In this paper, we aim to investigate how local communities cope with and adapt to multiple stresses in rural semiarid South Africa. In semiarid regions water scarcity is one of a number of stresses that shape livelihood vulnerability. With climate change, it is predicted that rainfall in South Africa will become more uncertain and variable in the future, exposing more people to water insecurity. At the same time, the impacts of disease, a lack of institutional capacity, and limited livelihood opportunities can combine to limit adaptive capacity. Therefore, adaptation to changing climate should not be viewed in isolation but instead in the context of social, economic, and political conditions, all of which shape local community vulnerability and people's ability to cope with and adapt to change. This study uses a qualitative-quantitative-qualitative framework, including the use of a stated preference survey, to identify the drivers of agroecosystem change, to understand the capacity of households to cope with droughts, and to determine the ability of local institutions to respond to crises. The analysis suggests that the capacity of the agroecosystem to remain productive during droughts is decreasing, individual/household adaptive capacity remains low, and institutional capacity faces considerable barriers that prevent it from supporting households to adapt to multiple stresses. This research adds weight to the claim that vulnerability reflects multiple forces and processes, and that multiple stresses, that are agroecological, socioeconomic, and institutional in nature, need to be examined to understand vulnerability and to prevent maladaptation

Restoration of mangroves is often considered a way to minimize losses incurred from their decline and to provide additional services to coastal communities. However, the success of restoration programs is often focused on biological or ecological criteria. The situation is no exception in Bangladesh, which houses the world's largest mangrove plantations. This study has been undertaken in a southcentral estuarine island (Nijhum Dwip) of the Bangladesh coast and aims to understand societal perception on the achievements of a plantation program. Through 110 household interviews and seven group discussions, an assessment was conducted of peoples' perception about major flora and fauna of the mangrove ecosystem, benefits derived from the forest, present condition of the forest, causes of degradation, and ways to improve the situation. Around one-fourth of the respondents mentioned that they were highly dependent on the ecosystem. The most important perceived benefits were: provision of raw materials, prevention against natural disasters, climate regulation and soil retention. However, the majority (>80%) of the respondents perceived the ecosystem to be degrading. Encroachment and illicit felling were identified as the main causes of such degradation. In order to arrest the continued degradation allowed by conventional forest management flaws, adaptive co-management has been recommended to conserve this ecosystem in a more equitable way.

Notions, such as leverage points, sensitive interventions, social tipping points, transformational tipping points, and positive tipping points, are increasingly attracting attention within sustainability science. However, they are also creating confusion and unresolved questions about how to apply these concepts when dealing with urgent global challenges such as rapid decarbonisation. We propose a relational methodology aimed at helping how to identify and support the emergence of positive ‘Social-Ecological Tipping Points’ (SETPs) that could bring about sustainability transformations. Our approach emphasises the need to pay attention to processes of social construction and to time dynamics. In particular, in a given social-ecological system, three key moments need to be considered: (1) The building of transformative conditions and capacities for systemic change, (2) A tipping event or intervention shifting the system towards a different trajectory or systems’ configuration, and (3) the structural effects derived from such transformation. Furthermore, we argue that the discovery and enactment of positive SETPs require considering multiple ontological, epistemological, and normative questions that affect how researchers and change agents define, approach, and assess their systems of reference. Our insights are derived from examining the implementation of household renewable energy systems at regional level in two rural areas of Indonesia and Bangladesh.

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