New exciting papers from our working group members: Rachael Garrett, Sam Levy, Florian Gollnow and Ximena Rueda have published a systematic review paper in Environmental Research Letters examining food supply chain policies in relation to improvement of forest conservation and rural livelihoods.The review examines the deforestation, reforestation, and fire conservation outcomes associated with implementation mechanisms for forest-focused supply chain policies (FSPs) in food supply chains, as well as their impacts on farm and household income. One key finding is that more than half of the cases that rigorously measure the outcomes of FSP implementation mechanisms find additional conservation and livelihood benefits resulting from the policies, though few studies simultaneously examine tradeoffs between the two sets of outcomes. Additional rigorous research across a greater variety of contexts is urgently needed to better understand if and when FSPs can be successful in achieving synergies between conservation and livelihoods Nicolas Roux, Thomas Kastner, Karl-Heinz Erb, and Helmut Haberl published a paper "Does agricultural trade reduce pressure on land ecosystems?" in Ecological Economics. The paper examines if recent changes in the origin of agricultural products reduced humanity's impact on a fundamental ecosystem function, the net primary production (NPP) of vegetation. They found that international trade reduced pressure on ecosystems before 1999, but worsened it afterwards. Globally, changes in the origin of agricultural products had small effects on global human appropriation of NPP compared to the rise in consumption and population, but changes in the origin of imports were the main driver of Western Europe's embodied appropriation of NPP over the period. Simon Bager, Martin Persson and Tiago N.P. dos Reis published a new study in One Earth titled: “Eighty-six EU policy options for reducing imported deforestation”. The paper identifies 86 policies the EU could implement to address tropical deforestation, show that policy options that are politically feasible tend to have a weaker theory of change—the causal chain through which the policies address deforestation—setting up a trade-off between feasibility and impact (though there are exceptions, such as mandatory due diligence). Martin Persson and Simon Bager along with a broad group of co-authors have also published a Trase policy brief on “A broad EU deforestation approach can help protect climate and biodiversity”. The authors recommend that the EU takes a broad approach to addressing the loss of natural habitat due to imports of forest-risk commodities, by (1) extending legislation to other ecologically important ecosystems beyond tropical forests (such as savannahs and wetlands), (2) addressing sustainability in a broad sense (and not just illegality), and (3) covering actors across the supply-chain (not just agents first placing commodities on the EU market). This broad approach will help reduce the risk for spillovers undermining the effectiveness of EU legislation and improve policy acceptability. Working group members James Millington, Ramon Felipe Bicudo da Silva and Mateus Batistella - along with other colleagues in the Telecoupling Brazil project - have recently published a paper in Environmental Modelling & Software entitled, 'Modelling drivers of Brazilian agricultural change in a telecoupled world'. The paper presents some of the work James discussed in the September 2020 GLP webinar on the challenge of modelling telecoupled land-use change, specifically the construction and use of the CRAFTY-Brazil model. As well as reporting on the structure and testing of the model (including linking to a version available online), the paper highlights how modelling of this kind would benefit from formal projections of demands for ecosystem services alongside - and consistent with - existing forecasts of future agricultural commodity demand, population growth, and the like. The Telecoupling Research Group at Michigan State University has published a number of new papers using and exploring the concept of meta-coupling: Tromboni, Flavia, Jianguo Liu, Emanuele Ziaco, David D. Breshears, Kimberly L. Thompson, Walter K. Dodds, Kyla M. Dahlin, Elizabeth A. LaRue, James H. Thorp, Andrés Viña, Marysa M. Laguë, Alain Maasri, Hongbo Yang, Sudeep Chandra, and Songlin Fei. 2021 Macrosystems as metacoupled human and natural systems. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 19(1): 20–29. Zhang, Jian, Tao Tian, Jin-Ying Cui, Gordon M. Hickey, Rui Zhou, Jian Guo Liu and You-Cai Xiong 2021. Sustainability Evaluation on the Grain to Green Program in the Hexi Corridor of China: A Metacoupled System Perspective. Sustainability 13(3), 1498. Zhao, Zhiqiang, Meng Cai, Fang Wang, Julie A. Winkler, Thomas Connor, Min Gon Chung, Jindong Zhang, Hongbo Yang, Zhenci Xu, Ying Tang, Zhiyun Ouyang, Hemin Zhang, and Jianguo Liu 2021. Synergies and Tradeoffs among Sustainable Development Goals across Boundaries in a Metacoupled World. Science of the Total Environment. 751: 141749 Xu, Zhenci, Xiuzhi Chen, Jianguo Liu, Yu Zhang, Sophia Chau, Nishan Bhattarai, Ye Wang, Yingjie Li, Thomas Connor, Yunkai Li 2020 Impacts of irrigated agriculture on food-energy-water-CO2 nexus across metacoupled systems. Nature Communications. 11: 5837. Zhao, Zhiqiang, Meng Cai, Thomas Connor, Min Gon Chung, Jianguo Liu 2020 Metacoupled tourism and wildlife translocations affect synergies and trade-offs among sustainable development goals across spillover systems. Sustainability. And using the telecoupling framework on a range of different environmental change issues: Wu, Xutong, Shuai Wang, Bojie Fu, Jianguo Liu 2021 Spatial differences and influencing factors of the effect of afforestation in China’s Loess Plateau. Science of the Total Environment 771:144904 Yao, Yingying, Jing Sun, Chunmiao Zheng, and Jianguo Liu. 2020 Alleviating water scarcity and poverty in drylands through telecouplings: Vegetable trade and tourism in northwest China. Science of the Total Environment. Liu, Jianguo 2020 Consumption patterns and biodiversity. Biodiversity Programme of The Royal Society. Xu, Zhenci, Yingjie Li, Sophia N. Chau, Thomas Dietz, Canbing Li, Luwen Wan, Jindong Zhang, Liwei Zhang, Yunkai Li, Min Gon Chung, and Jianguo Liu 2020 Impacts of international trade on global sustainable development. Nature Sustainability. Sun, Jing, Jianguo Liu, Xinjun Yang, Fuqiang Zhao, Yuchu Qin, Yingying Yao, Fang Wang, Fei Lun, Jiejing Wang, Bo Qin, Tao Liu, Conglin Zhang, Baorong Huang, Yeqing Cheng, Jinlian Shi, Jinsong Zhang, Huajun Tang, Peng Yang, Wenbin Wu 2020 Sustainability in the Anthropocene: Telecoupling framework and its applications. (in Chinese) Acta Geographica Sinica, 75(11): 2408-2416. Liu, Jianguo 2020 Telecoupling. In: The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology. Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
