The scale of the challenge is enormous. Marine and coastal systems are increasingly shaped by multiple, interacting pressures arising from human activities and climate change, and these pressures do not respect administrative boundaries or departmental portfolios. Policy initiatives such as the European Green Deal, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, and the Maritime Spatial Planning Directive have established ambitious goals for ecosystem-based management. Yet, as the editorial notes, their implementation often reveals persistent fragmentation across sectors, scales, and institutions. The seven contributions to the Research Topic suggest that transformative ocean planning depends on interconnected changes in three areas: how knowledge is generated and integrated, how policies and institutions are coordinated, and how stakeholders and diverse knowledge systems are involved in planning and decision-making. Each of these pillars, the editors argue, is necessary but insufficient on its own.

The first pillar concerns the analytical machinery that underpins ecosystem-based maritime spatial planning, often abbreviated as MSP. One of the most technically significant advances comes from work on cumulative effects assessment, a method used to estimate the combined impact of multiple human pressures on marine ecosystems. These assessments have long suffered from methodological limitations that made their outputs difficult to use in real-world decisions. The new research refines the way pressures from maritime activities are quantified and interpreted by incorporating magnitude-weighted relationships between activities and the pressures they generate. It also introduces an unsuitability metric based on ecosystem sensitivities, which helps planners identify areas where particular activities are least compatible with the local environment. Interestingly, these refinements do not fundamentally alter the overall spatial patterns that the assessments reveal, but they significantly improve the interpretability and practical applicability of the results, particularly when applied at finer spatial resolutions.

That last point carries real weight for practitioners. In geographically constrained areas, such as crowded coastal seas where every square kilometer may host competing demands, management decisions demand higher levels of accuracy than broad-brush regional analyses can provide. Aligning analytical precision with the spatial scale of the planning challenge is therefore not a technical nicety but a practical necessity. The lesson emerging from this line of work is that cumulative effects assessment is evolving from a somewhat abstract mapping exercise into a decision-support tool that can genuinely inform where activities should and should not occur. For a field that has struggled to translate ecological science into actionable planning guidance, that shift in usability may prove as important as any conceptual breakthrough.

Yet the editorial is emphatic that technical improvements alone are insufficient without a deeper integration of social and ecological dimensions. A second study tackles this gap by operationalizing social-ecological indicators, embedding them within the DAPSI(W)R(M) framework, a structured approach that links human activities to pressures, state changes, impacts, and responses in marine systems. By explicitly connecting ecosystem changes to human wellbeing, the research exposes just how limited existing indicators are in capturing these interconnections. Most current metrics track environmental conditions or economic outputs in isolation, leaving the feedback loops between nature and society largely invisible to planners. The study identifies pathways for developing compound, digitally ready indicators that could bridge this divide, and this is where the work connects to one of the most exciting technological developments in ocean science: Digital Twin initiatives.

Digital Twin Ocean projects, such as SEADITO referenced in the editorial, aim to build dynamic virtual replicas of marine systems fed by integrated data infrastructures. The promise is transformative: planners could simulate the consequences of different management choices before committing to them, testing scenarios for offshore energy development, fishing pressure, or conservation measures in silico rather than through costly trial and error in the real ocean. But a digital twin is only as good as the indicators and data that populate it. The push toward compound indicators that simultaneously reflect environmental conditions and societal outcomes is therefore a prerequisite for making these tools meaningful for governance. If the digital revolution in ocean science proceeds without social-ecological integration, it risks producing dazzling visualizations of a partial reality, blind to the human dimensions that ultimately determine whether policies succeed or fail.

The second pillar of transformation involves the stubborn gap between policy ambition and on-the-ground implementation. Empirical analyses from the French Mediterranean and the wider Mediterranean basin demonstrate that while European policy frameworks are relatively coherent at higher levels in their environmental objectives, this coherence often dissolves during implementation. Administrative complexity, fragmented governance structures, and limited institutional capacity erode well-intentioned directives as they cascade downward. Local authorities in both studies face overlapping mandates, resource constraints, and insufficient mechanisms for stakeholder engagement, all of which hinder effective policy delivery. Anyone who has followed the implementation history of European environmental legislation will recognize this pattern, but the Mediterranean cases also offer grounds for optimism. They document examples of innovation, including multi-actor governance platforms, specialized institutional arrangements, and territorially grounded restoration strategies that enhance coordination and collaboration among actors who previously operated in isolation.

Complementing these case studies, another contribution identifies archetypal patterns of barriers and enablers that recur across governance contexts, providing a broader structural diagnosis of policy incoherence. Fragmented governance roles, weak coordination across the land-sea interface, and insufficient integration across policy domains emerge as recurrent obstacles. On the enabling side, harmonized data systems, knowledge-sharing platforms, and inclusive stakeholder engagement are highlighted as key factors that allow governance systems to function. These findings reinforce the need for governance that is not only better aligned in design but also more adaptive and interconnected in practice, capable of responding to the complexity and dynamic nature of marine socio-ecological systems. The land-sea interface deserves particular attention, since many of the most damaging pressures on coastal waters originate in terrestrial activities, from agricultural runoff to coastal development, yet land-use planning and marine planning typically proceed through entirely separate institutional channels.

The alignment of maritime spatial planning with overarching sustainability agendas forms a third strand of the collection. Researchers developed an operational framework to assess the extent to which existing Maritime Spatial Plans contribute to the European Green Deal, and applied it across several EU countries. The results reveal both progress and remaining gaps. Climate change mitigation is widely reflected in current plans, largely through the expansion of offshore renewable energy, which has become the dominant driver of marine spatial reorganization in European waters. However, other Green Deal priorities, such as ecosystem restoration, the circular economy, and zero pollution, remain less consistently operationalized. This uneven integration highlights the need to move beyond declarative commitments toward concrete, measurable actions, supported by frameworks that enable systematic assessment, comparison, and iterative improvement of planning outcomes over time. Without such feedback mechanisms, plans risk becoming aspirational documents rather than instruments of change.

The third and perhaps most socially resonant pillar concerns who gets a say in ocean governance. A case study from the United States Virgin Islands demonstrates how community-based coral and mangrove restoration workshops can function as powerful sites for co-producing knowledge, integrating local ecological understanding, and fostering culturally responsive restoration strategies. Participants prioritized ecological function, local livelihoods, and intergenerational engagement, a value set that challenges conventional top-down models of decision-making and points toward more relational and community-driven forms of governance. The editorial draws a pointed conclusion from this work: participation is not merely a procedural requirement to be checked off, but a transformative component of effective and legitimate marine management. Taken together, the seven studies identify key enabling conditions and practical pathways for change, including stronger social-ecological knowledge integration, more coherent and implementable policies, greater coordination across sectors and scales, strengthened local capacity, and more inclusive and adaptive planning processes. For a planet whose blue half is changing faster than the institutions meant to steward it, these insights remain pivotal to the continued evolution of ecosystem-based and transformative ocean planning in Europe and beyond.

Subject of Research: Transformative approaches in marine governance and maritime spatial planning

Article Title: Editorial: Navigating change: Transformative approaches in ocean planning

Article References: Depellegrin, D., Li, S., & Kyriazi, Z. (2026). Editorial: Navigating change: Transformative approaches in ocean planning. Frontiers in Ocean Sustainability, 4, Article 1988794. https://doi.org/10.3389/focsu.2026.1988794

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/focsu.2026.1988794

Keywords: ocean governance, maritime spatial planning, cumulative effects assessment, Digital Twin Ocean, European Green Deal, policy coherence, social-ecological indicators, participatory approaches, Mediterranean Sea, ecosystem-based management, marine restoration, coastal management

The research tackles a deceptively simple question that has long frustrated scholars of public policy: what makes a policy mix work? In an ideal world, the authors explain, policies would display three qualities at once. Goals would be coherent, meaning they reinforce rather than contradict each other. Instruments, the concrete tools governments use, such as subsidies, regulations, taxes and information campaigns, would be consistent, so that one tool does not undermine another. And goals and instruments would be aligned, with each tool actually serving the objective it was designed for. In practice, however, governments rarely design policy mixes from scratch. Instead, as the study puts it, policy mixes are typically patched up to solve problems as they arise, a process that generates ever-greater complexity over time. Whether that complexity helps or hinders the long-term evolution of climate policy has remained stubbornly unclear.

To answer the question, the team adopted a quantitative longitudinal research design, a methodological approach that tracks phenomena across extended time periods rather than taking a single snapshot. They assembled and coded the full corpus of low-carbon policies issued in Shenzhen across 28 years, mapping how the number of policies grew, which policy subdomains emerged, and how individual goals and instruments changed over time. The coding allowed the researchers to classify changes in the policy mix into recognizable patterns familiar from the international policy-design literature: replacement, in which a new policy displaces an old one; conversion, in which an existing instrument is repurposed toward a new goal; and layering, in which new policies are simply stacked on top of existing ones without removing anything. Each pattern carries different implications for how well the overall mix fits together.

The headline finding is that Shenzhen’s low-carbon policy evolution followed a trajectory of gradual accumulation punctuated by two dramatic surges, with the number of policies peaking in 2012 and again in 2021. Those two dates are not accidental. The first surge coincided with Shenzhen’s designation as a national low-carbon pilot zone, part of China’s broader strategy of testing climate policies in selected cities before scaling them nationwide. The second surge aligned with the run-up to and aftermath of China’s national commitments on carbon peaking and carbon neutrality. In both cases, the study finds, the local government was responding directly to national government programs, translating central directives into municipal policy at remarkable speed. Shenzhen’s status as a laboratory for national experimentation thus acted as a powerful engine of policy production, driving the city to accumulate an ever-larger stock of policies across an expanding set of subdomains.

Beneath the aggregate growth, the researchers uncovered a striking asymmetry in how goals and instruments behaved. Policy goals, the study found, evolved rather flexibly, with new goals frequently replacing old ones as political priorities shifted. When Shenzhen’s leadership redefined what the city should achieve, whether industrial upgrading, air quality, or carbon intensity targets, the goal architecture of the policy mix was rewritten accordingly. Policy instruments, by contrast, developed far more incrementally. Rather than being swept away when priorities changed, existing tools tended to persist, undergoing replacement, conversion, or layering. This means that Shenzhen’s policy mix carries the sediment of its own history: instruments introduced decades ago for entirely different purposes have been bent toward low-carbon ends, while newer instruments sit atop older ones, sometimes reinforcing them and sometimes working at cross-purposes.

The distribution of these policy dynamics turned out to be roughly balanced between good fits and poor fits. Replacement, the pattern in which a new policy cleanly supersedes an outdated one, represented a good fit between new policies and the existing mix, keeping the toolkit relatively coherent. Conversion and layering, on the other hand, represented poor fits, adding complexity without necessarily resolving contradictions. Crucially, the study shows that these dynamics varied not only across different policy subdomains but also within them, meaning that even a single domain such as transport or buildings could contain a patchwork of well-integrated and poorly integrated instruments. This granularity matters, because it suggests that assessments of policy quality cannot rely on aggregate indicators alone; the internal texture of a policy mix determines whether its growing complexity translates into effective climate action or bureaucratic clutter.

What drove this evolution? The researchers identify three key factors. The first is the city’s strategic positioning: Shenzhen’s identity as China’s flagship special economic zone and its self-image as an innovation hub created strong incentives to be first with new policy ideas, including in the low-carbon sphere. The second is the focus of local leadership, since shifting priorities among municipal leaders redirected attention and resources across subdomains over time. The third, and perhaps most consequential, is the city’s response to national policies. Shenzhen did not develop its low-carbon agenda in isolation; it operated within a nested system in which central government programs, pilot designations, and evaluation schemes shaped local ambitions. The interplay between central directives and local experimentation produced the characteristic rhythm of the city’s policy history, with bursts of legislative activity following each national signal.

The practical results of this policy machine are visible on Shenzhen’s streets. The city has achieved one of the highest penetrations of new energy vehicles of any major city in the world, with the share of new-energy vehicles among new car sales exceeding 60 percent according to local reports cited in the study’s reference material. Shenzhen electrified its entire bus fleet years ahead of most global cities, a feat that required the coordinated deployment of subsidies, procurement rules, charging infrastructure standards, and industrial policy. The study’s framework helps explain how such coordination emerged not from a single master plan but from the iterative layering and conversion of instruments over many years, with each new policy responding to gaps and frictions left by its predecessors.

For the international policy community, the Shenzhen case carries a message that is both sobering and encouraging. Sobering, because it confirms what scholars such as Michael Howlett and colleagues have long argued: real policy mixes are rarely the product of rational, comprehensive design. They are mosaics, assembled incrementally, with goals that churn and instruments that linger. The democratic responsiveness trap identified in the policy-accumulation literature, in which governments keep adding policies to signal action without ever dismantling old ones, has a counterpart even in a technocratic, fast-moving city like Shenzhen. Encouraging, because the case demonstrates that a policy mix can nonetheless deliver transformative outcomes despite its imperfections, provided that goals remain broadly coherent, leadership attention is sustained, and the local system stays tightly coupled to national strategic signals.

The study also opens new avenues for research. Its quantitative longitudinal design, coding decades of policy texts to track coherence, consistency and alignment over time, offers a template that could be applied to other cities and other policy fields, from circular economy initiatives, which Ma and colleagues have analyzed previously, to waste management and energy transition policy across China’s provinces. As countries worldwide race to meet mid-century decarbonization targets, understanding how policy mixes actually evolve, rather than how they should evolve in theory, may prove decisive. Shenzhen’s 28-year experiment suggests that the path to a low-carbon future is not a straight line of elegant design but a winding process of patching, layering and occasional replacement, and that cities able to manage that process with strategic clarity may outpace those waiting for the perfect plan.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal analysis of low-carbon policy evolution, coherence, consistency and goal-instrument alignment in Shenzhen, China, from 1994 to 2022

Article Title: Policy evolution through coherence, consistency and alignment: the Shenzhen low carbon policy case

Article References: Ma, W., Hoppe, T., & Sun, T. (2025). Policy evolution through coherence, consistency and alignment: the Shenzhen low carbon policy case. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(1), 24-45. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-024-00103-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-024-00103-7

Keywords: Shenzhen, low-carbon policy, policy mix, policy coherence, policy instruments, policy layering, policy accumulation, climate governance, China, urban policy, policy design, longitudinal analysis

The core problem, according to the researchers, is that policy ideas which appear obvious within public health circles struggle to gain traction among the policymakers, employers, and managers who would actually need to implement them. Everyone can agree that healthy workplaces are desirable, but agreement on aspiration is not agreement on action. Different actors support the same vague ambitions while contributing to entirely different approaches, holding wildly different expectations about what can and should happen. The solution the authors propose is deceptively simple to state and fiendishly difficult to achieve: collective clarity about what the policy actually is, which instruments should support it, and who would be responsible for its success. Without those three answers, the healthy work movement risks spinning its wheels indefinitely.

Defining public policy is notoriously difficult in any domain. The term functions as an umbrella covering statements of desired aims and outcomes, a wide range of government instruments from taxes and regulations to guidance and voluntary agreements, and the governmental and non-governmental contributors whose practices actually deliver results. Applied to healthy working environments, the first challenge is identifying what policy actors mean when they invoke HWE, and how far they move beyond aspiration to specify which tools should produce which outcomes. International organisations and researchers tend to focus on aspirational aims and recommended practices, urging integrated and coherent policies that recognise the value of workplace health to public health, employment, and economic goals simultaneously.

The expanded vision of workplace health goes considerably beyond the traditional occupational safety and health focus on physical exposure to harm. Drawing on the World Health Organization’s healthy workplace framework, the agenda encompasses six key elements: attention to both physical and mental health; a longer-term view of immediate and chronic risks; focus on psychosocial risks such as excessive workloads, poor managerial communication, limited worker involvement in decisions, insecure work, and harassment or discrimination; emphasis on positive psychosocial measures connected to high job satisfaction; respectful and inclusive workplace decision-making; and recognition that the boundaries between work and life are often blurry, since private lives and wider social environments shape working lives profoundly. Behind this agenda sit three distinct motivations: it is the right thing to do, because a safe and healthy workplace is a fundamental human right; the smart thing to do, because a healthy and engaged workforce is more productive and innovative; and the legal thing to do, because companies must follow regulations minimising workplace harms.

Aspirations, however, remain incomplete until they can be mapped onto a concrete policy mix. Building on earlier research identifying the instruments essential to occupational safety and health policies, the authors catalogue an extensive toolkit: education to provide professional skills, workplace training in safety and health, evidence-backed guidelines for practice, awareness raising and direct organisational support, monitoring of risks and accidents, surveillance to prevent injuries and disease, enforcement through official inspections, accreditation standards and benchmarks, insurance coverage to mitigate company risk, and financial incentives or penalties deployed by governments. Each instrument implies a different delivery mechanism, a different responsible body, and a different theory of how change actually happens.

Extending this toolkit to the broader HWE agenda multiplies the complexity. A broader definition of health demands policy coordination to integrate physical and mental health initiatives. A longer-term view calls for guidance and research to anticipate musculoskeletal disorders and poor mental health, and strategies for worker retention that keep people healthier and in work for longer. Addressing negative contributors to mental health requires regulation of workloads to prevent stress and overwork, prevention of psychological, sexual, and racial discrimination and harassment, and support for workers during pregnancy or parental leave. Positive psychosocial measures depend on collaboration: fostering workplace autonomy where employees have meaningful say in how they work, ensuring workers feel part of decision-making through trade union and management partnerships, involving them in organisational change and innovation, and guaranteeing effective communication and support from management. Finally, acknowledging blurry work-life boundaries means coordinating measures covering caring responsibilities, family illness or loss, flexible and remote working, and adaptations to climate change and other crises.

Mapping these instruments onto responsible organisations exposes a thicket of overlapping and sometimes competing claims. Universities and national research centres would handle education; labour ministries, insurance institutes, trade unions, employer associations, and the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work would share training responsibilities; labour inspection authorities would enforce regulations; standardisation institutes would set accreditation benchmarks. The expanded HWE agenda adds further actors, from ministries of health and rehabilitation centres connecting physical and mental healthcare, to EU agencies, member states, subnational authorities, employers, and trade unions managing the wider social, economic, and environmental factors that shape working lives. Even in the relatively well-established OSH field, uncertainty about aims and responsibilities produces contrasting implementation models across national contexts, as comparisons of Croatian and Portuguese legislation demonstrate. The broader agenda accentuates these difficulties dramatically, raising tensions over who should take responsibility for HWE success and how much weight should fall on state regulation versus encouragement for businesses to innovate.

The authors’ research on European Union policy reveals how this ambiguity plays out in practice, identifying a disconnect between two intersecting approaches. The first is top-down: the EU uses regulations to oblige and enforce minimum occupational safety and health standards, backed by external inspection, monitoring, guidance, and benchmarks designed to reduce variation in national practices. The second is bottom-up: going beyond minimum standards through voluntary measures, such as EU-OSHA guidance encouraging employers and managers to collaborate with workers on innovative workplace practices. The combined effect, the researchers find, may disappoint anyone expecting the call for a fundamental shift towards healthy working environments to translate into substantive outcomes. The result is a rhetorically ambitious strategy without the clear means to produce consistent collaborative action. The EU devotes considerable energy to OSH regulation and compliance, but relies on networking and guidance tools for the broader HWE agenda, and relatively few companies are both motivated and able to innovate. Large firms in export-oriented, technology-based sectors, which depend on retaining skilled labour and protecting their reputations as good employers, may demonstrate what maximal approaches look like, but most organisations lack the means or motivation to learn from or emulate them.

None of this diminishes the EU’s standing as a global leader in worker health and safety, and the authors emphasise that its experiences offer valuable international lessons. Their cautionary tale is instead about the gap between ambition and mechanism. A top-down approach obliges and enforces minimum standards, but policymakers appear reluctant to raise those minimums when facing employer pushback. A voluntary, guidance-informed bottom-up approach seems destined to produce useful but limited innovation, concentrated in a small number of leading organisations with little support for policy learning elsewhere. Rather than choosing between the two models, the authors expect both to endure, and they argue that policymakers must clarify how to secure the best of both worlds. The implications for multi-disciplinary public health practice may be clear, but the likely impact on policy and workplace practice is not. Until healthy workplace advocates can define exactly what HWE policy is, which instruments are essential, and who is responsible for designing, delivering, and coordinating them, the fundamental shift they envision will remain a long distance away, sustained by shared enthusiasm but starved of shared direction.

Subject of Research: Policy analysis of healthy working environment (HWE) policy in the European Union

Article Title: Healthy working environments are essential, but what exactly is HWE policy and who would be responsible for its success?

Article References: Cairney, P., Auslender, E., & Fuchs, L. (2026). Healthy working environments are essential, but what exactly is HWE policy and who would be responsible for its success?. Public Health in Practice, 12, Article 100861. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhip.2026.100861

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.puhip.2026.100861

Keywords: healthy working environments, occupational safety and health, public health policy, EU policy, psychosocial risks, workplace mental health, policy instruments, EU-OSHA, Horizon Europe, worker wellbeing, policy coherence, work-life balance

The paper, authored by Hatta Ridho, Husni Thamrin, Solahuddin Nasution, Arief Marizki Purba, and Mujahid Widian Saragih, introduces the Green Tourism Transition Management framework, or GTTM. Built from a narrative synthesis of fifty peer-reviewed studies published between 2024 and 2026, the framework consolidates three indicator domains that the existing literature has tended to examine in isolation: policy coherence, digital innovation, and community resilience. The authors’ central claim is deliberately provocative for the field: these three drivers are not substitutable levers from which managers can pick and choose, but jointly reinforcing conditions that produce transformative outcomes only when activated together. Policy coherence without digital enablement yields well-intentioned but operationally weak governance; digital innovation without community embeddedness risks deepening platform-economy inequality; and community resilience without supportive policy and digital infrastructure remains locally bounded and institutionally fragile.

The first domain, policy coherence, addresses the alignment of objectives, instruments, and institutional mandates across levels and sectors of government. Tourism intersects with climate policy, land use planning, transportation, culture, and social protection in ways that rarely fall under a single ministry. Evidence reviewed in the paper shows that destination governance performance correlates strongly with the degree to which national tourism policy is integrated with sub-national implementation capacity and cross-sectoral regulatory coherence. Where this integration is absent, destinations can hold impressive policy documents while environmental quality deteriorates and social inequalities widen on the ground. Research on Destination Management Organizations across the ten best-performing tourism countries in the Travel and Tourism Development Index identifies mandatory inter-ministerial coordination mechanisms as a key differentiator between high- and low-performing destinations, creating structural conditions for coherence that do not depend on the goodwill of individual officials.

The costs of policy incoherence are documented with particular clarity in Indonesia’s Super-Priority Destination of Labuan Bajo. There, national green tourism ambitions were undermined by absent coordination between the national tourism ministry, regional government, and community governance structures. Investment flowed into high-end resort infrastructure while community-based tourism enterprises remained undercapitalized, and environmental monitoring systems were installed without the community governance capacity needed to act on their data. The result was a destination that looked green on paper but continued to degrade environmentally while failing to deliver promised community benefits. By contrast, West Sumatra’s regional tourism master plan, known as RIPPDA, was designed from the outset as a coordination mechanism requiring alignment between provincial strategy, district spatial planning, and community development plans, and research documents measurably better coherence outcomes than in destinations relying on ad hoc inter-governmental coordination.

The second domain, digital innovation, has been reframed over the past decade from a marketing tool into a structural governance enabler. The authors draw a crucial technical distinction between digitization, meaning doing the same things with digital tools, and digital innovation, meaning doing fundamentally different things because of digital capabilities. Smart tourism infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and data analytics allow destination managers to monitor environmental conditions in real time, allocate visitor flows algorithmically, and integrate sustainability reporting across the value chain. But the evidence shows digital investment translates into sustainability benefits only when accompanied by smart governance capacity, the institutional capability to act on the data collected. Destinations that install sensor networks, visitor management apps, and AI analytics without building the governance structures to use them see limited benefits. Micro-level studies of digital leadership in hospitality firms reinforce this point: businesses with digitally competent managers are significantly more likely to convert digital investment into reduced energy consumption, lower waste, and improved environmental compliance, a mechanism the literature describes as green absorptive capability.

Bali provides the most extensively studied case of digital-sustainability integration in a developing country context. Research reviewed in the paper shows digital platforms facilitating circular economy flows in tourism supply chains, tracking material inputs, connecting suppliers of sustainably certified products, and giving tourists real-time information on the environmental footprint of their choices. Studies of Bali’s tour and travel small and medium enterprises report that green dynamic capabilities and green service innovation, both enabled by digital tools, mediate between organizational capabilities and sustainability performance, with firms combining digital investment and green service redesign outperforming those pursuing either strategy alone. Beyond Bali, e-tourism platforms have opened previously isolated destinations to global markets, as demonstrated in the Albanian town of Belsh, where platform access transformed the economic viability of a rural destination lacking conventional tourism infrastructure. Digital inclusion, the authors argue, can function as a spatial equity mechanism when designed to reach peripheral communities rather than concentrating capability in established hubs.

The third domain, community resilience, captures the capacity of host communities to absorb shocks, adapt to change, and transform in response to shifting environmental and economic conditions. The synthesis identifies economic resilience, including household income diversification, local ownership of tourism assets, and financial reserves, as the strongest predictor of sustainability outcomes, followed by social resilience measured through trust, collective action, and cultural identity, and then ecological resilience. A systematic review of institutional barriers to community-based tourism governance identifies six categories of constraint, legal, financial, informational, organizational, political, and cultural, with legal and financial barriers consistently the most binding. This implies that effective support for community resilience requires structural changes in land tenure, access to finance, and legal recognition of community enterprises, not merely capacity-building programs. Heritage-based community tourism offers strong supporting evidence: communities with strong cultural heritage governance institutions achieve better sustainability outcomes than those where heritage management is left to commercial operators, because community control allows sustainability norms to be embedded directly into the visitor experience.

To translate the framework into practice, the authors propose a four-phase implementation roadmap. Phase one, policy alignment and diagnosis, uses multi-stakeholder governance audits to identify binding institutional restrictions and establish SDG baselines; the Labuan Bajo case shows what happens when this diagnostic stage is skipped. Phase two deploys e-tourism platforms, AI-enabled analytics, and smart destination technologies, with the governance imperative that digital investments be driven by sustainability management needs rather than technology supply pushes, and co-designed with community stakeholders. Phase three, community empowerment and co-creation, engages communities as active governance actors, activating cultural heritage assets and strengthening participatory planning. Phase four establishes monitoring, upscaling, and replication through KPI-based systems tracking policy coherence metrics, digital capability indices, and community resilience indicators alongside conventional sustainability measures. The framework aligns its outcome architecture with SDG 8 on decent work, SDG 11 on sustainable communities, SDG 12 on responsible consumption, and SDG 13 on climate action, providing an accountability structure connecting destination-level decisions with global commitments.

The authors are candid about the framework’s limits. GTTM is offered as a conceptual and taxonomic synthesis, not a statistically weighted composite index; the underlying literature reports indicators with heterogeneous definitions, units, and instruments, precluding direct aggregation. The central claim of joint reinforcement is presented as a working hypothesis consistent with predominantly cross-sectional and qualitative evidence, and establishing causality will require longitudinal research designs that track destinations over extended periods. The ten destinations examined in depth, from Bali and Labuan Bajo to rural Serbia, Albania, Egypt’s Red Sea, and luxury-destination contexts, remain a non-representative sample, and the framework has not been tested in small island states, post-conflict destinations, or hyper-commodified mass tourism settings. The authors also flag a political dimension the technical literature tends to avoid: governing the green transition means redistributing power and economic value from incumbent airlines, hotel chains, and fossil-fuel dependent infrastructure owners toward communities and ecological stewardship institutions, a process that generates resistance no measurement framework alone can overcome. Still, the paper’s conclusion is unambiguous. The green transition in tourism is a structural imperative, and the costs of inaction, environmental, social, and competitive, exceed the costs of governance transformation. The transition must be governed, the authors write, and it must be governed well.

Subject of Research: A conceptual framework for measuring the green transition in tourism through policy coherence, digital innovation, and community resilience

Article Title: Measuring the green transition in tourism: A conceptual framework integrating policy coherence, digital innovation, and community resilience for sustainable destination management

Article References: Ridho, H., Thamrin, H., Nasution, S., Purba, A. M., & Saragih, M. W. (2026). Measuring the green transition in tourism: A conceptual framework integrating policy coherence, digital innovation, and community resilience for sustainable destination management. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101519. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101519

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101519

Keywords: sustainable tourism, green transition, policy coherence, digital innovation, community resilience, destination management, smart tourism, SDGs, low-carbon tourism, governance indicators, Labuan Bajo, Bali

The review, led by Jie Su of Xiamen University and the University of Tokyo together with Alexandros Gasparatos of the University of Tokyo, brought together an international team including researchers from WorldFish, Michigan State University and the Stockholm Resilience Centre. In a deliberate departure from most earlier assessments, the team searched the literature in both English and Chinese, recognizing that a large fraction of the world’s inland aquaculture production occurs in China, where much of the relevant research is published in Mandarin and rarely reaches global synthesis efforts. From the screening process, 84 peer-reviewed publications met the review’s criteria and formed the evidence base for the analysis.

What emerges from this body of work is a picture of climatic stress that is remarkably diverse, geographically uneven and frequently compounded by non-climatic pressures. The studies document climatic impact drivers ranging from slow-onset changes such as warming water temperatures, altered precipitation regimes and salinity intrusion, to abrupt shocks including floods, droughts, storms and heat extremes. These hazards interact with the biology of farmed species in ways that can cascade through entire production cycles. Elevated temperatures alter fish metabolism, feeding rates, growth and disease susceptibility, while also stratifying ponds and degrading water quality. Extreme rainfall and flooding can physically destroy ponds and cages, wash away stocked fish and contaminate production water; droughts shrink pond volume, concentrate waste and heighten the risk of mass mortality.

The review emphasizes that the impacts do not stop at the farm gate. Climate-related stressors ripple across the entire aquaculture value chain. Hatcheries and seed suppliers suffer when extreme events disrupt broodstock and larval survival, as documented in studies from Bangladesh and the Indian state of Assam, where floods and storms have repeatedly damaged fish seed production. Feed supply chains are exposed through their dependence on agricultural commodities whose prices and availability fluctuate with climatic conditions. Post-harvest processing, storage and transport can be interrupted by flooding and damaged infrastructure, preventing farmed fish from reaching markets even when ponds survive. For the smallholder households that dominate inland aquaculture in much of the Global South, these off-farm disruptions translate directly into lost income, depleted assets and reduced access to nutrient-rich food.

Against this catalogue of risks, the authors mapped an equally diverse set of responses. Across the 84 studies they identified 53 distinct adaptation options, which they organized along the value chain and into broad categories spanning management practices, technological interventions and governance measures. On-farm options include adjusting stocking calendars to align with shifting seasons, deepening or reinforcing ponds, installing aeration and water-exchange systems, switching to more tolerant species or strains, diversifying production through polyculture and integrated rice-fish systems, and adopting improved site selection to avoid flood-prone or saline-affected ground. Off-farm measures include climate-resilient seed production, cold-chain and processing improvements, and market and financial instruments such as insurance and microcredit designed to buffer climate shocks.

By mapping which options were reported at which stage of the value chain, and linking each climatic impact driver to the responses documented in the literature, the review constructed adaptation pathways that reveal both the breadth of the toolkit and its gaps. Technological and farm-management responses dominate the on-farm segment, while governance-oriented measures cluster around the off-farm segments, where collective action, regulation and institutional support matter most. Notably, many adaptation options remain at the stage of proposals or pilots rather than widespread implementation, a finding the authors underscore through their analysis of implementation status across the reviewed studies. The heterogeneity of impacts and contexts, the authors conclude, means that uniform, one-size-fits-all solutions are unlikely to work; effective adaptation must be targeted to specific climatic drivers, production systems and socio-economic settings.

The starkest message of the review concerns why so few of these options are actually being adopted. The researchers systematically catalogued adaptation barriers and found a persistent trio at the top: restrictive or poorly aligned government policy environments, insufficient financial resources, and limited access to actionable, usable information. Many countries’ national adaptation plans give aquaculture, if it appears at all, only a marginal place, in sharp contrast to crop agriculture. Small-scale producers, who constitute the majority of inland fish farmers, often lack collateral, credit histories or formal insurance products that would let them invest in ponds, aeration, better seed or risk protection. Extension services, where they exist, rarely deliver climate information in forms that farmers can act upon, and early-warning systems for floods and droughts frequently fail to reach pond operators in remote areas.

The authors argue that unlocking adaptation requires enabling institutional and financial conditions rather than simply promoting more technologies. Their recommendations include mainstreaming aquaculture within national adaptation planning so that freshwater fish farming is explicitly represented alongside crops and livestock; enhancing policy coherence across fisheries, agriculture, water, disaster-risk and climate ministries, since fragmented governance undermines coordinated responses; strengthening information-sharing platforms so that climate forecasts, best practices and market signals flow reliably to producers; and increasing investment in adaptation finance tailored to the realities of smallholder aquaculture. Examples cited in the underlying literature, from community-based collective action among smallholders in Pakistan to climate mainstreaming efforts in Thai aquaculture policy, illustrate that progress is possible when institutions, finance and information align.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Global aquaculture has been the fastest-growing food production sector for decades, and inland farming accounts for the majority of farmed aquatic food by volume, with production increasingly concentrated on land rather than at sea. Aquatic foods deliver protein, omega-3 fatty acids and essential micronutrients to populations where malnutrition remains widespread, and the FAO’s Blue Transformation agenda has positioned sustainable aquaculture growth as central to future food security. If climate change erodes the productivity and reliability of inland fish farming faster than adaptation can keep up, the nutritional consequences will fall hardest on low-income consumers in South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, precisely the regions where the review finds both high vulnerability and the weakest adaptive capacity.

Conducted as part of the CGIAR Sustainable Animal and Aquatic Foods Science Program, and drawing on funders ranging from the Moore Foundation to the Government of Canada’s International Climate Finance Initiative, the review offers a rare bilingual, value-chain-wide synthesis of a sector that global climate assessments have long treated as an afterthought. Its central conclusion is both sobering and actionable: the knowledge of what needs to be done already exists in scattered pockets around the world, but without deliberate policy reform, targeted finance and better information flows, the adaptive capacity of the world’s inland fish farms will continue to lag behind the mounting climatic pressures they face. For a food system feeding billions, that gap is one the world cannot afford to leave open.

Subject of Research: Climate change impacts and adaptation in inland aquaculture systems

Article Title: A systematic review of the climatic impacts, diverse adaptation pathways and multiple adaptation barriers for inland aquaculture

Article References: Su, J., Tigchelaar, M., Belton, B., Wang, Q., Rossignoli, C. M., Allison, E. H., Troell, M., & Gasparatos, A. (2026). A systematic review of the climatic impacts, diverse adaptation pathways and multiple adaptation barriers for inland aquaculture. Nature Food. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-026-01410-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s43016-026-01410-4

Keywords: inland aquaculture, climate change adaptation, food security, aquatic food systems, systematic review, adaptation barriers, value chain, smallholder farmers, freshwater fish farming, Nature Food, policy coherence, adaptation finance