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A safe and just operating space for socioecological systems is a powerful bridging concept in sustainability science. It integrates biophysical earth-system tipping points (ie, thresholds at which small changes can lead to amplifying effects) with social science considerations of distributional equity and justice. Often neglected, however, are the multiple feedback loops between self-identity and planetary boundaries. Environmental degradation can reduce self-identification with nature, leading to decreased pro-environmental behaviours and decreased cooperation with out-groups, further increasing the likelihood of transgressing planetary boundaries. This vicious cycle competes with a virtuous one, where improving environmental quality enhances the integration of nature into self-identity and improves health, thereby facilitating prosocial and pro-environmental behaviour. These behavioural changes can also cascade up to influence social and economic institutions. Given a possible minimum degree of individual self-care to maintain health and prosperity, there would seem to exist an analogous safe and just operating space for self-identity, for which system stewardship for planetary health is crucial.

The need for sustainability transitions is widely recognised, along with a concurrent need for the evolution of knowledge systems to inform more effective policy action. Although there are many new policy targets relating to net zero emissions and other sustainability challenges, cities, regional and national governments are struggling to rapidly develop transformational policies to achieve them. As academics and practitioners who work at the science-policy interface, we identify specific knowledge and competency needs for governing sustainability transitions related to the interlinked phases of envisioning, implementing and evaluating. In short, coordinated reforms of both policy and knowledge systems are urgently needed to address the speed and scale of sustainability challenges. These include embedding systems thinking literacy, mainstreaming participatory policy making, expanding the capacity to undertake transdisciplinary research, more adaptive governance and continuous organisational learning. These processes must guide further knowledge development, uptake and use as part of an iterative and holistic process. Such deep-seated change in policy-knowledge systems will be disruptive and presents challenges for traditional organisational models of knowledge delivery, but is essential for successful sustainability transformations.

There is mounting evidence that terrestrial arthropods are declining rapidly in many areas of the world. It is unclear whether freshwater invertebrates, which are key providers of ecosystem services, are also declining. We addressed this question by analysing a long-term dataset of macroinvertebrate abundance collected from 2002 to 2019 across 5009 sampling sites in English rivers. Patterns varied markedly across taxonomic groups. Within trophic groups we detected increases in the abundance of carnivores by 19% and herbivores by 14.8%, while we estimated decomposers have declined by 21.7% in abundance since 2002. We also found heterogeneity in trends across rivers belonging to different typologies based on geological dominance and catchment altitude, with organic lowland rivers having generally higher rates of increase in abundance across taxa and trophic groups, with siliceous lowland rivers having the most declines. Our results reveal a complex picture of change in freshwater macroinvertebrate abundance between taxonomic groups, trophic levels and river typologies. Our analysis helps with identifying priority regions for action on potential environmental stressors where we discover macroinvertebrate abundance declines.

1. Wild bees provide a critical ecosystem service by pollinating globally important crops. Documented bee declines, notably in agricultural landscapes, therefore threaten future food security. Yet, evaluations of methods to inventory bees are rarely carried out in different crops or focus specifically upon crop pollinating species. 2. We utilise standardised field datasets to elucidate differences in the capacity of transect walks, observation plots and pan traps to sample wild bee pollinator communities in four contrasting crops. Our results indicate that individual survey methods detect different components of crop pollinator communities, with guild and body size potentially important causal factors behind these differences. 3. Transects detected half or less of the total potential pollinator community in three of our four study crops. Whilst transects were the most efficient method for sampling bumblebees, they often missed smaller solitary species, which were most efficiently sampled by yellow pan traps. 4. Crop type is likely an important determinant of the most suitable survey methods to sample bee pollinator communities. Whilst transects alone are sufficient in crops pollinated predominantly by bumblebees, pan traps, and potentially observation plots, may be an important addition in some crops where smaller solitary bee species are potentially important pollinators. 5. Our results indicate that the most efficient methods to sample bee species in agricultural landscapes are dependent upon crop type and pollinator community composition. We use our findings to make a set of recommendations on the inventorying and monitoring of bee pollinator crop communities that can inform regional and national monitoring programmes.

Agri-environment schemes are programmes where landholders enter into voluntary agreements (typically with\ud governments) to manage agricultural land for environmental protection and nature conservation objectives.\ud Previous work at local scale has shown that these features can provide additional floral and nesting resources to\ud support wild pollinators, which may indirectly increase floral visitation to nearby crops. However, the effect of\ud entire schemes on this important ecosystem service has never previously been studied at national scale. Focusing\ud on four wild pollinator guilds (ground-nesting bumblebees, tree-nesting bumblebees, ground-nesting solitary\ud bees, and cavity-nesting solitary bees), we used a state-of-the-art, process-based spatial model to examine the\ud relationship between participation in agri-environment schemes across England during 2016 and the predicted\ud abundances of these guilds and their visitation rates to four pollinator dependent crops (oilseed rape, field beans,\ud orchard fruit and strawberries). Our modelling predicts that significant increases in national populations of\ud ground-nesting bumblebees and ground-nesting solitary bees have occurred in response to the schemes. Lack of\ud significant population increases for other guilds likely reflects specialist nesting resource requirements not wellcatered\ud for in schemes. We do not predict statistically significant increases in visitation to pollinator-dependent\ud crops at national level as a result of scheme interventions but do predict some localised areas of significant\ud increase in bumblebee visitation to crops flowering in late spring. Lack of any significant change in visitation to\ud crops which flower outside this season is likely due to a combination of low provision of nesting resource relative\ud to floral resource by scheme interventions and low overall participation in more intensively farmed landscapes.\ud We recommend future schemes place greater importance on nesting resource provision alongside floral resource\ud provision, better cater for the needs of specialised species and promote more contiguous patches of semi-natural\ud habitat to better support solitary bee visitation.

Protected area (PA) networks have in the past been constructed to include all major habitats, but have often been developed through consideration of only a few indicator taxa or across restricted areas, and rarely account for global climate change. Systematic conservation planning (SCP) aims to improve the efficiency of biodiversity conservation, particularly when addressing internationally agreed protection targets. We apply SCP in Great Britain (GB) using the widest taxonomic coverage to date (4,447 species), compare spatial prioritisation results across 18 taxa and use projected future (2080) distributions to assess the potential impact of climate change on PA network effectiveness. Priority conservation areas were similar among multiple taxa, despite considerable differences in spatial species richness patterns; thus systematic prioritisations based on indicator taxa for which data are widely available are still useful for conservation planning. We found that increasing the number of protected hectads by 2% (to reach the 2020 17% Aichi target) could have a disproportionate positive effect on species protected, with an increase of up to 17% for some taxa. The PA network in GB currently under-represents priority species but, if the potential future distributions under climate change are realised, the proportion of species distributions protected by the current PA network may increase, because many PAs are in northern and higher altitude areas. Optimal locations for new PAs are particularly concentrated in southern and upland areas of GB. This application of SCP shows how a small addition to an existing PA network could have disproportionate benefits for species conservation.

Climatic anomalies are increasing in intensity and frequency due to rapid rates of global change, leading to increased extinction risk for many species. The impacts of anomalies are likely to vary between species due to different degrees of sensitivity and extents of local adaptation. Here, we used long-term butterfly monitoring data of 143 species across six European bioclimatic regions to show how species’ population dynamics have responded to local or globally-calculated climatic anomalies, and how species attributes mediate these responses. Contrary to expectations, degree of apparent local adaptation, estimated from the relative population sensitivity to local versus global anomalies, showed no associations with species mobility or reproductive rate but did contain a strong phylogenetic signal. The existence of phylogenetically-patterned local adaptation to climate has important implications for forecasting species responses to current and future climatic conditions and for developing appropriate conservation practices.

Food systems are primary drivers of human and environmental health, but the understanding of their diverse and dynamic co-transformation remains limited. We use a data-driven approach to disentangle different development pathways of national food systems (i.e. ‘transformation archetypes’) based on historical, intertwined trends of food system structure (agricultural inputs and outputs and food trade), and social and environmental outcomes (malnutrition, biosphere integrity, and greenhouse gases emissions) for 161 countries, from 1995 to 2015. We found that whilst agricultural total factor productivity has consistently increased globally, a closer analysis suggests a typology of three transformation archetypes across countries: rapidly expansionist, expansionist, and consolidative. Expansionist and rapidly expansionist archetypes increased in agricultural area, synthetic fertilizer use, and gross agricultural output, which was accompanied by malnutrition, environmental pressures, and lasting socioeconomic disadvantages. The lowest rates of change in key structure metrics were found in the consolidative archetype. Across all transformation archetypes, agricultural greenhouse gases emissions, synthetic fertilizer use, and ecological footprint of consumption increased faster than the expansion of agricultural area, and obesity levels increased more rapidly than undernourishment decreased. The persistence of these unsustainable trajectories occurred independently of improvements in productivity. Our results underscore the importance of quantifying the multiple human and environmental dimensions of food systems transformations and can serve as a starting point to identify potential leverage points for sustainability transformations. More attention is thus warranted to alternative development pathways able of delivering equitable benefits to both productivity and to human and environmental health.

The influence of large‐scale variables such as climate change on phenology has received a great deal of research attention. However, local environmental factors also play a key role in determining the timing of species life cycles. Using the meadow brown butterfly Maniola jurtina as an example, we investigate how a specific habitat type, lowland calcareous grassland, can affect the timing of flight dates. Although protracted flight periods have previously been reported in populations on chalk grassland sites in the south of England, no attempt has yet been made to quantify this at a national level, or to assess links with population genetics and drought tolerance. Using data from 539 sites across the UK, these differences in phenology are quantified, and M. jurtina phenology is found to be strongly associated with both site geology and topography, independent of levels of abundance. Further investigation into aspects of M. jurtina ecology at a subset of sites finds no genetic structuring or drought tolerance associated with these same site conditions., Maniola jurtina phenology is found to be strongly associated with both site geology and topography, independent of mean abundance across 539 monitoring sites. Across a subset of sites, no genetic structuring was associated with these site characteristics. Populations displayed high levels of genetic diversity but low genetic differentiation. Across a subset of sites, drought tolerance was not associated with site geology.