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2,826 documents from Stockholm Environment Institute
Putting REDD+ environmental safeguards into practice: recommendations for effective and country-specific implementation
The document examines the implementation of REDD+ environmental safeguards, noting that while the 2013 Warsaw Framework makes safeguard information a condition for results-based payments, the broad nature of these guidelines allows for significant national discretion. It proposes using systematic gap analyses of national policies, laws, and regulations to improve the effectiveness of safeguards for protecting natural forests and biodiversity.
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Document type: Research paper
Evaluating sustainability transitions pathways: bridging analytical approaches to address governance challenges
The authors argue that current analytical approaches to sustainable transitions provide incomplete pictures, necessitating an integration strategy based on alignment, bridging, and iteration to better support decision-makers.
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Document type: Research paper
Resilience in a Watershed Governance Context: A Primer
The document outlines six attributes of resilience for watershed governance: inclusive participation, shared understanding, inclusion of ecosystem services, strong leadership, institutional flexibility, and decentralized systems. It emphasizes managing for change rather than against it, using tools like the Social-Ecological Inventory and historical profiling to build trust and adaptability in social-ecological systems.
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Document type: Guide
Integrating sustainable development and security: An analytical approach with examples from the Middle East and North Africa, the Arctic and Central Asia
The paper argues that ecological, financial, and political systems are under increasing pressure, creating a need to integrate 'hard' security (state-centric) with 'human' security (individual and ecosystem well-being). It identifies commonalities between these fields—such as uncertainty, irreversibilities, and multi-stakeholder complexity—and proposes a three-step methodology: context analysis, participatory scenario building, and options appraisal. Case studies demonstrate how water scarcity in the Nile and Euphrates-Tigris basins, climate-driven geophysical changes in the Arctic, and energy-water dependencies in Central Asia create security risks that require integrated governance and investment strategies.
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Document type: Research paper
Keeping cities green: Avoiding carbon lock-in due to urban development
The paper examines how urban development decisions regarding buildings and transport infrastructure can 'lock in' future greenhouse gas emissions. By comparing a reference scenario with an aggressive 'urban action' scenario, the authors estimate that urban policy-makers can avoid committing approximately 45 Gt CO2 of cumulative future emissions by 2030 through energy-efficient technologies and compact urban design. The analysis emphasizes that current infrastructure already commits roughly 800 Gt CO2, meaning the 1,000 Gt CO2 global carbon budget for limiting warming to 2°C could be exceeded before 2020 if current trends continue.
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Document type: Research paper
Supply-side climate policy: the road less taken
The research paper argues that climate policy has historically over-emphasized demand-side measures, such as carbon pricing and energy efficiency, while neglecting the supply side of the fossil fuel economy. The authors identify three primary barriers to supply-side action: political opposition from powerful fossil fuel interests, territorial GHG accounting rules that under-credit supply-side reductions, and a common perception that restricting production merely causes 'leakage' to other regions. The paper proposes a typology of supply-side policies, including producer subsidy reform, conservation payments for leaving reserves undeveloped, and ring-fenced cap-and-trade systems for production rights. It suggests that integrating supply-side measures can widen the mitigation cost curve, reducing the cost of achieving emission targets and mitigating 'carbon lock-in' and 'stranded-asset' risks. The authors highlight the case of Norway, where a combined supply-demand strategy could potentially achieve global emission reductions at one-third the cost of a demand-only approach.
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Document type: Research paper
Uncertain Futures: The Changing Global Context of the European Arctic
The report details a workshop in Pajala, Sweden, where local stakeholders and researchers co-created four future narratives for the region based on global Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). Participants identified climate change, national-local power relations, and international security as primary drivers of change. The resulting narratives explore a range of futures, from a sustainable 'Green Road' focused on circular economies and bio-production to a 'Rocky Road' characterized by resurgent nationalism and state withdrawal from municipal welfare. The study emphasizes the interconnection between local Arctic conditions—such as mining and reindeer herding—and global trends in migration, resource demand, and climate change.
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Document type: Research paper
The complementarity and comparability of climate change adaptation and mitigation
The review finds that the relationship between climate change mitigation and adaptation varies by scale and perspective. At the global level, economic literature often views them as substitutes, while scientific literature sees them as complementary; however, implementing a global mix is considered highly contentious. At national and local scales, there is greater potential for complementarity, though institutional and governance barriers prevent such actions from occurring autonomously.
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Document type: Research paper
Exploring the economic case for climate action in cities
The analysis of five cities indicates a strong economic case for investing in cost-effective low-carbon measures, which could reduce urban emissions by 15–24% over 10 years with an average payback period of approximately 2 years. While these investments offer significant savings relative to city GDP, the authors warn that population and economic growth in rapidly growing cities could offset these carbon savings in as little as 7 years.
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Document type: Research paper
Exploring the links between post-industrial landscape history and ecology through participatory methods
The study demonstrates that integrating local knowledge through participatory GIS reveals how both planned interventions and informal community activities—ranging from the active protection of flower-rich habitats to disturbances like motorbike use—contribute to habitat heterogeneity and biodiversity in post-industrial landscapes.
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Document type: Research paper
RÍOS DEL PÁRAMO AL VALLE, POR URBES Y CAMPIÑAS
The report details a USAID-funded project led by the Stockholm Environment Institute to integrate climate change considerations into Colombian water management. By deploying the WEAP modeling system and a participatory RDS process in the Otún, La Vieja, and Alto Magdalena watersheds, the program built technical capacity within regional environmental authorities (CARs) and academic institutions. Key findings include the critical role of páramo ecosystems in maintaining dry-season baseflows and the potential for hydropower development to disrupt downstream wetland dynamics in the Magdalena-Cauca basin. The project emphasizes moving from 'conscious incompetence' to 'conscious competence' in climate adaptation planning through institutional capacity building and the creation of a professional community of practice.
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Document type: Report
RÍOS DEL PÁRAMO AL VALLE, POR URBES Y CAMPIÑAS
The 'Ríos del Páramo al Valle' project (2012-2015) focused on enhancing the adaptive capacity of Colombia's regional environmental authorities (CAR) in managing water resources under climate uncertainty. By implementing the Robust Decision Support (ADR) framework and the WEAP modeling system, the project provided technical tools and capacity building across several key basins: the Otún, La Vieja, Alto Magdalena, and the broader Magdalena-Cauca macro-basin. Key outcomes include the identification of basin-specific adaptation strategies—such as páramo conservation in the Otún and wastewater treatment in La Vieja—and the development of new WEAP functionalities to model floodplain dynamics and hydrological alteration. The project emphasized a gender-inclusive approach and the creation of a regional community of practice involving universities and government agencies like IDEAM to ensure the long-term sustainability of climate-informed water planning in Colombia.
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Document type: Report
Sustainable Development Goals for Sweden
The report examines the applicability of the 169 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets to Sweden's domestic context. Through a rapid screening and detailed interpretation of selected targets, the authors find that the majority of SDGs are relevant to Sweden, challenging the notion that they apply only to developing nations. The paper highlights significant gaps in areas such as youth unemployment, income inequality, and sustainable consumption. It argues that national implementation requires a political, government-led process to translate vague global targets into specific, measurable national goals, emphasizing the need for policy coherence and cross-sectoral coordination.
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Document type: Research paper
Visualizing connections: Mapping the landscape of adaptation research and practice through weADAPT
The CAMA project combined weADAPT's semantic tagging with Gephi visualization software to analyze the landscape of climate adaptation. By mapping relationships between organizations, keywords, and geography, the project identified 'hot topics', research gaps, and the role of bridging networks like SUMERNET in Southeast Asia. The analysis demonstrated how ICT tools can reveal patterns in complex datasets to inform strategic planning and identify potential collaborations for the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) in Africa and Asia.
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Document type: Research paper
Tackling biomass scarcity: from vicious to virtuous cycles in sub-Saharan Africa
The document examines how communities in sub-Saharan Africa adapt to biomass scarcity, noting that current strategies often lead to vicious cycles of over-exploitation and degradation. Using the Lake Tana sub-basin in Ethiopia as a case study, the authors analyze the impact of changing biomass supply and demand, emphasizing the role of soil productivity and natural resource governance. The authors conclude that effective strategies must balance the avoidance of vicious cycles with the encouragement of virtuous ones, requiring sustainable soil management, inclusive governance, and cross-sector collaboration within national development strategies.
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Document type: Research paper
Participation and learning for climate change adaptation: a case study of the Swedish forestry sector
The document examines a case study of the Swedish forestry sector to assess the impact of participatory processes on climate change adaptation learning. It finds that such processes increase individual learning by shifting how stakeholders perceive climate effects and vulnerability, leading to calls for more multi-level, multi-stakeholder collaboration arenas.
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Document type: Case study
Addressing the risk of double counting emission reductions under the UNFCCC
The paper identifies double issuance and double claiming as the primary forms of double counting of emission reductions under the UNFCCC and argues that preventing these requires international coordination across unit accounting, mechanism design, and tracking and reporting.
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Document type: Research paper
Emergence of polycentric climate governance and its future prospects
The document analyzes the shift toward polycentric climate governance, noting that while new dynamic forms of governing are emerging in alternative domains to complement the UNFCCC regime, it is currently too early to determine if these forms will effectively fill existing gaps due to untested assumptions about their performance.
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Document type: Research paper
An evaluation of ozone dry deposition in global-scale chemistry-climate models
The paper analyzes ozone dry deposition in 15 global chemistry-climate models, finding that land cover drives substantial regional differences in fluxes. While comparing these models to observations in Europe and North America, the authors found differences of up to a factor of two without a clear systematic bias, highlighting that many models still rely on outdated 'resistance in series' schemes from the 1980s.
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Document type: Research paper
Toidujäätmete ja toidukao teke Eesti kodumajapidamistes ja toitlustusasutustes
The report analyzes food waste in Estonia, finding that households are the largest contributors, with an average of 130.4 kg of food waste per household annually. In the catering sector, restaurants exhibit the highest rate of food loss, with 87% of their total food waste being avoidable. The study identifies food spoilage as the primary driver of household waste and plate leftovers as the main cause in hospitals and restaurants. It concludes with specific recommendations for households, schools, and healthcare facilities to reduce waste through better planning and consumer awareness.
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Document type: Report