Alberto González-García

Protected areas cannot halt biodiversity loss in isolation; integrating them with surrounding human‐dominated landscapes is critical. However, this integration is challenged by substantial landscape heterogeneity at protected area borders, making it difficult to determine cross‐border changes in ecosystem service provision. To address this knowledge gap, we developed a novel framework for characterizing these dynamics by analyzing ecosystem service gradients along protected area borders. For 16 protected areas in the French Alps, we used a mix of established biophysical models and novel connectivity‐based models for mobile species to assess 12 ecosystem services. These services were aggregated into three stakeholder‐driven domains reflecting rural, cultural, and urban management priorities. Automated polynomial regression analysis classified borders into five gradient types. The most common types were decreasing gradients, representing a decline in ecosystem services outside the protected area, and increasing gradients with the opposite pattern. Our analysis revealed that these patterns are driven by specific landscape configurations and uncovered frequent trade‐offs between the three management priorities; for example, landscapes supporting rural priorities often degrade cultural and urban ones. We also identified key opportunities for synergies by identifying areas where ecosystem services for all three priority domains increased simultaneously outside the protected area. This spatially explicit typology provides a powerful diagnostic tool for designing targeted interventions, such as prioritizing habitat restoration where ecosystem services decline or managing agricultural landscapes to mitigate conflicts across management priorities, supporting a more effective integration of protected areas into the wider landscape.

1. Global restoration targets, including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the European Union’s Nature Restoration Regulation, call for extending restoration beyond protected area boundaries to reconnect isolated ecosystems, yet implementing these landscape-scale interventions forces trade-offs between biophysical effectiveness and social feasibility. 2. In the Grenoble region of the French Alps, we used a gradient analysis of 12 ecosystem services across protected area interfaces to design and compare two restoration scenarios. Both were built from the same set of co-selected interventions but differed only in their spatial allocation: a ‘Technical’ scenario targeting areas of low ecosystem service continuity around protected areas, and a ‘Participatory’ scenario co-designed with local stakeholders. 3. Both scenarios physically modified about 14.5% of the landscape, mostly through a forest-based adaptation strategy, yet their effects reached up to more than 60% of the territory for the most connectivity-dependent services, showing that benefits propagate well beyond the area directly modified. 4. The two scenarios diverged mainly in how they treated agricultural land. The Technical scenario reduced abrupt drops in ecosystem service provision at the protected area edge nearly twice as often as the Participatory one (46% versus 26% of the sharp declines it addressed), and at six locations removed them entirely. However, it concentrated over 99% of its non-forest effort in agricultural diversification, such as diversifying crops and adding hedgerows, the action stakeholders ranked hardest to implement, whereas the Participatory scenario favoured more feasible actions such as river restoration, which met less resistance but missed several critical discontinuities in ecosystem service supply. 5. These contrasts show that biophysical potential and social feasibility can pull restoration in different directions, and that the more effective spatial configuration is not necessarily the more implementable one. 6. Closing the implementation gap for nature-based solutions depended less on expanding the area restored than on where interventions were placed. Gradient-based diagnostics appear most useful not as fixed prescriptions but as tools to steer existing sectoral funding in agriculture, urban planning and forestry toward high-impact locations, an approach transferable to other regions working to reconnect protected areas with their surrounding landscapes as coupled social-ecological systems.

Protected areas cannot halt biodiversity loss in isolation; integrating them with surrounding human-dominated landscapes is critical. However, this integration is challenged by substantial landscape heterogeneity at their borders, hindering our understanding of cross-border changes in ecosystem service provision. We introduce a novel framework for characterizing these dynamics by analyzing ecosystem service gradients along protected area borders. For 16 protected areas in the French Alps, we assessed 12 ecosystem services using a mix of established biophysical models and novel connectivity-based models for mobile species. These were aggregated into three stakeholder-driven domains reflecting respectively rural, cultural, and urban management priorities. Automated polynomial regression analysis classified borders into five gradient types. The most common were ‘Decreasing Gradients’, representing a decline in ecosystem services outside the protected area, and ‘Increasing Gradients’, with the opposite pattern. Our analysis reveals these patterns are driven by specific landscape configurations, uncovering frequent trade-offs between the three management priorities, where, for instance, landscapes supporting rural priorities often degrade cultural and urban ones. We also identify key opportunities for synergies, by identifying areas where ecosystem services for all three priority domains increase simultaneously outside the protected area. This spatially explicit typology provides a powerful diagnostic tool for designing targeted interventions, such as prioritizing habitat restoration where ecosystem services decline or managing agricultural landscapes to mitigate conflicts across management priorities, supporting a more effective integration of protected areas into the wider landscape. Article impact statement: Determining ecosystem service gradients at protected area borders reveals management trade-offs, guiding targeted spatial planning.

Global change poses “wicked problems” that have become ever more complex, pervasive, and damaging. Developing innovative solutions increasingly require diverse research approaches. The Franco-German Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA) program was designed to create a unique international network of top-level research, from fundamental to solution-oriented projects. MOPGA stands out from other large research initiatives by focusing not on a singular central research challenge but on facilitating multidisciplinary interactions between traditionally separated fields. MOPGA recognized that social, natural and engineering sciences share a unifying aim to address global change. In addition to addressing timely and innovative research questions within disciplines, MOPGA worked to improve communication across disciplines via annual meetings for all laureates and their research groups, scientific board exchanges, and public online seminars. Drawing on our MOPGA experiences, we discuss how such exchanges should be extended to meet the needs identified by the scientific community, international policy-makers, and regional stakeholders. In the current political landscape of scientific suppression and heightened mistrust in scientific expertise, the need for such bold, independent and collaborative scientific initiatives is greater than ever.

Conventional spatial planning often treats protected areas as static, self-contained units, failing to address the dynamic ecological and social processes at their borders. This approach is insufficient to halt biodiversity loss, making the integration of protected areas with surrounding human-dominated landscapes a critical challenge. We address this gap with an analytical approach that moves beyond static boundaries by characterizing ecosystem service gradients, offering a more dynamic and responsive tool for conservation.Analyzing 16 protected areas in the French Alps, we modeled 12 ecosystem services using a combination of established biophysical approaches (e.g., for carbon storage and flood regulation) and innovative connectivity-based models for mobile species (e.g., pollinators and seed dispersers). To reflect diverse social perspectives, these services were aggregated into three value domains (rural, cultural, and urban) representing distinct societal demands. To measure gradients, we developed area-based structural buffers: concentric zones of similar landscape permeability that account for how topography and land use facilitate or impede movement. Using automated polynomial regression, we classified the resulting gradient profiles for each border segment into distinct types.Our classification revealed five recurring patterns. The most common were linear 'Decreasing Gradients' (49% of segments), typically marking an abrupt transition to intensive agriculture or urban expansion, and 'Increasing Gradients' (25%). Our analysis reveals these patterns are driven by specific landscape configurations, uncovering frequent trade-offs. For instance, landscapes with small-scale agricultural mosaics that support rural values (like pollination) often fragment the continuous habitats required for cultural and urban services, creating a sharp conflict along the same border. However, our framework also pinpoints critical opportunities for synergies, identifying specific locations where landscape structure supports a simultaneous increase in services across all three value domains. This spatially explicit typology provides a powerful diagnostic tool to design targeted, context-specific interventions, such as prioritizing habitat restoration where all services decline or managing agricultural landscapes to mitigate conflicts, supporting a more effective and equitable integration of protected areas into the wider landscape.

The European Nature Restoration Regulation (NRR) aims to scale Nature-based Solutions across ecosystems in Europe. We evaluate its potential across the Alps for delivering ecosystem services and climate change adaptation for three of its binding targets: i) restoring rivers; ii) increasing urban green spaces in cities; and iii) integrating hedgerows into agricultural landscapes. Our analysis indicates the potential of implementing the regulation to mitigate floods from rivers. However, the capacity of the NRR to mitigate heatwaves in urban areas is limited, and we found no significant effect of hedgerow implementation for drought adaptation through groundwater recharge in agricultural landscapes. Our spatially explicit cost-benefit analysis demonstrates that the NRR would be more cost-effective if vulnerable areas were prioritized. Overall, these findings call for an increase of the ambition and budget of the NRR to effectively address climate change adaptation.

Successful adaptation often involves changes to the decision context to enable new ways of thinking and acting on climate change. Using 16 adaptation initiatives the authors were engaged with, we analysed how and why decision contexts changed to identify ways to improve adaptation as a process of collective deliberation and social learning. We used the scope of the adaptation issue and governance arrangements to classify initiatives into four types and scored changes in the decision context using three frameworks: (1) the values, rules and knowledge (VRK) perspective to identify changes to adaptation decision‐making; (2) the five dimensions of futures consciousness to identify the building of adaptation capabilities and (3) the social learning cycle to reveal evidence of reflexive learning. Initiatives using novel governance arrangements for discrete problems (‘problem governance’) or complex, systemic issues (‘systems governance’) scored highest for influences of VRK, futures consciousness and the social learning cycle on the decision context. Initiatives using existing management for discrete problems (‘problem management’) scored moderately for change in the decision context, while those using existing management for systemic issues (‘systems management’) scored low because change was often impeded by existing rules. All three frameworks influenced decision contexts in systems governance initiatives. Problem governance initiatives revealed interactions of VRK and futures consciousness but limited influence of VRK on the social learning cycle. Scope and governance arrangements differ with the adaptation issue and initiatives adapt over time: some small‐scale ones became more systemic, developed novel governance arrangements and changed the decision context. Our findings do not show that some adaptation initiatives are better or more transformative than others; just that their scope and appropriate governance arrangements are different. This questions the notion that successful adaptation requires building generic transformative adaptation approaches and capabilities. There is a diversity of arrangements that work. What is important is to align the approach to the adaptation problem. We suggest two directions for improving adaptation initiatives: first, by influencing how they can shift between problem and systems focus and between standard management and novel governance, and secondly, by using methods to diagnose and direct change in the decision context. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Adaptation to climate change is a social–ecological process: it is not solely a result of natural processes or human decisions but emerges from multiple relations within social systems, within ecological systems and between them. We propose a novel analytical framework to evaluate social–ecological relations in nature-based adaptation, encompassing social (people–people), ecological (nature–nature) and social–ecological (people–nature) relations. Applying this framework to 25 case studies, we analyse the associations among these relations and identify archetypes of social–ecological adaptation. Our findings revealed that adaptation actions with more people–nature relations mobilize more social and ecological relations. We identified four archetypes, with distinct modes of adaptation along a gradient of people–nature interaction scores, summarized as: (i) nature control; (ii) biodiversity-based; (iii) ecosystem services-based; and (iv) integrated approaches. This study contributes to a nuanced understanding of nature-based adaptation, highlighting the importance of integrating diverse relations across social and ecological systems. Our findings offer valuable insights for informing the design and implementation of adaptation strategies and policies. This article is part of the discussion meeting issue ‘Bending the curve towards nature recovery: building on Georgina Mace's legacy for a biodiverse future’.