The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations Agenda 2030 represent an ambitious blueprint to reduce inequalities globally and achieve a sustainable future for all mankind. Meeting the SDGs for water requires an integrated approach to managing and allocating water resources, by involving all actors and stakeholders, and considering how water resources link different sectors of society. To date, water management practice is dominated by technocratic, scenario‐based approaches that may work well in the short term but can result in unintended consequences in the long term due to limited accounting of dynamic feedbacks between the natural, technical, and social dimensions of human‐water systems. The discipline of sociohydrology has an important role to play in informing policy by developing a generalizable understanding of phenomena that arise from interactions between water and human systems. To explain these phenomena, sociohydrology must address several scientific challenges to strengthen the field and broaden its scope. These include engagement with social scientists to accommodate social heterogeneity, power relations, trust, cultural beliefs, and cognitive biases, which strongly influence the way in which people alter, and adapt to, changing hydrological regimes. It also requires development of new methods to formulate and test alternative hypotheses for the explanation of emergent phenomena generated by feedbacks between water and society. Advancing sociohydrology in these ways therefore represents a major contribution toward meeting the targets set by the SDGs, the societal grand challenge of our time.

Purpose Ongoing population growth and economic development place increasing demands on the supply of services produced in and by ecosystems. The resulting degradation compromises their ability to continue supporting the provision of these services. As ecosystem services (ESs) are closely related to land use changes, studies linking these topics are critical in the context of better land use planning and to ensure the sustainable provision of ESs. Results The impacts of various land uses on ESs occur in three ways: (1) Major ESs are generated under different land use practices, (2) land use patterns have a significant impact on ESs, and (3) differing intensities of land use may have different impacts on the generation of ESs. As human needs for different ESs vary and are not always consistent, maximizing the use of one ES can lead to a sharp decline in other ESs that may exceed a threshold inducing irreversible change. Therefore, trade-offs between ESs have become challenges that the ecosystem planning and management community must address. Furthermore, other problems (such as a lack of reliable data, inconsistent evaluation methods, and a lack of validated results used in assessments of ESs) compound the difficulty of this challenge. The development of comprehensive assessment models that result from an integrated assessment and scenario analysis of ESs under different land uses can inform ecosystem management options. Future perspectives and conclusions Studies of ESs under different types of land use change must enhance understanding of topics that link ecosystem processes with ESs. Recommended research includes enhancement of the management practices of soil and land, modeling and mapping the spatial flow of ESs, analyzing trade-offs and synergies between multiple ESs, and integrating and optimizing analyses of ESs. By understanding the ecological processes that drive ESs and how these are affected by land use change, we can establish a sustainable balance between multiple uses of different ESs.

Many studies have been conducted on ecosystem services and double counting is a frequent problem that causes uncertainty and poor reliability of estimating the value of ecosystem services. By referring to previous studies of ecosystem service valuation, our research has identified the basic causes of double counting. These include ambiguous definitions and inconsistent classifications of ecosystem services, poor understanding of ecosystem complexity, inadequate recognition of exclusiveness and complementarities of individual ecosystem services, spatio-temporal scale dependence of ecosystem services, and overlap and lack of cross-referencing between ecosystem service valuation methods. Measures for reducing double counting in ecosystem service valuation are proposed as follow: (1) identifying the spatiotemporal scales of ecosystem services; (2) valuing the final benefits obtained from ecosystem services; (3) establishing consistent classification systems for ecosystem services; and (4) selecting valuation methods appropriate for the study context.

Abstract. Groundwater recharge is one of the important factors determining the groundwater development potential of an area. Even though recharge plays a key role in controlling groundwater system dynamics, much uncertainty remains regarding the relationships between groundwater recharge and its governing factors at a large scale. Therefore, this study aims to identify the most influential factors of groundwater recharge, and to develop an empirical model to estimate diffuse rainfall recharge at a global scale. Recharge estimates reported in the literature from various parts of the world (715 sites) were compiled and used in model building and testing exercises. Unlike conventional recharge estimates from water balance, this study used a multimodel inference approach and information theory to explain the relationship between groundwater recharge and influential factors, and to predict groundwater recharge at 0.5∘ resolution. The results show that meteorological factors (precipitation and potential evapotranspiration) and vegetation factors (land use and land cover) had the most predictive power for recharge. According to the model, long-term global average annual recharge (1981–2014) was 134 mm yr−1 with a prediction error ranging from −8 to 10 mm yr−1 for 97.2 % of cases. The recharge estimates presented in this study are unique and more reliable than the existing global groundwater recharge estimates because of the extensive validation carried out using both independent local estimates collated from the literature and national statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In a water-scarce future driven by increased anthropogenic development, the results from this study will aid in making informed decisions about groundwater potential at a large scale.

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Understanding the regime shifts of social-ecological systems (SES) and their local and spillover effects over a long time frame is important for future sustainability. We provide a perspective of processes unfolding over time to identify the regime shifts of a SES based on changes in the relationships between SES components while also addressing their drivers and local and spillover effects. The applicability of this approach has been demonstrated by analyzing the evolution over the past 1000 years of the SES in China’s Loess Plateau (LP). Five evolutionary phases were identified: “fast expansion of cultivation,” “slow expansion of cultivation,” “landscape engineering for higher production,” “transition from cultivation to ecological conservation,” and “revegetation for environment.” Our study establishes empirical links between the state (phase) of a SES to its drivers and effects. Lessons of single-goal driven and locally focused SES management in the LP, which did not consider these links, have important implications to long-term planning and policy formulation of SES.