concepts such as sustainability, defined as the use of environment and resources to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs (The World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), gained traction in the late 1980s and sustainable development gained momentum in the 1990s that resulted in a shift in development thinking and research (Chambers and Conway, 1991; Scoones, 1998; Solesbury, 2003).

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In the 2000s, assessments such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment were carried out by experts across the globe to evaluate ecosystem services and change within the context of human well-being (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2003, 2005). Global climate change, loss of biodiversity and desertification were identified as three environmental problems with global significance in terrestrial systems, which are interlinked and are perpetuated by anthropogenic activities with vast implications for social systems from food production to human health (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Similarly in ocean environments, international attention has been drawn to destructive fishing activities that have negative social and environmental ramifications from local to global scales (Pinsky et al., 2011). The collapse of large-scale, lucrative fisheries from the 1940s into the 1990s indicated that universal management practices were unsustainable regarding marine food production (Hauge et al., 2009). Stock collapse due to exploitative fishing practices in the world’s oceans is further compounded by policy changes, pollution, habitat destruction, invasive species, climate change and highly variable environmental factors, which can lead to widespread consequences as seafood is the most traded food commodity globally (Hauge et al., 2009; Gephart et al., 2017).

With the onset of the Anthropocene, the role and responsibility of society as a driving force of change within the biosphere has been widely recognised (Steffen et al., 2007; Ruddiman et al., 2015), which has sparked the need for new forms of engagement and responses to build towards sustainability (Preiser et al., 2017) in light of the pressing 21st century challenges discussed above.

2.2.1. Different academic discourses

Current academic discourses use different framings when examining the Anthropocene, thus influencing how sustainable human-environment interactions are understood, interpreted and acted upon (Preiser et al., 2017). As examined by Preiser et al. (2017), four mainstream ontological imageries that define current academic perspectives around the Anthropocene include eco-modernism, biosphere stewardship, sustainable pathways and critical post-humanism, as detailed in Table 2.1.

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Table 2.1. Different academic perspectives used for framing human-environment responses to the Anthropocene (from Preiser et al., 2017)

These different perspectives propose contrasting ways of understanding and achieving sustainability within the context of present environmental and socially-related challenges of the 21st _{century. The eco-modernism outlook examines sustainability} through the dimension of human development, where modernisation and technological innovation is viewed as primary means to achieve social and environmental stability within the new geological epoch governed by human-directed opportunity (Ellis, 2011). In contrast, the biosphere steward perspective argues that people and the natural environment cannot be treated as separate entities and calls for humanity to ‘reconnect to the biosphere’ (for example Folke and Gunderson, 2012), where sustainability can be achieved through adaptive governance strategies that place humans within the biosphere (Folke et al., 2016). The sustainable pathways approach moves away from technological or top-down governance innovations and instead advocates multiple pathways that draw on diverse (and often marginalised) perspectives within the realm of human agency to achieve sustainability (Leach et al., 2012). The critical post-humanism paradigm proposes that sustainability under the Anthropocene is the responsibility of both human and non-human entities in order to allow all forms to flourish on Earth (Haraway, 2016). Within these broad academic discourses, Preiser et al. (2017) propose that a plurality of framings should exist within the Anthropocene to respond to challenges from a diverse

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range of disciplines and perspectives that can broaden understanding, leading to the possibility of developing “more nuanced, socially considerate and credible responses” (Preiser et al., 2017: 86). While recognising that choosing one academic perspective can be limiting in terms of how sustainability can be interpreted, this thesis primarily borrows from the planetary (or biosphere) stewardship discourse that focuses on how ecological and social systems interact – along with the complexities, uncertainties and multi-scale dynamics inherent to these complex systems – as this framing is best suited for examining local systems across terrestrial and marine perspectives in the southern Cape. Natural systems and social systems are viewed as complex systems, with many present day environmental and resource problems involving complex interactions between natural and social systems (Berkes et al., 2003). Complexity within non-linear and unpredictable systems has created challenges for traditional, compartmentalised disciplinary approaches and so complex systems thinking is used to bridge social and biophysical sciences in order to gain a more holistic picture of these challenges (Burns and Weaver, 2008; Jarre et al., 2013; Rogers et al., 2013).

Additionally, this thesis brings together diverse knowledge systems to better understand uncertainties within complex social-ecological systems as a way to build towards a deeper understanding of different experiences, perspectives and responses held by local natural resources users (i.e. farmers and fishers) to global 21st _{century challenges, such} as climate variability. As proposed by Leach et al. (2013), responses to challenges presented in the Anthropocene require interdisciplinary approaches that are inclusive of both social and natural sciences, which should be further augmented by multiple forms of knowledge.

2.2.2. Interpreting sustainability

To better understand how possible large-scale changes such as climate variability, regime shifts and land-use changes play out in a local area, such as the southern Cape and the Agulhas Bank, this thesis examines ecological and social systems in tandem – through a social-ecological perspective. Many serious and recurrent problems relating to natural resource use and environmental management practices can be attributed to the lack of recognition that ecosystems and social systems are complexly linked (Folke et al., 2010;

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2011). The planetary stewardship discourse recognises social-ecological systems as dynamic and connected from local to global scales, forming part of complex webs of interactions which experience both gradual and sudden changes (Folke et al., 2011; Folke and Gunderson, 2012). To maintain the capacity of ecological systems to support, for example, social and economic systems requires understanding the feedbacks and dynamics of interrelations between ecological systems and social systems (Berkes et al., 2003), as sustainability of interlinked social and ecological systems can be dependent on feedback loops between the different components. Therefore, sustainability can be viewed as a dynamic process, that requires people to continuously adapt in order for societies to deal with change, rather than merely an end product (Berkes et al., 2003).