RESUMEN
Biocultural approaches that acknowledge the multiple and dynamic relationships between the diversity of cultures and nature are growing in popularity in sustainability research. Scientific contributions to biocultural approaches written in Spanish are numerous, including influential work on biocultural memory, biocultural heritage and biocultural ethics. However, despite linguistic diversity being considered essential in knowledge production for assuring broad and balanced evidence to successfully cope with sustainability challenges, non-English literature is rarely reviewed and taken into account in English-language scientific knowledge production and publications. This review assesses how the scientific literature in Spanish conceptualizes and applies biocultural approaches, showing their richness beyond the Anglophone predominance in academic knowledge production and communication. The results suggest that insights from Spanish-language scientific literature could contribute alternative methodological and theoretical pathways for biocultural approaches that might foster transformations for more sustainable human-nature relationships. We conclude by highlighting avenues that could bring more plural biocultural studies.
RESUMEN: Los enfoques bioculturales, que reconocen relaciones múltiples y dinámicas entre la diversidad de culturas y la naturaleza, son cada vez más populares en la investigación sobre la sostenibilidad. Las contribuciones científicas en español son numerosas, incluyendo trabajos sobre la memoria, la ética y el patrimonio biocultural. La diversidad lingüística se considera esencial en la producción de conocimientos para asegurar una base equilibrada de evidencias que permita afrontar los retos de la sostenibilidad. Sin embargo, rara vez se considera la literatura de habla no inglesa en la producción científica en inglés. Esta revisión evalúa cómo la literatura científica en español conceptualiza y aplica enfoques bioculturales, mostrando su riqueza más allá de la predominancia anglosajona en la producción de conocimiento académico. Los resultados sugieren que las perspectivas de la literatura en español podrían aportar propuestas teóricas y metodológicas alternativas. Concluimos destacando maneras que podrían contribuir a hacer más plurales las investigaciones bioculturales.
RESUMEN
Eradicating world hunger-the aim of Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2)-requires a social-ecological approach to agrifood systems. However, previous work has mostly focused on one or the other. Here, we apply such a holistic approach to depicting the global food panorama through a quantitative multivariate assessment of 43 indicators of food sovereignty and 28 indicators of sociodemographics, social being, and environmental sustainability in 150 countries. The results identify 5 world regions and indicate the existence of an agrifood debt (i.e., disequilibria between regions in the natural resources consumed, the environmental impacts produced, and the social wellbeing attained by populations that play different roles within the globalized agrifood system). Three spotlights underpin this debt: 1) a severe contrast in diets and food security between regions, 2) a concern about the role that international agrifood trade is playing in regional food security, and 3) a mismatch between regional biocapacity and food security. Our results contribute to broadening the debate beyond food security from a social-ecological perspective, incorporating environmental and social dimensions.
RESUMEN
Ecosystem service assessments have increasingly been used to support environmental management policies, mainly based on biophysical and economic indicators. However, few studies have coped with the social-cultural dimension of ecosystem services, despite being considered a research priority. We examined how ecosystem service bundles and trade-offs emerge from diverging social preferences toward ecosystem services delivered by various types of ecosystems in Spain. We conducted 3,379 direct face-to-face questionnaires in eight different case study sites from 2007 to 2011. Overall, 90.5% of the sampled population recognized the ecosystem's capacity to deliver services. Formal studies, environmental behavior, and gender variables influenced the probability of people recognizing the ecosystem's capacity to provide services. The ecosystem services most frequently perceived by people were regulating services; of those, air purification held the greatest importance. However, statistical analysis showed that socio-cultural factors and the conservation management strategy of ecosystems (i.e., National Park, Natural Park, or a non-protected area) have an effect on social preferences toward ecosystem services. Ecosystem service trade-offs and bundles were identified by analyzing social preferences through multivariate analysis (redundancy analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis). We found a clear trade-off among provisioning services (and recreational hunting) versus regulating services and almost all cultural services. We identified three ecosystem service bundles associated with the conservation management strategy and the rural-urban gradient. We conclude that socio-cultural preferences toward ecosystem services can serve as a tool to identify relevant services for people, the factors underlying these social preferences, and emerging ecosystem service bundles and trade-offs.