Metacoupling

"As our world now is so tightly connected both socioeconomically and environmentally, and things are changing so fast, we simply don’t have the luxury of taking the easy way to find solutions. To understand interconnected and epic changes, we need to change."   Jianguo "Jack" Liu

The video below introduces the Metacoupling Framework, proposed by Professor Jianguo "Jack" Liu, as a new way to understand human-nature interactions for promoting global sustainability in a highly interconnected world. Through examples such as food trade, pollution transfer, global crises (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic), Russia-Ukraine conflict, migration, tourism, protected areas, and species dispersal, the video shows how actions in one place (e.g., city or country) can affect people and nature nearby and far away. It explains how the framework categorizes human-nature interactions into intracoupling within a specific system, pericoupling between adjacent systems, and telecoupling between distant systems. Operationalizing the framework can reveal hidden connections across regions and scales and offers a powerful perspective for sustainability research and decision-making.

 (The video was made to introduce Professor Liu’s “Master Distinguished Lecture” in 2025 by Shanghai Jiaotong University, with English voice-over by Alyssa Bradley at Michigan State University.)