Agriculture, Attitudes, Adoption: This Week's Regeneration Research Brief
What Caught My Eye: Readings and reflections on regenerative finance, farming, and the forces reshaping sustainability.
This week’s research picks look at how sustainability depends on the structure of systems, not simply on whether humans intervene in nature or whether societies pursue growth and development. Farming can cultivate biodiversity when it creates heterogeneous landscapes, but reduce it when it becomes industrially uniform. Economic growth does not necessarily weaken climate concern, but public support depends on what growth is understood to deliver. Renewable energy adoption is not only about technology availability, but about how resources, infrastructure, and transaction barriers are unevenly distributed across actors.
Read on below for highlights and links on the following topics:
Biodiversity by farming: Long-term evidence from Swiss lake sediments shows that traditional agriculture often increased plant diversity by creating mosaics of fields, pastures, hedgerows, orchards, and settlement edges.
Landscapes that cultivate life: Seven millennia of pollen records suggest biodiversity loss is tied less to human activity itself than to the recent simplification and intensification of land use.
Growth without the culture war: A 13-country European survey finds that pro-growth views are common, but not necessarily opposed to climate concern or support for climate policy.
Uneven energy transitions: Renewable energy adoption depends on who holds which resources, how efficiently energy and products can move, and whether policy reduces technology, trade, and emissions barriers.
Biodiversity by Farming
This article complicates the idea that human activity is always harmful to biodiversity. Drawing on 7,000 years of sediment and pollen records from three Swiss lakes, the researchers show that early and traditional farming on the Swiss Plateau actually increased plant diversity by transforming closed forest into a more varied mosaic of fields, pastures, hedgerows, orchards, and small-scale habitats.
The key shift came only in the past 80 years, when agricultural intensification after World War II replaced this heterogeneous landscape with larger, more uniform fields supported by heavy machinery, fertilizers, and pesticides. The study suggests that biodiversity loss is not simply caused by “human presence,” but by particular forms of land use—and that more diverse, lower-intensity farming landscapes could help reverse recent declines.
Read more: Human activity has not always harmed biodiversity—quite the opposite (University of Basel / Phys.org)
Landscapes That Cultivate Life
This Nature Communications article reframes human land use as a long-term driver of biodiversity change rather than a simple story of damage. Using lake sediments as natural archives, the authors reconstruct 7,600 years of plant diversity across the Swiss Plateau, drawing on pollen records from three lakes, 227 radiocarbon dates, and decadal-scale chronologies to connect vegetation change with land use across six cultural–historical periods.
The study finds that from the Neolithic onward, agriculture often increased plant diversity by opening dense forest landscapes and creating mosaics of fields, grasslands, pastures, hedgerows, orchards, fire-managed areas, and settlement edges. Diversity fell during periods of social crisis, such as the Migration Period and the Black Death, when farming declined and forests regenerated. The major rupture comes in recent decades: industrialized agriculture has replaced heterogeneous landscapes with larger, more uniform systems, contributing to biodiversity loss. The article suggests that the problem is not human activity itself, but the form of land use—and that past low-intensity, diverse farming landscapes may offer clues for reversing today’s biodiversity decline.
Read more: Decadal-scale pollen records link land use and plant diversity change across European lowlands over seven millennia (Nature)
Growth Without the Culture War
This Nature Communications article examines how European citizens actually think about economic growth in relation to sustainability and climate policy. Drawing on a cross-national survey of 16,781 people across 13 EU countries, the authors find that nearly 60% of respondents hold pro-growth views, seeing economic growth as important for building a sustainable society. About one-third are indifferent, while fewer than 10% express growth-sceptical views.
The findings complicate the usual “growth versus climate” framing. Pro-growth attitudes are not strongly associated with lower climate concern or weaker support for climate policy. Instead, many citizens appear to see growth as serving both individual advancement and collective wellbeing. Support for growth is lower in wealthier and less unequal countries, suggesting that public attitudes are shaped by broader social and economic conditions. The article implies that climate policy may not need to be framed as a battle over growth itself, but as a question of what kinds of prosperity, security, and wellbeing different economic pathways can deliver.
Read more: Views of EU citizens on economic growth and implications for climate policy (Nature)
Uneven Energy Transitions
This article examines why renewable energy adoption cannot be understood as a simple system-wide technology choice. Using a heterogeneous-agent optimization model, the authors show that energy transitions are shaped by uneven resource endowments: some actors have abundant fossil resources, some have renewable resources, some have both, and others have neither.
By comparing this more distributed model with a centralized planner approach, the study finds that who has access to which resources strongly affects how renewable technologies spread across a system. Trade, infrastructure, and transaction barriers matter because renewable energy is not adopted in a vacuum; it depends on whether resources, electricity, and products can move efficiently between actors. The article identifies several key levers for accelerating adoption: improving power transmission efficiency, lowering the initial cost of renewable technologies, reducing barriers to product transactions, and introducing carbon emission constraints. Its broader implication is that energy policy must account for heterogeneity—not just total resource availability—when designing pathways for a renewable transition.
Read more: Natural resource endowments and renewable energy technology adoption: insights from a heterogeneous-agent optimization model (Humanities and Social Sciences Communications)
The regenerative business practices and sustainability innovations highlighted in this week’s Regenerative Insights directly tackle the critical issues of corporate responsibility explored in my recent book explored in my recent book, The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profit and Socializes Cost.
