Managing Canada’s land- and seascapes for multiple ecosystem services in the Anthropocene: introduction to the Food, Fiber, Fuel, and Function collection

As the world recovers from the worst ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we assess a “new normal” that will define much of the next decade, many of us hope that we will find new energy to address the global challenge of managing our relationships with the environment. In particular, we must develop strategies to reconcile our need to use the environment to provide food, energy, and other basic necessities while preserving all the other ecosystem services on which we depend for a good life.

As noted by decades of research in the broad area of planetary health, including the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA 2005), the IPBES Global Assessment (IPBES 2019), and the Sustainable Development Goals (UN General Assembly 2015), humanity’s impact on the biosphere is enormous and growing (Rockström et al. 2009). We live in the Anthropocene, a time defined by what some scholars describe as “the great acceleration” where many significant indicators of both economic activity and environmental degradation are rising exponentially (Steffen et al. 2015a). Humanity is exceeding a “safe operating space” in terms of our impact on biodiversity, nutrient cycling, and the climate, threatening ourselves with the very real prospects that major ecosystems from the Amazon to the Great Barrier Reef and to the polar ice sheets will become irrevocably changed over the next two generations (Steffen et al. 2015b).

At the same time, unprecedented amounts of data give us hitherto unimaginable abilities to measure human impacts on the environment. Technological innovations including artificial intelligence, robotics, and broadband accessible worldwide also provide us with a platform to develop new tools to mitigate our impact on the planet (Weersink et al. 2018; Rotz et al. 2019). In short, by applying the data revolution to agriculture, fisheries, and forestry we may be able to both better understand and more sustainably manage the environment.

But data and information alone will not solve our complicated and problematic relationship with the environment. We must also consider how and what we are managing and governing, and what kind of relationships we want to have with the natural world. Research on natural resource management and governance has recently recognized the importance of approaches that reflect the complexity of involved interests, actors, and worldviews. As such, participation, both in research and decision-making, can help to move from a top-down approach to pathways that reflect the diversity of relationships people have with others and the natural world (Mann et al. 2015). Indigenous, local, and scientific knowledge systems together function as a base for innovation and new insights (Tengö et al. 2014). In the Canadian context, “Two-Eyed Seeing,” not only features the perspective of knowledge coexistence rather than integration of Indigenous knowledge and Western scientific knowledge, but also asks knowledge holders to put their knowledge in action (Reid et al. 2021). Together, a responsibility to take action, the recognition of the variety of human–nature relationships, and the need of a transformation towards sustainability, has brought to the forefront the idea of “Earth Stewardship”, a social–ecological framework for sustaining healthy human–nature relationships in a rapidly changing world (Chapin 2020).

This collection picks up on many of themes from this broad literature and presents a collection of essays, research papers, and perspective pieces drawn from the first two years of work by a team of researchers funded by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada called ResNet.