Amid accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss, and growing systemic ecological risks, strengthening ecological resilience through adaptive environmental policy and governance innovation has become an urgent global priority. Ecological resilience refers not only to the capacity of ecosystems to absorb shocks and maintain core functions, but also to their ability to self-regulate, adapt, and transform under long-term and compound pressures. Achieving the transition from passive recovery to proactive adaptation requires environmental policy to move beyond end-of-pipe regulation toward adaptive, learning-based, and multi-level governance models that integrate ecological, institutional, and social dimensions.

This Research Topic focuses on adaptive environmental policy for strengthening ecological resilience in socio-ecological systems, aligning directly with major international frameworks such as the EU Green Deal, the Nature Restoration Law, the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDGs 13, 14, 15, and 16), and the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. It aims to advance analytical and empirical understanding of how specific policy instruments, including regulatory measures, market-based mechanisms, incentive schemes, and voluntary agreements, interact with governance processes such as adaptive learning, coordination, and stakeholder participation, thereby shaping ecological outcomes in terms of stability, recovery, diversity, and transformability.

By bridging local and global policy perspectives, it encourages contributions that generate actionable insights for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars committed to building resilient environmental governance systems. We are particularly interested in studies examining how adaptive environmental policies with different objectives, types, governance approaches, temporal scales, and spatial scales can drive transformations in governance models and subsequently enhance ecological resilience. We welcome theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions, as well as comprehensive literature reviews and interdisciplinary research.

• Assessing and optimizing the multidimensional impacts of adaptive environmental policy instruments on ecological resilience
• Identify and evaluate the effectiveness of policy mixes that foster ecological resilience.
• Analyze the role of adaptive governance and multi-level policy learning in sustaining socio-ecological systems.
• Develop policy design principles that enhance resilience under uncertainty and systemic risk.
• Examine how subsidies, taxes, payment for ecosystem services, and voluntary agreements drive environmentally beneficial behaviors among governments, firms, and communities.
• Nature-based solutions and ecological restoration practices
• Examine how policy instruments at multiple levels (local, regional, and national) interact to generate synergies or trade-offs affecting ecological outcomes.
• Measurement of ecological resilience, construction of indicator systems, and scenario simulation approaches
• Explore the sensitivity of ecological outcomes to policy design parameters such as stringency, flexibility, and incentive intensity.
• Other related topics

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Adaptive Environmental Policy for Strengthening Ecological Resilience in Socio-Ecological Systems