Reflective thinking meets artificial intelligence: Synthesizing sustainability transition knowledge in left-behind mountain regions

Abstract

We demonstrate a multi-method approach towards discovering and structuring sustainability transition knowledge in marginalized mountain regions. By employing reflective thinking, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered text summarization and text mining, we synthesize experts’ narratives on sustainable development challenges and solutions in Kardüz Upland, Türkiye. We then analyze their alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) using document embedding. Investment in infrastructure, education, and resilient socio-ecological systems emerged as priority sectors to combat poor infrastructure, geographic isolation, climate change, poverty, depopulation, unemployment, low education levels, and inadequate social services. The narratives were closest in substance to SDG 1, 3, and 11. Social dimensions of sustainability were more pronounced than environmental dimensions. The presented approach supports policymakers in organizing loosely structured sustainability transition knowledge and fragmented data corpora, while also advancing AI applications for designing and planning sustainable development policies at the regional level.

Keywords

Artificial intelligence / Innovation / Reflective thinking / Scientific imagination / Text mining / Text summarization

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Andrej Ficko: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Simo Sarkki: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Methodology, Investigation, Conceptualization. Yasar Selman Gultekin: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Project administration, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Antonia Egli: Writing – review & editing, Project administration, Data curation. Juha Hiedanpää: Funding acquisition, Project administration, Writing – review & editing.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This article is based upon work conducted under COST Action CA21125 - a European forum for revitalisation of marginalised mountain areas (MARGISTAR), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). The first author gratefully acknowledges the support received for the research from the University of Ljubljana’s research program Forest, forestry and renewable forest resources (P4-0059).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2024.100257.

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