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Response diversity as a sustainability strategy

Abstract

Financial advisers recommend a diverse portfolio to respond to market fluctuations across sectors. Similarly, nature has evolved a diverse portfolio of species to maintain ecosystem function amid environmental fluctuations. In urban planning, public health, transport and communications, food production, and other domains, however, this feature often seems ignored. As we enter an era of unprecedented turbulence at the planetary level, we argue that ample responses to this new reality — that is, response diversity — can no longer be taken for granted and must be actively designed and managed. We describe here what response diversity is, how it is expressed and how it can be enhanced and lost.

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Fig. 1: Major maritime choke points and primary (solid blue) and secondary (dotted blue) shipping routes.
Fig. 2: A conceptual illustration of response diversity.
Fig. 3: How response diversity manifests at different spatial scales and how this can influence the propagation of risk.

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Acknowledgements

This Perspective is the result of the Beijer Institute’s Askö meetings supported by the Beijer Foundation. M.N. was partly funded by a grant from the Swedish Research Council (no. 2020-04586). C.Q. was partly supported by the Swedish Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (grant no. 2017.0137) and the FeedBaCks FORMAS/Era project (grant no. 2020-02360).

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B.W., A.-S.C., M.N., J.M.A., E.A., T.E. and C.Q. led the conceptualization and writing of the paper. All authors contributed to the conceptualization and editing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Anne-Sophie Crépin.

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Walker, B., Crépin, AS., Nyström, M. et al. Response diversity as a sustainability strategy. Nat Sustain 6, 621–629 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-01048-7

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