The study rests on 22 semi-structured interviews with municipal officials, philanthropic funders, non-governmental organization leaders, Indigenous representatives, and community organizers across Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, supplemented by participant observation at a regional climate adaptation event. Participants were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling, with data collection continuing until thematic saturation was reached. All interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, anonymized, and analyzed through an inductive thematic approach, allowing themes such as funding access, policy support, and barriers to collaboration to emerge from the data rather than being imposed in advance. The work received ethical approval from the Grenfell Campus Research Ethics Board and forms part of a larger transdisciplinary project on collaborative governance in financing climate adaptation and mitigation.

Conceptually, the research is anchored in the Socio-Ecological Systems framework, which treats communities not as isolated units of adaptation but as nodes embedded within interconnected social, institutional, and ecological systems. From this perspective, the most effective adaptation strategies emerge from feedback loops between community experience, institutional support, and environmental change. The author also frames the translation of local knowledge as a three-stage process: recognition, in which local knowledge is acknowledged as a valid source of environmental information; valuing, in which it gains real influence over the priorities and design of adaptation plans; and use, in which it is applied alongside scientific tools to concrete planning decisions, such as combining elders’ memories of past shoreline positions with geospatial mapping.

The findings are striking in their consistency: local knowledge is central to building climate resilience, not peripheral to it. Participants described a rich tapestry of knowledge forms, from fishers’ observations of shifting marine species to the Traditional Ecological Knowledge held by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples, which reflects generations of observation of seasonal change, animal behaviour, and land management. The study also highlights the concept of Two-Eyed Seeing, introduced by Mi’kmaq Elder Albert Marshall, which calls for weaving Indigenous and Western ways of knowing together rather than treating them as competing systems. One participant captured the grassroots ethos succinctly, explaining that the work is not about telling communities what to do but about communities receiving support and encouragement for what they are already doing and want to do.

In practice, this knowledge is being mobilized through four broad categories of adaptation activity. Education and outreach initiatives, including arts communication projects and museum preservation efforts responding to shoreline erosion, rely heavily on cultural knowledge and build public engagement. Community and skills-building efforts, such as public education sessions and community-garden knowledge-sharing, transmit expertise effectively at small scale. Natural infrastructure projects, including living shorelines and regenerative agriculture, showed the deepest integration of traditional ecological knowledge, drawing directly on longstanding local practices. Community planning initiatives, particularly municipal climate advisory committees with formal community representation, demonstrated the strongest institutional uptake. In one municipality, eight community consultation sessions on climate adaptation directly informed local plans, while in another, five of twelve council seats were held in ways that fostered trust and shared responsibility.

Yet the study documents a persistent gap between recognition and substantive use. Systemic barriers, including rigid, short-term funding programs, top-down policy frameworks, and heavy bureaucratic requirements, continue to limit the consistent and equitable application of local knowledge. One participant from a community NGO criticized federal funding structures as formulaic, with everything prescribed in advance and little room for genuine collaboration. A municipal official noted the absence of internal resources to adequately cover climate programs, and another organization described the lack of continuity between short grants as very harmful to progress. Smaller and rural communities face particular disadvantages, forced to compete against large municipalities with dedicated administrative staff for funding opportunities they often lack the capacity to pursue.

Equity concerns surfaced repeatedly. A community foundation representative pointed to Nova Scotia’s history of environmental racism and suggested it extends to adaptation efforts, underscoring the need to embed climate justice principles in planning. Volunteer burnout emerged as another strain on smaller organizations. At the same time, participants identified clear enablers: strong local leadership, grassroots engagement that lets communities define their own priorities, collaborative governance, and flexible funding arrangements. Multi-year funding commitments were described as a game changer, allowing organizations to plan and sustain projects rather than lurching from one grant cycle to the next.

The role of partnerships proved double-edged. Multi-stakeholder platforms connecting municipalities, Indigenous groups, and NGOs were praised for pooling resources and building legitimacy, with one program coordinator noting that such partnerships ensure local knowledge shapes coastal resilience projects. But power dynamics matter enormously. One community organizer observed that input is often sought while final decisions ignore community priorities, such as protecting cultural sites. This distinction between being consulted and having actual influence echoes the scholarly argument that meaningful knowledge co-production requires redistributing decision-making authority, not simply inviting participation. The clearest cases of effective collaboration in the study were precisely those where such redistribution occurred.

Federal policy frameworks received a mixed assessment. Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy was seen as supportive in principle but weak in practice, with one provincial program planner observing that it encourages local knowledge while lacking clear guidelines for implementation. Large funding programs, such as the 41-million-dollar Climate-Resilient Coastal Communities initiative running from 2023 to 2028, provided essential resources, enabling one Nova Scotia municipality to hire local experts to map erosion risks based on community input. But access inequities persist, and rigid use-case restrictions can leave communities unable to pay for what they actually need most: staff and people. By contrast, municipal-level policies establishing climate advisory committees were praised for creating goodwill by giving community members a formal voice in decision-making.

The study concludes that resilience cannot be delivered from the top down; it must be built through collaboration and continuous learning across the system. The author calls for policy shifts to institutionalize long-term, locally controlled funding, formalize community participation in decision-making, and embed equity-centered, co-productive approaches into adaptation frameworks. Without these enabling conditions, the role of local knowledge risks being reduced to a symbolic gesture rather than serving as a core driver of adaptation. The findings carry weight well beyond Atlantic Canada, offering a template for any jurisdiction grappling with how to move beyond token acknowledgment of community expertise toward climate action that is adaptive, context-specific, and grounded in the lived realities of the people who know their places best. As the author notes, the study’s qualitative design offers transferable insight into similar rural and coastal contexts rather than statistically generalizable conclusions, and future research probing how local knowledge shapes the most contentious decisions, such as managed retreat, would be a valuable extension.

Subject of Research: Integration of local and Indigenous knowledge into community climate change adaptation planning in Atlantic Canada

Article Title: Place-based climate adaptation: How Atlantic Canadian communities translate local knowledge into action

Article References: Yirenkyi, E. (2026). Place-based climate adaptation: How Atlantic Canadian communities translate local knowledge into action. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(10), e0000291. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000291

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000291

Keywords: climate adaptation, local knowledge, Indigenous knowledge, Atlantic Canada, socio-ecological systems, co-production, climate governance, funding, coastal communities, participatory planning, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland

The study, led by Moritz Egger, Michael Curran, and Johanna Jacobi together with colleagues in Ecuador and Switzerland, set out to address a persistent weakness in sustainability science. Most assessment frameworks used in agriculture are designed by experts and imposed from the outside, with criteria chosen by analysts rather than by the people whose lives the assessments are meant to improve. When smallholder farmers are asked to evaluate development pathways, they are often handed a menu of indicators they did not create, in a language and logic that may not reflect their own priorities. The research team wanted to know what happens when that logic is inverted, when farmers first generate their own criteria for what a sustainable future looks like and then deliberate together over which futures best satisfy those criteria.

The method unfolded in two stages. First, the researchers used a participatory technique called Photovoice, in which farmers photograph aspects of their own environment and livelihoods and use the images to articulate what matters to them. From this process, each farmer group generated its own set of sustainability criteria, grounded in local experience rather than external checklists. These criteria then became the foundation for a series of two-day workshops involving eight farmer groups and thirty-six participants across two contrasting regions: the Ecuadorian Amazon and the coastal lowlands. In the workshops, farmers evaluated four distinct scenarios for the future of their farming systems using three complementary techniques: intuitive ranking, in which participants simply ordered the scenarios by preference; urgency ratings, which captured how pressing participants considered the issues embedded in each scenario; and swing-weighting, a structured method from decision analysis that asks participants to assign relative importance to criteria by imagining the difference each would make when moved from its worst to its best state.

What makes the study methodologically distinctive is the set of indices the researchers developed to measure deliberation itself. Rather than simply recording final rankings, they calculated measures of individual deliberative reasoning, capturing how coherently each participant connected criteria to scenario preferences, and measures of intersubjective consensus, capturing how tightly the group’s judgments converged. These indices were computed both before and after the deliberation phase, allowing the team to observe not just where groups ended up but how the process of talking together changed their reasoning. This before-and-after design transforms what is often a purely qualitative observation, that deliberation seems to help groups agree, into something that can be quantified, compared, and potentially transferred to other participatory planning contexts.

The two regions told strikingly different stories. In the Amazon, where the farmer groups began with intuitive preferences for the four scenarios that diverged noticeably from one another, deliberation produced a remarkable convergence. By the end of the workshops, every Amazonian group had arrived at the same ranking of scenarios, a consensus that had not existed when the sessions began. Just as significantly, the weights that farmers assigned to their sustainability criteria shifted during deliberation, moving toward long-term environmental and social concerns and away from shorter-term or more narrowly economic considerations. In other words, the act of discussing trade-offs with peers did not merely smooth over disagreements; it appears to have changed what participants valued, prompting them to give greater weight to the slower, less visible benefits of environmental stewardship and social cohesion.

On the coast, the dynamics were almost the inverse. The coastal groups entered the workshops already sharing a strong preference for an environmentally restorative scenario, one that emphasized rebuilding ecological health in their farming landscapes. Here, deliberation did not change the overall ranking of scenarios at all. Instead, it reinforced the existing consensus, substantially increasing the degree of agreement on how the sustainability criteria themselves should be prioritized. The coastal experience suggests that deliberation is not only a tool for resolving conflict but also a mechanism for consolidating and sharpening shared values that a community already holds, making implicit agreement explicit and robust enough to support collective action.

Across both regions, the researchers observed a subtler and more intellectually intriguing pattern. In some groups, the alignment between intuitive rankings of scenarios and the rankings derived from the formal criteria-based weighting grew closer after deliberation, suggesting that participants had learned to reason in ways that connected their gut preferences to their articulated values. In other groups, the two modes of judgment actually diverged further, which the authors interpret as a sign that deliberation can surface trade-offs that participants had not previously recognized. When a farmer realizes that the scenario she instinctively favors performs poorly on a criterion she deeply cares about, the resulting tension is not a failure of the method but a genuine insight, one that a purely intuitive or purely technical evaluation would have concealed.

The modest but consistent increases in the importance-consensus and individual reasoning indices across the workshops indicate that these were not dramatic conversions but incremental refinements, the kind of slow alignment that real-world collective decision-making typically requires. This matters for anyone designing sustainability interventions, because it suggests that a single workshop cannot manufacture consensus where the underlying conditions for it are absent, but it can reliably tighten the connection between what people value and what they choose, and it can do so in a way that is visible and measurable. The deliberation indices proposed in the study provide a transferable framework for tracking learning, reasoning, and consensus in participatory planning, something that has long been called for in the literature on deliberative democracy and environmental governance but rarely operationalized with this level of specificity.

The broader implications reach well beyond Ecuadorian cocoa. Smallholder agriculture is where many of the world’s sustainability transitions will be won or lost, and the study demonstrates that the raw material for those transitions, locally grounded criteria, shared narratives, and the willingness to weigh trade-offs openly, already exists within farming communities. What is often missing is a process that can articulate and consolidate these shared visions without hijacking them with externally defined metrics. Deliberative multicriteria evaluation, when anchored in community-generated criteria from the very start, appears to fill that gap. For policymakers, NGOs, and researchers seeking context-sensitive interventions, the message is that the deliberation itself is not a soft preliminary to the real analysis; it is the analysis, and it can be measured, compared, and improved.

There is also a caution embedded in the findings. Because deliberation can both stabilize and reconfigure preferences, practitioners cannot assume that a consensus reached through discussion is simply the sum of pre-existing individual views, nor that it will remain static once trade-offs become clearer over time. The Ecuadorian cocoa farmers showed that communities are capable of sophisticated, self-directed reasoning about their own futures, but the process demands time, skilled facilitation, and genuine openness to the possibility that the outcome may surprise everyone, including the participants. In a world where sustainability planning is too often a box-ticking exercise performed on communities rather than with them, this study offers a concrete, quantifiable demonstration that giving people the tools to deliberate on their own terms changes not only the answers they reach but the values they bring to reaching them.

Subject of Research: Deliberative multicriteria evaluation of sustainability pathways in Ecuadorian cocoa farming communities

Article Title: Consolidation of shared sustainability visions through deliberative multicriteria evaluation in Ecuadorian cocoa farming communities

Article References: Egger, M., Curran, M., Aubert, A., Kearney, N., Ventura, D., Zambrano Mohauad, G. A., Santos Ordóñez, A. P., & Jacobi, J. (2026). Consolidation of shared sustainability visions through deliberative multicriteria evaluation in Ecuadorian cocoa farming communities. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(9), e0000279. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000279

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000279

Keywords: cocoa farming, Ecuador, deliberation, multicriteria evaluation, sustainability transitions, smallholder agriculture, Photovoice, consensus, participatory planning, swing-weighting, Amazon, environmental governance

The study, led by Tesfaye Abdeta and Yared Girma of Adama Science and Technology University together with Daniel Lirebo of Ethiopian Civil Service University, set out to fill a stubborn evidence gap. While large capitals such as Addis Ababa have attracted considerable research attention, secondary cities — the places absorbing much of Sub-Saharan Africa’s explosive urban growth — remain poorly documented. Bishoftu, a fast-expanding town in Ethiopia’s Oromia region, offered an ideal case: a settlement where pressure on green infrastructure is intensifying, yet where almost no empirical data existed on what residents actually understand about the ecosystem services around them.

Methodologically, the team took a mixed-methods approach. They surveyed 383 households selected through stratified random sampling, ensuring that respondents were drawn proportionally from different parts of the town rather than from a single convenient neighborhood. The questionnaire data were complemented by key informant interviews with local experts, and the results were analyzed using descriptive statistics, inferential tests, and thematic analysis of the qualitative material. The research protocol was reviewed by the Research Ethics Committee of Adama Science and Technology University, which granted a waiver of formal approval on the grounds that the study involved minimal risk and non-sensitive topics; informed verbal consent was obtained from all participants.

The headline finding is a striking hierarchy in environmental awareness. Respondents rated their awareness of different categories of ecosystem services on a scale, and cultural services — the recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits of green space — scored highest, with a mean of 3.85. Regulating services, such as climate moderation and air purification, came second at 3.28. Provisioning services, the tangible products like food and raw materials, followed at 2.9. Supporting services — the slow, foundational processes that underpin all the others — trailed far behind at just 1.5. In other words, people see the park bench but not the soil beneath it.

Drilling down to individual services sharpened the picture. Recreation scored 4.6 and aesthetic value 4.3, the two most recognized benefits of urban green infrastructure in Bishoftu. At the opposite end of the spectrum, nutrient cycling registered a mean of just 1.2 and soil formation 1.4, making them the least understood services of all. The pattern repeated when residents were asked how important each category was to them: cultural services again topped the list at 3.8. Pairwise comparisons made the preference explicit — a strong majority of respondents favored cultural services over regulating services (82 percent), provisioning services (70 percent), and supporting services (85 percent).

That preference would be less concerning if the invisible services were thriving on their own, but residents reported the opposite. Most respondents perceived a decline in both the extent and the quality of urban green spaces in Bishoftu over the past decade. Alongside that physical shrinkage, they noted reductions in key regulating services: air quality improvement, flood regulation, and temperature moderation were all reported to have weakened. For a town expanding rapidly in a warming climate, the perceived erosion of cooling and flood-control functions is more than a statistical footnote — it is a warning that the benefits residents least notice may be the ones disappearing fastest.

The study also probed who is more aware of ecosystem services, and the answers carry practical weight for planners. Regression analysis identified education as a significant predictor of awareness, with a standardized coefficient of 0.18 and a p-value of .001. Physical proximity mattered too: people living closer to green spaces were significantly more aware of what those spaces provide, with a coefficient of 0.14 and a p-value of .011. Notably, gender and home ownership showed no significant relationship with awareness. The implication is twofold — environmental knowledge in Bishoftu is unevenly distributed along educational lines, and it is shaped by everyday contact with nature, meaning that access to green space is not just an amenity issue but an information issue.

Why does awareness matter so much for a town’s trees? The authors point toward the politics of urban land. Green infrastructure in fast-growing cities competes directly with housing, roads, and commerce, and when the services a park provides are invisible to the public, the constituency for defending that park shrinks. A community that values a lakeside grove mainly as a picnic spot may offer little resistance when it is cleared for construction, unaware that the same grove was moderating local temperatures, buffering stormwater, and regenerating soil. Awareness gaps, in this sense, translate directly into vulnerability for the least visible ecosystem functions.

The Bishoftu findings echo a broader challenge across Sub-Saharan Africa, where secondary cities are expanding faster than planning systems can adapt. The researchers argue that closing the awareness gap requires participatory, multifunctional, and policy-driven approaches to green infrastructure management. Participatory planning would bring residents into decisions about green space before it is lost; multifunctional design would deliberately bundle visible cultural benefits with the regulating and supporting services that currently go unnoticed; and policy-driven management would embed ecosystem service protection in the formal planning instruments of fast-growing municipalities rather than leaving green space to survive by accident.

For a town like Bishoftu, the study offers a clear diagnosis and an actionable prescription. Residents already care deeply about the beauty and recreational value of their green spaces — that enthusiasm is an asset. The task now, the researchers suggest, is to build on that visible appreciation and make the hidden economy of urban nature equally legible: to teach, plan, and design so that nutrient cycling and soil formation become as real to a city’s residents as a shady afternoon in the park. As Ethiopia’s secondary cities continue to grow, the difference between green infrastructure that endures and green infrastructure that vanishes may depend on exactly that shift in perception.

Subject of Research: Community awareness and perception of ecosystem services provided by urban green infrastructure in a rapidly urbanizing Ethiopian secondary city

Article Title: Community awareness and perceived ecosystem services of urban green infrastructure in Bishoftu, Ethiopia

Article References: Abdeta, T., Lirebo, D., & Girma, Y. (2026). Community awareness and perceived ecosystem services of urban green infrastructure in Bishoftu, Ethiopia. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04906-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04906-y

Keywords: urban green infrastructure, ecosystem services, Bishoftu, Ethiopia, community awareness, urban ecology, cultural services, regulating services, participatory planning, secondary cities, Sub-Saharan Africa, environmental perception