Telecoupling Framework Research Articles

Resources time footprint for assessment of human influence on ecosystem service from a sustainability standpoint

Nature provides diverse services to humanity, known as ecosystem services (ES), yet certain services, such as food and timber, are geographically distant from human settlements. This spatial separation of ES from supply area to demand site fosters transfer through human-made carrier as ES flow, resulting in social and ecological impacts. This study delves into this complex ES supply, flow, and demand relation. While the conventional ES assessment approach mainly quantifies ES supply potential, Resources Time Footprint (RTF) is introduced as a new indicator to evaluate human intervention part of ES supply and flow. RTF examines intergenerational sustainability of ES by evaluating material, land, labor, and pollutant resource utilization in relation to individual allocations. The efficacy of this integration is evaluated through a case study covering 17 ESs dynamics in central Bhutan for 2010 and 2020, and RTF is applied to potato-ES, given its higher human intervention in the area. This is finally validated against commonly used emergy analysis and its derivatives. The study observed a 3.5% increase in 17 ESs, with minor intergenerational implications associated with supply and flow of potato-ES. The average per capita RTF values were 0.81 and 0.52 years, or 2 and 1.3 years per 100 kg of potatoes for the 2010 and 2020 base case, respectively. This smaller RTF value for 2020 indicates reduced resource occupancy rates with higher intergenerational sustainability. This replicable indicator effectively evaluated human related impacts on ES supply and flow and identified land and labor as underperforming aspects with higher occupancy rates. The comparative validation showed inadequateness of emergy-derivatives in examining human intervention in ES flow, and limitations of ES-RTF in evaluating nature's contribution. This underscores the complementary nature of two methodologies. Overall, this study contributes to a telecoupling framework for a sustainable society, enhancing coherence and consistency in analyzing ES supply and flow.

Understanding and achieving sustainable consumption: Integrating international political economy and psychology perspectives

AbstractThe concept of sustainable consumption has gained significant attention in international policy discussions. In order to achieve sustainable consumption, it is essential to thoroughly comprehend the underlying causes of current unsustainable consumption patterns and the associated challenges in transitioning to more sustainable practices. This research, employing perspectives from international political economy and psychology, elucidates that unsustainable consumption is rooted in a combination of systemic and individual factors. Systemic factors encompass unequal exchange relations, lack of efficient telecoupling framework, political and ecological trade‐off dilemma. Individual factors include unsatisfied needs, insufficient environmental concern, and low self‐efficacy. Drawing upon these findings, this study presents a comprehensive set of macro and micro‐level policy recommendations for achieving sustainable consumption and a more equitable and sustainable future.

Telecoupling indirect ecological impacts of urban expansion in China from the perspective of the food trade

AbstractA comprehensive evaluation of the ecological cost of urban expansion is crucial for preventing ecosystem degradation and improving ecosystem governance. However, the indirect impacts of urban expansion through cropland displacement are grossly underestimated, particularly the spillover effects on distant regions. This study proposed a telecoupling framework for the total indirect ecological losses (TIEL) of urban expansion. It was divided into the near losses (NIEL) and distant losses (DIEL), depending on whether cropland displacement occurs inside or outside the region. An inter‐provincial network of DIEL can also be constructed by ecological impact embodied in food trade with other regions. We found that approximately 80% of urban expansion occurred on croplands, which caused indirect loss of 86,586 km2 of ecological land through cropland displacement in China during 2000–2019. The total indirect ecological losses were 8.4 times greater than direct losses at the average of all provinces. Food trade induced more serious indirect ecological losses owing to the higher yield difference between encroached cropland import regions and new cropland in export regions. The proportion of DIEL in TIEL was more than 50% in developed regions such as Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Jiangsu. The distant impacts of urban expansion in the eastern coastal provinces were mainly transferred to north‐eastern China and the rest of the world. This study identified the teleconnection between local urban development and distant environments and infromed inter‐regional ecological compensation policies to mitigate regional inequalities.

Physical and virtual nutrient flows in global telecoupled agricultural trade networks

Global agricultural trade creates multiple telecoupled flows of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P). The flows of physical and virtual nutrients along with trade have discrepant effects on natural resources in different countries. However, existing literature has not quantified or analyzed such effects yet. Here we quantified the physical and virtual N and P flows embedded in the global agricultural trade networks from 1997 to 2016 and elaborated components of the telecoupling framework. The N and P flows both increased continuously and more than 25% of global consumption of nutrients in agricultural products were related to physical nutrient flows, while virtual nutrient flows were equivalent to one-third of the nutrients inputs into global agricultural system. These flows have positive telecoupling effects on saving N and P resources at the global scale. Reducing inefficient trade flows will enhance resource conservation, environmental sustainability in the hyper-globalized world.

International Tourism in the Arctic under COVID-19: A Telecoupling Analysis of Iceland

During the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism slowed down as the world went into lockdown. This pause in tourism provides a unique opportunity to analyze the environmental and socioeconomic effects of tourism by comparing tourism participation levels before, during, and after the pandemic restrictions. We examined tourism in Iceland, an island nation in the Arctic where international tourists vastly outnumber residents. Specifically, we systematically analyzed the materials, energy, tourist, and information flows, as well as the causes, effects, and agents of tourism in Iceland using the framework of telecoupling (human-nature interactions over distances). Results show that the U.S., U.K., and Nordic countries sent the highest numbers of tourists to Iceland. Flows of tourists to Iceland were tracked based on international flights and cruise ships, with Iceland’s tourism industry returning close to pre-pandemic levels in 2022 for air arrivals, while cruise ship tourism was slower in returning to pre-pandemic levels. Agents in the Icelandic tourism industry include government entities, local businesses, tour operators, and many others. There are diverse causes for tourism in Iceland, such as the demand for nature-based tourism and a cooler climate. International tourism in Iceland had both substantial environmental effects (CO2 emissions, damage to sensitive areas, etc.) and socioeconomic effects (e.g., increases in GDP and jobs). Many effects also spillover to the rest of the world as increases in CO2 emissions contribute to global climate change. Tourism is also expected to continue increasing after Iceland’s 2022 marketing launch of “Iceland Together in Progress.” Since Iceland has had such a strong tourism rebound, other countries around the world (especially other Arctic countries) that are looking to increase their tourism can gain insights from Iceland. However, it is important to make tourism more sustainable (e.g., reduction in CO2 emissions).

Vulnerability to Food Insecurity in a Telecoupled World: Insights From Vanuatu

Food insecurity is a pressing problem in many regions across the world. Drivers of food insecurity are becoming increasingly embedded in sociocultural and economic processes that transcendent multiple spatial and temporal scales. This is due to the increasingly globalized interconnections of places and people. Understanding this complexity is essential to devise locally relevant and effective adaptation strategies to tackle existing vulnerabilities causing food insecurity. This article analytically addresses the complexity in cross-scale dynamics by combining a case study from northern Vanuatu with a conceptual analysis of the broader socioeconomic dynamics within the telecoupling framework. Our aim is to identify drivers of vulnerability that span multiple temporal and spatial scales and contribute to food insecurity in a given location while exploring the relevance and applicability of the framework for the holistic assessment of vulnerability to food insecurity. The transdisciplinary approach used in this work involved local community members and local agriculture extension officers at all stages of the study process. For this, we used complementary research methods, such as workshops, participant observations, and in-depth interviews. The results showed that potential vulnerability to food insecurity in northern Vanuatu is likely to be related to individual choices aimed at maximizing income, enabled by economic development and driven by socio-cultural changes. These choices and their consequences are perceived in many cases to be responsible for lower subsistence food production and the overuse of natural food resources. However, economic changes in particular can also enable additional livelihoods that complement existing (subsistence-based) strategies, leading to a reduction in one-sided dependencies and thus to an overall increase in the resilience of local livelihoods. We find the telecoupling approach to be a useful tool to holistically capture a local vulnerability context. However, we also encountered challenges in describing telecouplings that operate over longer time scales.

An integrated tele-coupling analysis for requisition–compensation balance and its influence on carbon storage in China

The expansion of construction land and the reduction of farmland are two important aspects of land use change and land cover change (LUCC) that can greatly affect the terrestrial carbon balance. The requisition–compensation balance of farmland (RCBF) is an important land use policy in China, which aims to maintain the amount of farmland and prevent the unrestricted requisition of farmland for construction. This study has designed a new integrated tele-coupling framework to analyse the land use change and associated carbon storage change under the RCBF in China. The results show that on the national scale, although the quantitative balance of farmland has been achieved for the whole of China, the area of farmland in most provinces decreased, with a decrease in vegetation carbon (VC) storage of 3.7 Tg. For each province, this study finds that the more developed regions in the southeast of China have often acted as net importers, while some less developed regions have become primarily exporters with an evident expansion of construction land driven by other regions. The VC storage has decreased in most provinces due to the imbalance of farmland requisition and compensation and inappropriate compensation methods. In particular, some provinces located in the southwest of China have had the largest loss of VC storage due to their better hydrothermal conditions and relatively higher VC density. Thus, harmonious development and suitable compensation strategies, such as the farmland to forest program and environmental taxes, need to be further considered.

Carbon emissions from land use in Jiangsu, China, and analysis of the regional interactions.

Land carbon emissions are primarily determined by land use type, and these emissions could be transferred during interprovincial trade activities. This study took Jiangsu in China as a case, assigned all the energy-related carbon emissions to land, and analyzed the transferred land use carbon emissions through the application of a tele-coupling framework. Finally, the physical spatial distribution of transferred land use carbon emissions within Jiangsu at high resolution was simulated. China and Jiangsu emitted 2.27 × 109 t and 1.43 × 108 t of carbon in 2012, respectively, with industrial and mining land being the biggest emission source, generating more than 70% of their total emissions. Overall, Jiangsu's net carbon emissions transferred to other provinces was 2.41 × 106 t in urban land and 9.03 × 105 t in industrial and mining land, and these carbon emissions were mainly transferred to Hebei, Shandong, and Inner Mongolia. Land utilization intensity and economic development influenced the carbon emission transfer to some extent. Other provincesalso transferred a large amount of carbon emissions to Jiangsu, of which 2.57 × 106 t was in urban land and 3.18 × 107 t was in industrial and mining land. Our simulation showed that the emissions in both land use types exhibited a south-north difference within Jiangsu; more specifically, urban land carbon emissions were mainly concentrated in core urban areas, especially in Suzhou, Wuxi, and Nanjing, whereas industrial and mining land carbon emissions were mostly distributed in the periphery of core urban areas and along the Yangtze River. To balance economic development and environment protection, the government must limit the expansion of construction land (especially industrial and mining land), and developed regions should implement various types of ecological compensation measures to help less developed regions reduce carbon embodied in trade activities.

Telecoupling as a framework to support a more nuanced understanding of causality in land system science

ABSTRACT This article illustrates the potential of the telecoupling framework to improve causal attribution in land system science (LSS). We shed light on the distinct analytical approaches that have characterized telecoupling research to date, how these can contribute to LSS with new insights, and whether such insights can improve causal attribution. By reviewing 45 empirical telecoupling studies, we firstly demonstrate how telecoupling is applied in a broad variety of ways within LSS and across different disciplines and research topics, albeit with qualitative data and assessments being underrepresented. Secondly, we show that telecoupling is clearer in its contribution to causal attribution when applied explicitly in framework integration or empirical application, rather than when it is included more indirectly as a narrative. Finally, we argue that telecoupling can complement existing LSS theory with a flexible and holistic approach to dealing with the uncertainties and complexities related to attributing causality in a globalized world.

Sustainable minerals extraction for electric vehicles: A pilot study of consumers’ perceptions of impacts

Global transitions to electric vehicles (EVs) have triggered a surge in demand for the required minerals, whose extraction impacts raise questions on the overall sustainability of EVs. The impacts of mineral extraction are usually invisible to consumers who are at the relative end of EV-minerals’ life cycle, posing a challenge for the governance of minerals. Due to their increasingly important role in motivating corporate response, understanding consumers' perceptions is crucial to inform efforts towards sustainable mineral extraction (SME), which encompasses the actions, policies, and practices to minimize environmental and social impacts of minerals extractions. In this study, we applied the telecoupling framework and combined a survey and Q-method to examine how EV consumers perceive the life-cycle developments of EV, impacts of minerals extraction, and potential governance schemes. Our analysis identified and discussed the nuanced categories of perceptions and their implications. Overall, there is a general lack of awareness of impacts among respondents, but most respondents recognized the complexity in the supply chain of EVs and the role of consumers in influencing its governance. Contradictory opinions are widely found, reflecting the tensions and conflicts between the imperative of energy transitions and the reality of adverse mining impacts. Improved SME governance should consider the differences in consumers’ purchase motivations when mobilizing for changes, and not detract from the positive roles of EVs. We also highlight the need for a telecoupling view in mineral governance and suggest a shift in the EV supply chain to include broader sustainable development goals and a global community of consumers, affected communities, and the general public.

Telecoupling urbanization and mountain areas deforestation between 2000 and 2020: Evidence from Zhejiang Province, China

AbstractForest transition theory posits that socioeconomic development in a country or region may cause its forestland to shift from net loss to net gain. However, forest transition may also occur under various policies, resulting in forest gains in some regions but deforestation in other regions. We used the telecoupling framework to address this crucially important issue that has rarely been examined. Using time series satellite images and statistical yearbook data from 2000 to 2020, this study seeks to understand land use change patterns, the corresponding regional spillover effects, and the driving forces behind such patterns in Zhejiang Province, China. The results show that large‐scale continuous deforestation has taken place since 2000, causing a total loss of forestland by 22,823 ha. In parallel with this forest loss and a slight decrease in arable land, urban construction land has soared by 169.45%. We found that more developed municipalities such as Hangzhou witnessed increases in urban land at the expense of large‐scale deforestation in less developed municipalities such as Lishui. This cross‐region land use change pattern may arise from the balance of arable land system (BALS) policy that seeks to achieve a goal of no net loss of arable land. Land use policy—such as the BALS policy—must strike a good balance among competitive land uses that have different objectives such as residents' living, ecology, and production. In addition to enriching the forest transition theory, this study provides a solid basis for future land use decisions in developing regions or countries.

The influence of urbanization on vegetation carbon pools under a tele-coupling framework in China

The influence of urbanization on vegetation carbon pools under a tele-coupling framework in China

When the whole is less than the sum of all parts – Tracking global-level impacts of national sustainability initiatives

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are described as integrated and indivisible, where sustainability challenges must be addressed across sectors and scales to achieve global-level sustainability. However, SDG monitoring mostly focuses on tracking progress at national-levels, for each goal individually. This approach ignores local and cross-border impacts of national policies and assumes that global-level progress is the sum of national, sector-specific gains. In this study, we investigate effects of reforestation programs in China on countries supplying forest and agricultural commodities to China. Using case studies of rubber and palm oil production in Southeast Asian countries, soy production in Brazil and logging in South Pacific Island states, we investigate cross-sector effects of production for and trade to China in these exporting countries. We use a three-step multi-method approach. 1) We identify distal trade flows and the narratives used to justify them, using a telecoupling framework; 2) we design causal loop diagrams to analyse social-ecological processes of change in our case studies driven by trade to China and 3) we link these processes of change to the SDG framework. We find that sustainability progress in China from reforestation is cancelled out by the deforestation and cross-sectoral impacts supporting this reforestation abroad. Narratives of economic development support commodity production abroad through unrealised aims of benefit distribution and assumptions of substitutability of socio-ecological forest systems. Across cases, we find the analysed trade supports unambiguous progress on few SDGs only, and we find many mixed effects – where processes that support the achievement of SDGs exist, but are overshadowed by counterproductive processes. Our study represents a useful approach for tracking global-level impacts of national sustainability initiatives and provides cross-scale and cross-sectoral lenses through which to identify drivers of unsustainability that can be addressed in the design of effective sustainability policies.

Guiding Environmental Law’s Transformation into Earth System Law Through the Telecoupling Framework

Insights from Earth system science show us that we are crossing over into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Yet, environmental law has failed to integrate these insights and adopt an Earth system perspective, with the result that environmental law has arguably become incapable of responding to the numerous complex, interconnected, and non-linear challenges of an erratic Earth system in the Anthropocene. Earth system law is proposed as a response and is intended to ‘translate’ Earth system science insights into the legal domain, thereby transforming Holocene environmental law and making it more fit for purpose in the Anthropocene. In order to practically explore how this transformation could take place, reliance is placed on the telecoupling framework, which analyses interconnected or coupled human and natural systems over distances. With reference to the mining activities conducted by Canadian companies in Mexico, the telecoupling framework is revealed as a valuable tool for thinking about environmental law in Earth system terms and enabling one to see a range of deeply intertwined telecoupled issues and considerations that must be taken account of by the law. In turn, this enables one to begin to imagine the types of considerations that should be incorporated into legal responses in order to adequately respond to the socio-ecological challenges of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene, Earth system, Earth system governance, Earth system law, Earth system science, Environmental law, Socio-ecological systems, Telecoupling

Spatial Differentiation of Cultivated Land Use Intensification in Village Settings: A Survey of Typical Chinese Villages

The intensified use of cultivated land is essential for optimizing crop planting practices and protecting food security. This study employed a telecoupling framework to evaluate the cultivated land use intensification rates in typical Chinese villages (village cultivated land use intensifications—VCLUIs). The pressure–state–response (PSR) model organizes the VCLUI indexes including the intensity press, output state, and structural response of cultivated land use. Empirical analysis conducted in Baiquan County, China, indicating that the cultivated land use intensification levels of the whole county were low. However, the intensifications of villages influenced by physical and geographic locations and socioeconomic development levels varied significantly. This paper also found that variations in the VCLUIs were mainly dependent on new labor-driven social subsystem differences. Thus, the expanding per capita farmland scales and increasing numbers of new agricultural business entities were critical in improving the VCLUI. Overall, the theoretical framework proposed in this study was demonstrated to be effective in analyzing interactions among the natural, social, and economic subsystems of the VCLUI. The findings obtained in this study potentially have important implications for future regional food security, natural stability, and agricultural land use sustainability.

Understanding the Stickiness of Commodity Supply Chains Is Key to Improving Their Sustainability

Summary Commodity trade is central to the global economy but is also associated with socio-environmental impacts, for example, deforestation, especially in producer countries. It is crucial to understand how geographic sourcing patterns of commodities and commercial relationships between places and actors influence land-use dynamics, socio-economic development, and environmental degradation. Here, we propose a concept and methodological approach to analyze the geographic stickiness of commodity supply chains, which is the maintenance of supply network configurations over time and across perturbations. We showcase policy-relevant metrics for all Brazilian soy exports between 2003 and 2017, using high-resolution supply chain data from www.trase.earth . We find that the Brazilian soy traders with the largest market share exhibit stickier geographic sourcing patterns, and that the supply network configurations between production places and traders become increasingly sticky in subsequent years. Understanding trade stickiness is crucial for supply chain accountability, because it directly affects the effectiveness of zero-deforestation commitments.

Coupled Human and Natural Cube: A novel framework for analyzing the multiple interactions between humans and nature

Understanding the interactions between humans and nature in the Anthropocene is central to the quest for both human wellbeing and global sustainability. However, the time-space compression, long range interactions, and reconstruction of socio-economic structures at the global scale all pose great challenges to the traditional analytical frameworks of human-nature systems. In this paper, we extend the connotation of coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) and their four dimensions—space, time, appearance, and organization, and propose a novel framework: “Coupled Human and Natural Cube” (CHNC) to explain the coupling mechanism between humans and the natural environment. Our proposition is inspired by theories based on the human-earth areal system, telecoupling framework, planetary urbanization, and perspectives from complexity science. We systematically introduce the concept, connotation, evolution rules, and analytical dimensions of the CHNC. Notably there exist various “coupling lines” in the CHNC, connecting different systems and elements at multiple scales and forming a large, nested, interconnected, organic system. The rotation of the CHNC represents spatiotemporal nonlinear fluctuations in CHANS in different regions. As a system continually exchanges energy with the environment, a critical phase transition occurs when fluctuations reach a certain threshold, leading to emergent behavior of the system. The CHNC has four dimensions—pericoupling and telecoupling, syncoupling and lagcoupling, apparent coupling and hidden coupling, and intra-organization coupling and inter-organizational coupling. We mainly focus on the theoretical connotation, research methods, and typical cases of telecoupling, lagcoupling, hidden coupling, and inter-organizational coupling, and put forward a human-nature coupling matrix to integrate multiple dimensions. In summary, the CHNC provides a more comprehensive and systematic research paradigm for understanding the evolution and coupling mechanism of the human-nature system, which expands the analytical dimension of CHANS. The CHNC also provides a theoretical support for formulating regional, sustainable development policies for human wellbeing.

Telecoupling of the Trade of Donkey-Hides between Botswana and China: Challenges and Opportunities

International trade has become a major threat to biodiversity in the telecoupled world. The literature on biodiversity loss mostly concentrates on wild species; however, the increasing loss of and demand for domesticated species are overlooked. Donkeys are decreasing in many countries because of economic development, urbanization, and increased demand for donkey hides in China. The donkey population in Africa has rapidly declined recently due to supplying China with donkey hides for the production of highly demanded and legalized traditional medicine, ejiao. As a result, some African countries, including Botswana, banned the export of donkey hides. Animal protection and media continuously reported threats over the extinction of donkeys and exacerbated rural livelihood in developing countries, however, limited literature has investigated the causes and effects of donkey-hide trade and its policy interventions. This paper applies the telecoupling framework and uses the data extracted from the media reports and FAO, to understand the scale and impacts of donkey-hide trade from Botswana to China. We also explore the challenges and opportunities of donkey-hide trade for Botswana, highlighting the mechanisms need to be established to regulate the donkey-hide trade, and also to harness available opportunities if the trade ban is lifted in the future.

Why telecoupling research needs to account for environmental justice

ABSTRACTEngaging with normative questions in land system science is a key challenge. This debate paper highlights the potential of incorporating elements of environmental justice scholarship into the evolving telecoupling framework that focuses on distant interactions in land systems. We first expose the reasons why environmental justice matters in understanding telecoupled systems, and the relevant approaches suited to mainstream environmental justice into telecoupled contexts. We then explore which specific elements of environmental justice need to be incorporated into telecoupling research. We focus on 1) the distribution of social-ecological burdens and benefits across distances, 2) power and justice issues in governing distantly tied systems, and 3) recognition issues in information flows, framings and discourses across distances. We conclude our paper highlighting key mechanisms to address injustices in telecoupled land systems.

Land-Use Changes in Distant Places: Implementation of a Telecoupled Agent-Based Model

Abstract: International agricultural trade has changed land uses in trading countries, altering global food security and environmental sustainability. Studies have concluded that local land-use drivers are largely from global sources (e.g., trade increases deforestation in exporting countries). However, little is known about how these local land-use changes affect distant locations, namely the feedback between them. Yet these distant impacts and feedbacks can be significant for governing local land systems. The framework of telecoupling (i.e., socioeconomic-environmental interactions between distant places) has been shown to be an effective conceptual tool to study international trade and the associated socio-economic and environmental impacts. However, a systems simulation tool to quantify the telecoupled causes and effects is still lacking. Here, we construct a new type of agent-based model (ABM) that can simulate land-use changes at multiple distant places (namely TeleABM, telecoupled agent-based model). We use soybean trade between Brazil and China as an example, where Brazil is the sending system and China is the receiving system because they are the world?s largest soybean exporter and importer respectively. We select one representative county in each country to calibrate and validate the model with spatio-temporal analysis of historical land-use changes and the empirical analysis of household survey data. We describe the model following the ODD+D protocol, and validate the model results in each location respectively. We then illustrate how the aggregated farmer agents? land-use behaviors in the sending system result in land-use changes in the receiving system, and vice versa. One scenario example (i.e., a high-tariff scenario) is given to demonstrate the results of TeleABM. Such a model allows us to advance the understanding of telecoupling features and the influence on land system science, and to test hypotheses about complex coupled human-natural systems (e.g., cascading effect).