Drivers of Human Stress on the Environment in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Human actions are transforming ecosystems across the globe. Six frameworks aid in understanding the forces that drive human stress on the environment and human responses to this stress. Two of them, the stochastic impacts by regression on population, affluence and technology (STIRPAT) model and decomposition analysis, are approaches to analyzing data. Four describe the interrelated system of human actions and environmental responses: driving forces, pressures, states, impacts, responses (DPSIR); the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) framework; coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) and telecoupling; and social-ecological systems (SES). In applying these frameworks, attention must be given to the scale of analysis and to the effects of context. In addition to the frameworks there are four substantial research literatures providing theory and empirical analysis of how drivers place stress on the environment: a macrocomparative tradition, work on household energy consumption, land change science, and research on commons. Although these traditions remain somewhat separate, they are largely complementary.

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“…We include annual observations for six predictors in the analysis, all of which are commonly used in research on the human drivers of emissions: urbanization, GDP per capita, total population, trade openness, manufacturing as a percentage of GDP, and services as a percentage of GDP (Dietz, 2017;Jorgenson et al, 2019;Rosa & Dietz, 2012). Urbanization is measured as the percentage of the nation's population living in urban areas (World Bank, 2018).…”

Incorporating Social System Dynamics in the Columbia River Basin: Food-Energy-Water Resilience and Sustainability Modeling in the Yakima River Basin

“…These considerations become even more complex with incorporation of the social, as systems operate at different units or levels. Dietz (2017) offers one useful typology as an illustration, as follows. Ecological systems may be seen as including the biosphere, biotic province, landscape, watershed/airshed, community population, and individual, whereas the social system may be thought of as the world system, nation, culture, political subdivisions, community, household, and individual.…”

“…Ostrom's work has also inspired multiple other research areas (see Arrow et al, 2012 for a review). Two relevant examples include work on human drivers of environmental change (Rosa and Dietz, 2012;Dietz, 2017) and work on Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS) (Liu et al, 2007a,b). Within the CHANS framework, Chen et al (2012) explore systems in which human and natural aspects interact and the production of human, animal, and ecosystem well-being and sustainability.…”

“…We are especially concerned with environmental change because of its expected impacts on human well-being (Dietz, 2017). Social science perspectives would likely conceptualize the purpose of the FEW system to be improving human wellbeing 2 .…”

Frontiers in socio-environmental research: components, connections, scale, and context

“…They catalogued how each framework conceptualized the social and ecological subsystems of SE systems, the dynamics driving each subsystem, the interactions between them, and the relative emphasis of each framework on the social versus ecological subsystem. More recent comparative efforts assessed the current state of theory and empirical knowledge about human stress on the environment and human responses to that stress from five disciplinary perspectives (Cox et al 2016) and across four SE frameworks (Dietz 2017). …”