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Bossel's (2001) systems-based approach for deriving comprehensive indicator sets provides one of the most holistic frameworks for developing sustainability indicators. It ensures that indicators cover all important aspects of system viability, performance, and sustainability, and recognizes that a system cannot be assessed in isolation from the systems upon which it depends and which in turn depend upon it. In this reply, we show how Bossel's approach is part of a wider convergence toward integrating participatory and reductionist approaches to measure progress toward sustainable development. However, we also show that further integration of these approaches may be able to improve the accuracy and reliability of indicators to better stimulate community learning and action. Only through active community involvement can indicators facilitate progress toward sustainable development goals. To engage communities effectively in the application of indicators, these communities must be actively involved in developing, and even in proposing, indicators. The accuracy, reliability, and sensitivity of the indicators derived from local communities can be ensured through an iterative process of empirical and community evaluation. Communities are unlikely to invest in measuring sustainability indicators unless monitoring provides immediate and clear benefits. However, in the context of goals, targets, and/or baselines, sustainability indicators can more effectively contribute to a process of development that matches local priorities and engages the interests of local people.

In this paper, seven researchers reflect on the journeys their research projects have taken when they engage with and synthesize complex problems. These journeys embody an adaptive approach to tackling problems characterized by their interconnectedness and emergence, and that transcend traditional units of analysis such as ecosystems. In this paper we argue that making such a process deliberate and explicit will help researchers better combine different research paradigms such as expert-driven and participant-directed work, thus resulting in both broad explanations and specific phenomenon; research tensions traditionally defined as oppositional must be approached as complimentary. This paper includes researchers' personal journeys as they dealt with the emergent properties of complex problems and participant involvement. This paper argues that that research journey should be more than accidental but is a methodological necessity and should guide the theoretical and practical approaches to complex problems.

This paper shows how, with the aid of computer models developed in close collaboration with decision makers and other stakeholders, it is possible to quantify and map how policy decisions are likely to affect multiple ecosystem services in future. In this way, potential trade-offs and complementarities between different ecosystem services can be identified, so that policies can be designed to avoid the worst trade-offs, and where possible, enhance multiple services. The paper brings together evidence from across the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme's Sustainable Uplands project for the first time, with previously unpublished model outputs relating to runoff, agricultural suitability, biomass, heather cover, age, and utility for Red Grouse (Lagopus scotica), grass cover, and accompanying scenario narratives and video. Two contrasting scenarios, based on policies to extensify or intensify land management up to 2030, were developed through a combination of interviews and discussions during site visits with stakeholders, literature review, conceptual modeling, and process-based computer models, using the Dark Peak of the Peak District National Park in the UK as a case study. Where extensification leads to a significant reduction in managed burning and grazing or land abandonment, changes in vegetation type and structure could compromise a range of species that are important for conservation, while compromising provisioning services, amenity value, and increasing wildfire risk. However, where extensification leads to the restoration of peatlands damaged by former intensive management, there would be an increase in carbon sequestration and storage, with a number of cobenefits, which could counter the loss of habitats and species elsewhere in the landscape. In the second scenario, land use and management was significantly intensified to boost UK self-sufficiency in food. This would benefit certain provisioning services but would have negative consequences for carbon storage and water quality and would lead to a reduction in the abundance of certain species of conservation concern. The paper emphasizes the need for spatially explicit models that can track how ecosystem services might change over time, in response to policy or environmental drivers, and in response to the changing demands and preferences of society, which are far harder to anticipate. By developing such models in close collaboration with decision makers and other stakeholders, it is possible to depict scenarios of real concern to those who need to use the research findings. By engaging these collaborators with the research findings through film, it was possible to discuss adaptive options to minimize trade-offs and enhance the provision of multiple ecosystem services under the very different future conditions depicted by each scenario. By preparing for as wide a range of futures as possible in this way, it may be possible for decision makers to act rapidly and effectively to protect and enhance the provision of ecosystem services in the face of unpredictable future change.

Over 40% of the earth's land surface are drylands that are home to approximately 2.5 billion people. Livelihood sustainability in drylands is threatened by a complex and interrelated range of social, economic, political, and environmental changes that present significant challenges to researchers, policy makers, and, above all, rural land users. Dynamic ecological and environmental change models suggest that climate change induced drought events may push dryland systems to cross biophysical thresholds, causing a long-term drop in agricultural productivity. Therefore, research is needed to explore how development strategies and other socioeconomic changes help livelihoods become more resilient and robust at a time of growing climatic risk and uncertainty. As a result, the overarching goal of this special feature is to conduct a structured comparison of how livelihood systems in different dryland regions are affected by drought, thereby making methodological, empirical, and theoretical contributions to our understanding of how these types of social-ecological systems may be vulnerable to climate change. In introducing these issues, the purpose of this editorial is to provide an overview of the two main intellectual challenges of this work, namely: (1) how to conceptualize vulnerability to climate change in coupled social-ecological systems; and (2) the methodological challenges of anticipating trends in vulnerability in dynamic environments.

Although climate change models project that communities in southern Europe may be exposed to increasing drought in coming years, relatively little is known about how socioeconomic factors will exacerbate or reduce this problem. We assess how socioeconomic and policy changes have affected drought vulnerability in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal, where EU agricultural policy and the construction of a major dam have resulted in a shift from a land-extensive mixed agricultural system to the intensive production of irrigated grapes and olives. Following a dynamic systems approach, we use both published socioeconomic data and stakeholder interviews to present a narrative account of how this transition has increased the region's vulnerability to drought. To explore the assumptions made in the narrative, and to present different possible future scenarios, we create a dynamic systems model, the results of which suggest that socioeconomic drivers will play a more important role than projected rainfall changes in increasing vulnerability in the future.

Between 1845 and 1850, a potato blight triggered a famine that killed or displaced 25% of the Irish population. Aside from its historical and cultural significance, the Irish Potato Famine illustrates how social and economic forces can create vulnerability to environmental disturbance. Therefore, studying the famine contributes to the on-going academic debate on theories to combine social and environmental data. This paper explores the conditions leading to the Irish famine using the "Entitlement" framework of Sen (1980) and the "Panarchy" model proposed by Gunderson and Holling (2002). Entitlement theory allows us to better understand how community food security may become vulnerable over time as different social and economic forces eliminate or restrict avenues to obtain food. In Ireland, a host of economic, demographic, and social pressures marked the decades leading to the famine and meant that the Irish peasantry had no food options when the potato crop failed. Panarchy provides a way of characterizing ecological systems that are vulnerable to disruptions. The agro-ecosystem that developed in Ireland prior to the famine had characteristics typical of vulnerable environments: fields were close together, biodiversity was low, and a large amount of biomass made this ecosystem attractive to opportunistic pests. Neither framework, however, provides an adequate way of examining the totality of human-environmental relations. By combining entitlements with panarchy, we can explore both the social and environmental characteristics of vulnerability. Entitlements and panarchy can be coupled by first assessing the extent to which communities depend on the natural environment for livelihoods, and the options available if the environment changes. Once a dependency on the environment has been ascertained, the characteristics of the specific ecosystems in question must then be assessed to determine their vulnerability to external shocks and disturbances. The panarchy framework makes this possible.