Shaanxi Normal University
Tourism and Environment College
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... more
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.
- by Jianguo Liu and +3
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Telecoupled flows of people, organisms, goods, information, and energy are expanding across the globe. Causes are integral components of the telecoupling framework, yet the rigor with which they have been identified and evaluated to date... more
Telecoupled flows of people, organisms, goods, information, and energy are expanding across the globe. Causes are integral components of the telecoupling framework, yet the rigor with which they have been identified and evaluated to date is unknown. We address this knowledge gap by systematically reviewing causal attribution in the telecoupling literature (n = 89 studies) and developing a standardized causal terminology and typology for consistent use in telecoupling research. Causes are defined based on six criteria: sector (e.g., environmental, economic), system of origin (i.e., sending, receiving, spillover), agent, distance, response time (i.e., time lapse between cause and effect), and direction (i.e., producing positive or negative effects). Using case studies from the telecoupling literature, we demonstrate the need to enhance the rigor of telecoupling causal attribution by combining qualitative and quantitative methods via process-tracing, counterfactual analysis, and related approaches. Rigorous qualitative-quantitative causal attribution is critical for accurately assessing the social-ecological causes and consequences of telecouplings and thereby identifying leverage points for informed management and governance of telecoupled systems.
- by Jianguo Liu and +1
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The needs and capacities to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) differ across regions and nations, but little research has been done to investigate their similarities and differences. Here, we proposed using SDG bundles... more
The needs and capacities to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) differ across regions and nations, but little research has been done to investigate their similarities and differences. Here, we proposed using SDG bundles (i.e. groups of regions with similar performances on all individual SDGs) to classify regions when assessing SDG progress and applied the method at the provincial level in China from 2000 to 2015. Five SDG bundles with distinct characteristics were identified. The dominant bundles changed from 'poor performance for all SDGs' in 2000 to 'high scores for environmental and some social SDGs and intermediate scores for others' and 'low scores for environmental SDGs but high scores for others' in 2015, indicating the overall improvement of China's sustainable development level. However, no bundle had relatively high scores in all SDGs, implying that China has much work left to do. Changes in the SDG bundles across space and time were related to regional socioeconomic development, climate, and geographic conditions. This study sheds light on identifying regions' strengths and weaknesses in achieving all SDGs, which can inform targeted sustainability actions for regions within certain SDG bundles and promote collaborations among regions with different bundles.
- by Jianguo Liu and +1
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Rapid urban expansion has profound impacts on global biodiversity through habitat conversion, degradation, fragmentation, and species extinction. However, how future urban expansion will affect global biodiversity needs to be better... more
Rapid urban expansion has profound impacts on global biodiversity through habitat conversion, degradation, fragmentation, and species extinction. However, how future urban expansion will affect global biodiversity needs to be better understood. We contribute to filling this knowledge gap by combining spatially explicit projections of urban expansion under shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) with datasets on habitat and terrestrial biodiversity (amphibians, mammals, and birds). Overall, future urban expansion will lead to 11-33 million hectares of natural habitat loss by 2100 under the SSP scenarios and will disproportionately cause large natural habitat fragmentation. The urban expansion within the current key biodiversity priority areas is projected to be higher (e.g., 37-44% higher in the WWF's Global 200) than the global average. Moreover, the urban land conversion will reduce local withinsite species richness by 34% and species abundance by 52% per 1 km grid cell, and 7-9 species may be lost per 10 km cell. Our study suggests an urgent need to develop a sustainable urban development pathway to balance urban expansion and biodiversity conservation.
- by Yingjie Li and +1
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Many leading countries are boosting renewables, especially solar energy, as a major way to mitigate future energy crises and climate change. Particularly, in China, the number and scale of photovoltaic (PV) power stations have grown... more
Many leading countries are boosting renewables, especially solar energy, as a major way to mitigate future energy crises and climate change. Particularly, in China, the number and scale of photovoltaic (PV) power stations have grown unprecedentedly in the last decade. There is an urgent need to monitor the PV power development in order to accurately estimate national renewable potentials and understand the ecological impacts. However, there are few efforts towards providing spatially explicit and time-series datasets of PV development at the regional and national scales. To fill the gap, this study proposes an integrated remote sensing approach for PV power stations mapping by combining image segmentation and object-based classification (ISOC) techniques. We took five northwestern provinces of China as an illustration and produced 30-m medium-resolution PV power station distribution maps from 2007 to 2019. Our analysis shows that the total area of PV power stations in the five provinces increased to 722 km 2 in 2019, with producer, user and overall accuracies of 86%, 100% and 93%. Of the 309 PV station clusters (hereafter, PV parks), the top 7% largest ones account for 61% of the total area of PV power stations, indicating that PV power stations in the Northwest tend to be developed in the form of large-scale centralized PV parks. The land used for PV power stations was mainly converted from four land cover types: Gobi Desert, sandy land, sparse grassland, and moderate grassland. The central government policy on facilitating clean energy played a major role in driving the rapid expansion of PV parks across the country. The methodology and results of this study will help policymakers, researchers, and practitioners to develop corresponding industrial standards and environmental regulations to mitigate the potential environmental impacts, and promote more sustainable development of solar energy in China and beyond.
- by Yingjie Li
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Renewable energy is crucial to address climate change and achieve carbon neutrality. Within the existing technologies, photovoltaics is one of the most promising renewable energies. However, large-scale development of photovoltaics always... more
Renewable energy is crucial to address climate change and achieve carbon neutrality. Within the existing technologies, photovoltaics is one of the most promising renewable energies. However, large-scale development of photovoltaics always needs a large amount of space, competing for land with other usages. Installing photovoltaics on water surfaces such as lakes and reservoirs is one of the major solutions to solve the contradiction between photovoltaic development and land shortage. In recent years, many countries have been actively promoting the development of water photovoltaic (WPV) to reduce carbon emission and meet increased energy demand, of which China is far ahead. Mapping the spatial distribution of WPV with satellite image time series will help reveal the spatial distribution, assess the scale and future potential of national WPV development, and understand its environmental impact. However, studies and reliable spatial data on the extent and distribution of WPV are still lacking. To address this gap, we proposed a classification algorithm based on Random Forest to extract WPV features and determine the types of the WPV from the Sentinel time series. The results show that the area of WPV in China reached 165 km 2 in 2019, with an average annual growth of 43.8 km 2 from 2016 to 2019. Among them, Stationary Photovoltaic (SPV) accounts for 95% of the total WPV, while Floating Photovoltaic (FPV) only accounts for 5%. Based on our WPV mapping results, we estimated the installed capacity and power generation of WPV would be approximately 6911 MW and 7.8 TWh yr − 1 , accounting for 3.4% and 3.5% of the total cumulative installed PV capacity and total PV power generation, respectively. This study provides an efficient and robust approach for extracting WPV at a large scale. The WPV data can be a valuable supplement to official tabulate data because it contains much finer spatial information that can assist stakeholders with future WPV planning and environmental impact assessment.
- by Yingjie Li
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