Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability

Publications

• NATURE SUSTAINABILITY - Telecoupled impacts of the Russia–Ukraine war on global cropland expansion and biodiversity

  Published on March 1, 2024
  We simulated the global cropland expansion provoked by the reshaping of international virtual cropland flows under different war scenarios and conducted a biodiversity impact assessment.

• RESOURCES, CONSERVATION & RECYCLING - Workable solutions for sustainably feeding the Chinese population

  Published on March 1, 2024
  We calculated the environmental costs of producing domestic rice, wheat, corn, soybeans, and imported soybeans. The environmental costs were enormous, and the food self-sufficiency and sufficiency (imported soybean included) rates were below 100%.

• JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT - Pathways for achieving conservation targets under metacoupled anthropogenic disturbances

  Published on February 27, 2024
  We endeavored to model the connectivity between protected areas in rapidly urbanizing regions in China, drawing on insights from the framework of metacoupling based on connected corridors at short and long distances.

• NATURE - Triple win: Solar farms in deserts can boost power, incomes and ecosystems

  Published on February 20, 2024
  As land degradation becomes more severe (see Nature 623, 666; 2023), desert photovoltaics are a triple-win, fostering not only clean-energy generation but also ecosystem recovery and local poverty reduction.

• EARTH INTERACTIONS - Effects of payment for ecosystem services and tourism on conservation and development: trade-off or synergistic?

  Published on February 13, 2024
  We showed a trade-off between the ecological and economic effects of two PES programs, while synergistic effects exist in the ecological and economic benefits of tourism.

• NATURE COMMUNICATIONS - Global transboundary synergies and trade-offs among Sustainable Development Goals from an integrated sustainability perspective

  Published on January 13, 2024
  This study quantified the transboundary interactions between 768 pairs of SDG indicators. The results showed that high income countries comprised 14.18% of the global population, but contributed to total SDG interactions worldwide (60.60%).

• JOURNAL OF CLEANER PRODUCTION - Building smallholder-adapted climate-resilient systems: Evidence from China's apple farms

  Published on January 5, 2024
  We developed a smallholder-adapted climate-resilient system (SA-CRS) conceptual framework and applied this in an empirical assessment of the adaptation of smallholder apple farmers (SAFs) to the risk of low temperature during flowering (LTF) in China

• NATURE SUSTAINABILITY - Translating Earth system boundaries for cities and businesses

  Published on January 4, 2024
  We identify commonly used sharing approaches, illustrate ten principles of translation and present a protocol involving key building blocks and control steps in translation.

• URSUS - Social network analysis uncovers hidden social complexity in giant pandas

  Published on December 7, 2023
  We employed noninvasive fecal genetic sampling to identify individuals of giant pandas, then used spatiotemporal proximity thresholds to infer scent mark–based association networks and conduct social network analyses of the population.

• ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BIODIVERSITY - Evaluation of ecosystem service policies from biophysical and social perspectives: The case of China

  Published on December 1, 2023
  The article highlights China's major large-scale ecosystem service policies: Nature Reserve System, Natural Forest Conservation Program, and Grain-to-Green Program. Overall, these programs have produced positive biophysical and socioeconomic effects.

• PNAS - Environmental impacts beyond land use and conservation risk hotspots: Coffee and tea

  Published on November 20, 2023
  Compared the production and consumption of coffee and tea, the most common beverages after water.

• ECOLOGY AND SOCIETY - Transboundary flows in the metacoupled Anthropocene: typology, methods, and governance for global sustainability

  Published on September 20, 2023
  We make the first attempt to develop a typology of transboundary flows using six flow attributes (i.e., type, magnitude, direction, distance, time, and mode) to advance metacoupling flow research and governance.

• SCIENTIFIC REPORTS - Complex relationships between soybean trade destination and tropical deforestation

  Published on July 12, 2023
  Using data for soybean-producing municipalities in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, between 2004 and 2017, we evaluated the relationships between forest cover change and the annual soybean trade destination.

• FRONTIERS IN FORESTS AND GLOBAL CHANGE - Toward a forest transition across the Brazilian Atlantic Forest biome

  Published on June 29, 2023
  Using land-use/cover (LULC) data, we assessed the loss and successive gain in forest cover during the 1987–2001 and 2001–2015 periods.

• NATIONAL SCIENCE REVIEW - Leveraging the metacoupling framework for sustainability science and global sustainable development

  Published on June 8, 2023
  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.

• NATURE COMMUNICATIONS - Physical and virtual nutrient flows in global telecoupled agricultural trade networks

  Published on April 26, 2023
  We quantified the physical and virtual nitrogen and phosphorus flows embedded in the global agricultural trade networks from 1997 to 2016 and elaborated components of the telecoupling framework.

• GEOGRAPHY AND SUSTAINABILITY - Broader applicability of the metacoupling framework than Tobler’s first law of geography for global sustainability: A systematic review

  Published on April 17, 2023
  We reviewed and synthesized sustainability literature that used Tobler’s first law of geography and framework of metacoupling across seven major topics: land change, species migration, tourism, trade, agricultural development, conservation, and governance.

• AMBIO - Global gateways as telecoupled human and natural systems: The emerging case of the Bering Strait

  Published on March 28, 2023
  We examine how three telecoupling processes (tourism, vessel traffic, and natural resource development) impact and are impacted by the coupled human and natural system of the Bering Strait Region.

• iSCIENCE - Global Decadal Assessment of Life below Water and on Land

  Published on March 16, 2023
  t\The overall SDG 14 scores had a small growth between 2010 and 2020, while the substantial increase in SDG 15 scores use of trirestrial spotlighted for the conservation ecosystem services,Especially in countries with biodiversity hotspots.

• Communications Earth & Environment - A big data approach to assess progress towards Sustainable Development Goals for cities of varying sizes

  Published on March 9, 2023
  We devise and test a systematic method for assessing SDG progress using open-source big data for 254 Chinese cities and compare the results with those obtained using statistical data.