Leveraging the metacoupling framework for sustainability science and global sustainable development

Abstract

Sustainability science seeks to understand human-nature interactions behind sustainability challenges, but has largely been place-based. Traditional sustainability efforts often solved problems in one place at the cost of other places, compromising global sustainability. The metacoupling framework offers a conceptual foundation and a holistic approach to integrating human–nature interactions within a place as well as between adjacent places and between distant places worldwide. Its applications show broad utilities for advancing sustainability science with profound implications for global sustainable development. They have revealed effects of metacoupling on the performance, synergies, and trade-offs of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) across borders and across local to global scales; untangled complex interactions; identified new network attributes; unveiled spatio-temporal dynamics and effects of metacoupling; uncovered invisible feedbacks across metacoupled systems; expanded the nexus approach; detected and integrated hidden phenomena and overlooked issues; re-examined theories such as Tobler's First Law of Geography; and unfolded transformations among noncoupling, coupling, decoupling, and recoupling. Results from the applications are also helpful to achieve SDGs across space, amplify benefits of ecosystem restoration across boundaries and across scales, augment transboundary management, broaden spatial planning, boost supply chains, empower small agents in the large world, and shift from place-based to flow-based governance. Key topics for future research include cascading effects of an event in one place on other places nearby and far away. Operationalizing the framework can benefit from further tracing flows across scales and space, uplifting the rigor of causal attribution, enlarging toolboxes, and elevating financial and human resources. Unleashing the full potential of the framework will generate more important scientific discoveries and more effective solutions for global justice and sustainable development.

Spatial flows of ecosystem services under future climate and land-use changes

“…For example, the implementation of ecological conservation policy under the EPP scenario led to increased flows of water retention, flood mitigation and soil retention services when future climatic forcing is relatively moderate. This illustrates the opportunities of co-managing and enhancing these essential services together through telecoupling processes (Liu 2023). Moreover, the discrepancy of synergistic areas among different land-use scenarios suggested an important role played by land policies in mediating the climatic effects on the interactions among multiple ES flows.…”

“…Understanding how ES flows will be affected by future climate and land-use changes could help decisionmakers to evaluate past management strategies and counteract undesirable influences (Liu 2023), thus increasing the capacity to develop adaptive strategies to global changes. This knowledge could route from assessments of past land dynamics and future projections by anticipating policy outcomes (Hasan et al 2020, Mandle et al 2021.…”

“…However, evaluating the effects of climate and land-use changes is often challenged by their interactions and the uncertainties caused by the variations in their impacts over a long timescale. Despite these challenges, integrating climate and land-use changes into ES flow assessments is vital, because management efforts to ensure sustainable and long-term ES provision which ignore these effects could lead to perverse outcomes (Liu 2023). Previous studies have evaluated the effects of climate and landuse changes on ES by focusing on their supply capacity (Langerwisch et al 2018, Pham et al 2019.…”

“…The importance of ES flows has been increasingly recognized during the past years (Wang et al 2022, Liu 2023). Given their political and practical relevance, ES flows have been incorporated into assessments for provisioning (Fridman and Kissinger 2018, Liu et al 2022 and regulating services (Bagstad et al 2019, Kleemann et al 2020, Zhang et al 2023 at regional and national scales.…”

A Consumption‐Based Integrated Framework for Subnational Absolute Environmental Sustainability Management

“…To address this knowledge gap, we construct a consumption‐based AES (CAES) management framework based on the PBs and CEFs at the subnational scale. We have incorporated the metacoupling analysis (Liu, 2023; Wiedmann & Allen, 2021) and the nexus thinking (Meng et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2022) in our framework, which provides a flow‐based perspective. It helps measure the intracoupled (local), pericoupled (transferring through imports from other subnational regions), and telecoupled (transferring through imports from other countries) environmental pressure.…”