In the past six months, a number of interesting papers have been published by our research group members and colleagues from around the world, including from many women and early-career scholars: A new paper by Perrine Laroche and colleagues from the COUPLED project, “Telecoupled environmental impacts of current and alternative Western diets”, presents a spatially explicit assessment of the impact of different Western Diets. The paper suggests that alternative diets allow for less intensive and more varied agricultural systems built on reinforced ecological infrastructure, and is published open access in Global Environmental Change.
Also in GEC, Janina Kleeman et al. published a paper titled combining different methodological approaches to assess four interregional ecosystem services flow types in the paper “Quantifying interregional flows of multiple ecosystem services – A case study for Germany”. Leandra Merz, Vanessa Hull and Di Yang published a paper in Sustainability titled “A Metacoupling Framework for Exploring Transboundary Watershed Management”. The paper outlines the application of metacoupling framework to transboundary watersheds, identifying the limitations to this application, and providing a detailed assessment of the steps needed to complete this application In a new article in Ecology and Society, titled “Drivers of Decoupling and Recoupling of Crop and Livestock Systems at Farm and Territorial Scales”, Rachael Garrett and colleagues show that branding integrated crop and livestock systems as sustainable could improve adoption, but would likely be unsuccessful at encouraging wide-scale change.
A number of scientific articles have been recently published by the Managing Telecoupled Landscapes project on “Participatory Bayesian network modeling to understand driving factors of land-use change decisions” (Ntsiva Andriatsitohaina et al.) and “Human well-being under telecoupling” (Jorge Llopis et al.) in Madagascar; on the “Drivers of the rubber boom” (Victoria Junquera et al.) in Laos; and on “Sustainable Development Under Competing Claims on Land” (Flurina Schneider et al.) and “Tracing land use regime shifts” in Myanmar (Julie Zähringer et al.). Xiaobo Hua and Yasuyuki Kono recently published about “Reconsidering land system changes in borderlands: Insights from the China-ASEAN borderland”. The paper highlights how the telecoupling lens can contribute to studies of land change in borderlands to account for multiple interactions on both sides of a national border.
Alfredo Romero-Muñoz and colleagues published a study in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment on “Beyond fangs: beef and soybean trade drive jaguar extinction”, arguing for a need to consider the connections between agricultural expansion, agricultural trade and other treats such as wildlife trafficking are needed in conservation efforts.
Approaches to conservation of forests is also the topic of a new paper by COUPLED fellow Floris Leijten and colleagues assessing “Which forests could be protected by corporate zero deforestation commitments? A spatial assessment” published in Environmental Research Letters.
Finally, Sébastien Boillat et al. published a paper in the Journal of Land Use Science on “Why telecoupling research needs to account for environmental justice”. The paper is the main outcome of the research workshop "Environmental Justice in Governing Telecoupled Systems", that took place at the University of Bern on 7th and 8th November 2018. |
