Garry Peterson

We asked 22 innovators (in 3 separate groups) embedded in the ancient wood-pastures of Transylvania to draw the ideal wood-pasture, and explain how it functions. Ideal wood-pasture features are already (still) present and only need maintenance. The social dimensions are, however, to be restored.

Protected area management has significant spillover effects on vegetation - Nature Analysis of effect sizes of vegetation spillovers from protected areas in Australia shows that 71% of over 3,063 analysed protected areas had a positive spillover effect, and that these effects c...

Happy to share my new publication in #Nature
doi.org/10.1038/s415.... Vegetation spillovers from Aus protected areas are common & widespread; also, management inside the area can affect vegetation outside the area. Spillovers don't factor much into conservation policy, but perhaps they should! 🧪🌍🌐

The hidden Kenyan workers training China’s AI models An unemployment crisis has created fertile ground for companies to step in with opaque systems built on WhatsApp groups, middlemen, and bargain-basement wages.

The invisible precarious work behind AI.

"An unemployment crisis has created fertile ground for companies to step in with opaque systems built on WhatsApp groups, middlemen, and bargain-basement wages."

restofworld.org/2025/kenya-c...

Virtually every ABM applied to study physical climate impacts embraces agents heterogeneous in economic roles (e.g., households, businesses, governments, insurers, banks; Taberna et al. 2020), in attributes (e.g., incomes, behavioral biases, social networks) or strategies (e.g., decision-making grounded in expected utility vs. prospect theory; see De Koning et al. 2017; Magliocca and Walls, 2018). Agents could also alternate their behavioral strategies endogenously. For example, farmers choose among four empirically grounded behavioral strategies as their performances update based on agents’ past economic decisions, taken adaptation measures, and droughts affecting individual farmers in the ABM developed by van Duinen et al. (2016)

Complexity Economics View on Physical Climate Change Risk and Adaptation
Filatova+
dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

Figure illustrates how dominant the dollar remains. Each bar in the figure represents a different segment of the financial market, and in each case, the dollar is clearly dominant.

"how dominant the dollar remains"

the USD is the main currency across segments of global financial market

Nearly 50% of international debt securities are denominated in dollars, far higher than the 25% share of global GDP accounted for by the US economy.53 This asymmetry is plotted in Figure 23, where the United States appears well above the 45-degree line, highlighting the US dollar’s preeminent role as an international currency. As Figure 2.4 makes clear, the euro plays an outsized role in international finance, although its share of the amount of international bonds outstanding, at about 40%, is smaller. As will be discussed in detail below, the international role of the renminbi has increased somewhat over the last decade. However, its role in international finance remains comparatively small not only in absolute terms, but also relative to China’s share of world output or its role in global manufacturing trade

Geneva 28: Geopolitical Tensions and International Fragmentation: Evidence and Implications
Chari+
cepr.org/voxeu/column...

~50% of international debt securities are denominated in USD
while US GDP 25% of global economy

Graph of APCs of journals publishing social ecological research - from lows of Ecology and Society and Ecosystems and People -> 12X greater in Nature journals

Journal Open-access Article Page Charges

Huge range of
article page charges for a collection of journals
publishing
Social-ecological systems research

Clear pattern
for profit are much more expensive

(most society journals provide discounts for members usually 15-20% + waivers)

Spatial Insurance of Distinct Ecological Functions

Communities can act as functional sources and sustain rare ecological roles across space. We reveal patterns of functional vulnerability for plants and birds

Check out our Perspective in Ecol Lett

👉 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🌐🌍🦤🪴🍁🧪

Energy flows reveal declining ecosystem functions by animals across Africa - Nature An ecosystem energetics approach, quantifying trophic energy flows across species, offers a unified framework for linking animal biodiversity loss to changes in ecosystem function and Earth system pro...

modelling changes in ecosystem fn based on changes in African BII data

Energy flows reveal declining ecosystem functions by animals across Africa
Loft+
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

connecting BII to energy and material flows
allows
impact of biodiversity loss
to be integrated into earth system models

There is high variability in intactness among functional groups of mammals, which range from 20 to 82% (Extended Data Fig. 2). Large herbivore and carnivore species (>20 kg) have experienced the greatest declines in abundance (BII = 20–52% and 25–51%, respectively), followed by primates (46–65%). These groups are relatively low in species richness and therefore contribute less towards total intactness compared with the more species-rich orders of bats (BII = 64–80%), insectivores (64–74%) and rodents (61–82%), which have retained on average almost double the intactness of larger mammals. There is less marked variability in intactness in the other vertebrate taxa, with birds ranging from 47 to 85%, reptiles from 56 to 77% and amphibians from 55 to 74%. Forest interior and cavity-breeding large savanna birds have been the most affected (BII = 47% and 58%, respectively), whereas grassland birds (except for ground nesters) and aerial feeders have been the least affected (82% and 85%, respectively). Among reptiles, chelonians and large specialist snakes and lizards have experienced the largest declines (BII = 56% and 57%, respectively), whereas small generalist snakes and lizards and rupicolous reptiles have experienced the smallest declines (75% and 77%, respectively). Amphibians that breed in plant or tree hollows or in seep or spray zones have been worst affected (BII = 55%), whereas those that breed in ephemeral streams have been least affected (74%). Plant functional groups have large variability in intactness, ranging from 55 to 91%. Shade-tolerant (forest) and swamp trees and shrubs, together with epiphytes, have suffered the greatest losses (BII = 55–56%), whereas forbs and graminoids that resist disturbance31 have been the most resilient to land-use changes (≥90%).

The Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) for different functional groups of vertebrates and plants - varies a lot.

Large herbivore and carnivore species (>20 kg) have experienced the greatest declines in abundance
(BII = 20–52% and 25–51%, respectively)

followed by primates (46–65%)

"Compared with previous assessments of BII (Extended Data Fig. 7), our BII estimate of 80% for the southern African sub-region is a plausible decrease from the 84% estimated for the sub-region in 2005 through a simplified expert elicitation and mapping process4. However, both our and the 2005 BII estimates for southern African are higher than the 74% predicted for the sub-region by the global BII model in 2016 (ref. 13). Considering the full region, the global model estimated a higher BII for sub-Saharan Africa (84%) than our approach (76%). These differences are due to the global model estimating lower BII in lower-rainfall biomes (desert, shrubland and Acacia savanna) and higher BII in higher-rainfall biomes (forest, humid savanna and grassland) than our assessment (Extended Data Fig. 7c). Taken together, these diverse comparisons corroborate our BII assessment, which is in contrast to the existing global BII model, which lacks such corroboration15. The reported uncertainty around our BII scores gives an indication of uncertainty in the underlying expert scores. We also note that this does not fully account for potential systematic biases and other unknown potential sources of error in our assessment, some of which may be shared with the corroborating datasets."

Comparison with previous assessments of the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII)

a) This study’s BII across sub-Saharan Africa (with biomes delineated), compared against
model - Newbold et al. 2016

southern Africa
expert elicitation (Scholes and Biggs 2005)

from:
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

A place-based assessment of biodiversity intactness in sub-Saharan Africa - Nature Regional, place-based biodiversity information is used to comprehensively map and quantify biodiversity intactness of sub-Saharan Africa to inform national and global sustainability policies and plann...

A place-based assessment of biodiversity intactness in sub-Saharan Africa
Clements+
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

based on "place-based knowledge of 200 African biodiversity experts"

approach can be used "to integrate contextual, place-based knowledge into multiscale" biodiversity assessments

US "Policy responses to date have focused on deregulation (FL) or modifying existing rate regulations (CA) to ...Both approaches fail to address underlying causes of the losses—emissions from the fossil-fuel industry and increased development in high-risk areas"
yalelawjournal.org/essay/the-un...

Next, in 'The Nature of Tomorrow' Michael Rawson expertly reveals how past science fictions came to grip the popular imagination & how we acted on these ideas to shape the world around us.

This book reminds us that a sustainable future hinges on our ability to create new visions of tomorrow🧵

Great science happens in great teams — research assessments must try to capture that Europe must reform the ways in which science is evaluated. To boost innovation, it must improve research culture.

Great science happens in great teams — research assessments must try to capture that
doi.org/10.1038/d415...

Great recognition of the importance of team science,
and then terrible advice on how to foster it.

My suggestion:
talk to places that have managed to produce great team science

Tokyo’s Perpetual Resilience Project: Between Local Knowledges and Universal Modernist Concepts | Climate Change and Risk Mitigation

As cities around the globe scramble to face the unpredictable local impacts of runaway climate change and a growing polycrisis, the question is clear: how do we plan and build resilience?

Here’s my take on the Resilience Project of the world’s biggest city, #Tokyo.

Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Fig. 1. Conceptual model for place-based stewardship of wildlife. This model builds on the care–knowledge–agency framework (Enqvist et al. 2018), grounding it in Indigenous and place-based perspectives. Care reflects emotional attachment and responsibility toward place and wildlife; knowledge refers to the practical and ecological understanding that informs action; and agency includes both institutional empowerment and personal virtue, the capacity to act for the common good. These elements are dynamically linked through an ethic of virtue, which is nurtured through mentored, place-based practices.

Fostering care and agency for wildlife stewardship on Indigenous and local lands: the power of place, practice, and virtue
Gomez+
doi.org/10.5751/ES-1...

a model for care based community-based wildlife management

illustrated with case studies from
Guyana and
Democratic Republic of Congo"

Floods Have Killed at Least 1,200 in Southern Asia. Here’s What to Know.

Floods Have Killed at Least 1,200 in Southern Asia. Here’s What to Know. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/w...

First Street says their models are based on peer reviewed science and their methods are available on their website (which is true), though whether rival private companies should have this power rather than the government is a good point.

The effect of modeling choices on updating intensity-duration-frequency curves and stormwater infrastructure designs for climate change - Climatic Change Intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves, commonly used in stormwater infrastructure design to represent characteristics of extreme rainfall, are gradually being updated to reflect expected changes i...

We looked at the impact of routine spatial adjustment choices on future rainfall levels and the choice can change the required stormwater pipe sizes by a lot. We don’t really know the equations for resilience yet. Still muddling through, & often underdelivering in resilience. doi.org/10.1007/s105...

A reminder, in light of that NYT story today, about skill and spread across climate analytics providers:

Getting good climate info in the hands of individuals would be highly valuable. Just not convinced we're actually there yet.

Flood death toll rises rapidly across south-east Asia to more than 900 Large parts of Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Sri Lanka reeling after rare cluster of storms

"Flooding across much of south-east Asia fuelled by a rare cluster of three tropical storms has claimed the lives of more than 900 people in five countries, with Indonesia the worst hit so far"
on.ft.com/3KhnS2q

Tropical cyclones in 2025
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropica...

Zillow Removes Climate Risk Scores From Home Listings

"Zillow, [USA's] largest real estate listings site, has quietly removed a feature that showed the risks from extreme weather for more than one million home sale listings on its site.
...users can click through to view climate risk scores for a specific property."
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...

🧪

Seven key principles for the regenerative governance of social-ecological systems. The seven principles depicted here draw on the seven central insights of resilience and regenerative systems literature as summarized in Fig. 1 for resilience (i, iii, iv) and Fig. 2 for regeneration (ii, v, vi, vii). While each item is derived from either body of literature on resilience or regeneration, the list of items offered here is fully complementary. See main text for details and references and Table 1 for some of the most pertinent similarities and differences between the two bodies of literature

Resilience and regeneration for a world in crisis
Fischer+
doi.org/10.1007/s132...

building on resilience thinking
"regeneration can help through its explicit focus on human agency and mutualistic social-ecological relationships...
‘Poly-opportunities’ thus become a conceptual possibility"

"Exposure to high-risk assets in Tether’s reserve portfolio has increased over the past year. These holdings include corporate bonds, precious metals, bitcoin, secured loans, and other investments that are subject to credit, market, interest-rate, and foreign-exchange risks and for which disclosures remain limited. Such assets accounted for 24% of total reserves as of Sept. 30, 2025, compared with 17% on Sept. 30, 2024. More importantly, Tether’s exposure to bitcoin has also increased. On Sept. 30, 2024, bitcoin represented about 4% of USDT in circulation, below the 5.1% overcollateralization margin implied by a collateralization ratio of 105.1%. As of the latest attestation, bitcoin represents 5.6% of USDT in circulation, exceeding the 3.9% overcollateralization margin associated with a collateralization ratio of 103.9%. A decline in the price of bitcoin or the value of other higher-risk assets, could therefore reduce collateral coverage and result in USDT becoming undercollateralized. We believe the increasing share of risky assets exposes USDT's reserves to greater market fluctuations"

S&P Global Ratings on Tether (USDT)
"the longest-standing stablecoin with the largest volume in circulation"

"asset assessment of 5 (weak) reflects
the rise in exposure to high-risk assets in USDT's reserves over the past year
and
persistent gaps in disclosure"
www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/r...

MORNING SUN
(2003)
2 hr documentary about China's Cultural Revolution
focussed on first-hand perspectives from former Red Guards and victims of the era
www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3Ai...

reviews:
www.rottentomatoes.com/m/morning_sun

Scientific Reports has a ⬆️ Impact Inflation: a very high IF given their citation network (self-citing, citation cartels, etc).

They'll even typeset & publish AI slop for a fee!

Strain: bit.ly/StrainQSS
Strain explorer β: pagoba.shinyapps.io/strain_explo...

#SciPub #ResearchIntegrity #AcademicSky

Very useful analysis of how the metaphors have changed over time.