Telecoupling Research: The First Five Years

Abstract

In an increasingly interconnected world, human–environment interactions involving flows of people, organisms, goods, information, and energy are expanding in magnitude and extent, often over long distances. As a universal paradigm for examining these interactions, the telecoupling framework (published in 2013) has been broadly implemented across the world by researchers from diverse disciplines. We conducted a systematic review of the first five years of telecoupling research to evaluate the state of telecoupling science and identify strengths, areas to be improved, and promising avenues for future study. We identified 89 studies using any derivation of the term telecoupling. These works emphasize trade flows, information transfer, and species dispersal at international, national, and regional scales involving one or a few countries, with China, Brazil, and the United States being the most frequently studied countries. Our review showed a rising trend in publications and citations on telecoupling, with 63% of identified telecoupling studies using the framework’s specific language (e.g., “flows”, “agents”). This result suggests that future telecoupling studies could apply the standardized telecoupling language and terminology to better coordinate, synthesize, and operationalize interdisciplinary research. Compelling topics for future research include operationalization of the telecoupling framework, commonalities among telecouplings, telecoupling mechanisms and causality, and telecoupled systems governance. Overall, the first five years of telecoupling research have improved our understanding of human–environment interactions, laying a promising foundation for future social–ecological research in a telecoupled world.

Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change

“…These projections come with important uncertainties as to the degree of change or to the geographical differentiation of the impacts, depending on the underlying socioeconomic scenario. Given the interconnectedness of the world regions, future scenarios need to better address the impacts of telecouplings [socioeconomic and environmental interactions over distances (70)], such as trade, foreign direct investment, migrations, biological invasions, and pollutant flows (87). Projections also omit interconnections among species, which may cause domino effects that amplify the loss of diversity (88).…”

Making land-use change and markets: the global-local entanglement of producing rice in Bagré, Burkina Faso

“…Telecoupling Since its first explicit formulation (Liu et al 2013), the concept of telecoupling has generated insights into the globalization of land-use change (see also Kapsar et al 2019 for an overview and synthesis). Having emerged from land system science (see Eakin et al 2014 for an overview of the concept's genealogy; Friis et al 2016;Liu et al 2019), the concept assembles researchers who draw on quite different epistemologies and methods (Tonini and Liu 2017;Nielsen, Hauer, and Friis 2019;Schaffartzik and Kastner 2019;Seaquist and Johansson 2019;Verburg 2019).…”

“…Tracing and understanding the connection between the land-use changes observed in Bagré and the making of a national rice market is achieved by connecting two strands of literature, namely telecoupling (Liu et al 2013;Kapsar et al 2019;Friis and Nielsen 2019a) and geographies of marketization (Berndt and Boeckler 2012). Bringing the telecoupling literature (Liu et al 2013;Eakin et al 2014;Friis and Nielsen 2014, 2017a, 2019aFriis et al 2016;Kapsar et al 2019) into dialogue with the geographies of marketization literature (Berndt and Boeckler 2012;Boeckler and Berndt 2013;Ouma 2013Ouma , 2015Ouma, Boeckler, and Lindner 2013) has not yet been done but, as we will show, offers insights into global-local relations.…”

Smallholder Telecoupling and Climate Governance in Jambi Province, Indonesia

“…Telecoupling is an emerging analytical concept in land system science reacting to an increasingly complex and distal cause and impact context, as well as a reaction to an increasingly process-oriented system (Kapsar et al 2019). It aims to support research striving to unravel drivers of intended as well as unintended changes in social-ecological systems (Friis and Nielsen 2017).…”