Abstract
As the inaugural editors of Transactions in Earth, Environment, and Sustainability (TEES), we would like to welcome you to this new journal. Transactions in Earth, Environment, and Sustainability aims to publish original high-quality research that lays foundations for understanding the complex environmental processes that govern the sustainability of our social-ecological systems. The journal encourages innovative approaches and thinking about the cascading linkages among Earth, Environment, and Sustainability, operating across local, regional, and global scales through the lenses of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary perspectives. It distinguishes itself by providing a flexible and cross-disciplinary platform for promoting the exchange of cutting-edge scientific findings, innovative ideas, and insightful knowledge among scientists, planners, policy makers, and analysts for the social-ecological systems within which we all reside.
Our Earth is continuously undergoing rapid changes. The transformation of the Earth’s environmental systems acts to create enormous and ongoing challenges to sustainability. A deeper understanding of the various trade-offs and potentially unintended consequences – in the complex Earth-environmental-social systems – calls for a comprehensive understanding of the social-ecological systems. Smart and systematic solutions are required for the sustainable use of food, energy, water, and adaptation to climate change. Sustainability science requires the integration of the natural and social sciences. The United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have guided scholars in the natural and social sciences for achieving specific sustainability targets. Among these SDGs, Earth system processes and the related environmental changes play a fundamental role in achieving a sustainable development related to food (SDG2), water (SDG6), energy (SDG7), city and community (SDG11), climate (SDG13), and biodiversity (SDG14/15).
Integrated environmental-ecological-resource issues are important in the context of global urbanization and environmental change and there is little doubt that human well-being will remain a major challenge in the Anthropocene. We now live on a changing Earth, in which understanding the environmental and socio-economic transformations along with the evolution of Earth systems is vital for managing and governing environmental pollution, utilizing natural resources, enhancing ecological security, and promoting social development. These issues are not only directly related to our living environments, but also important for a sustainable future development. However, the linkages between Earth processes, environmental issues, and sustainability challenges have not been clearly addressed from a social-ecological perspective.
Exploring innovative solutions for a sustainability development has recently become an open and transdisciplinary field of research. A core purpose of Transactions in Earth, Environment, and Sustainability is to provide a platform for multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary debates about sustainable development agendas and roadmaps for sustainability from local to global scales, which aims to solve the environmental issues based on the foundations of the Earth system. The journal focuses not only on individual aspects of foundations of the Earth system, environmental processes, and the consequences of socioeconomic and ecological interactions that affect global and regional sustainable development, but also on the integration of all three in wholistic social-ecological systems.
Foundations: Earth system settings for the social-ecological systems
A large and compelling body of evidence demonstrated that human activity has unequivocally contributed to the increase in greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, which has affected all parts of the climate system, including the atmosphere, ocean, land, cryosphere, and biosphere (IPCC, 2021). Warming affects global patterns of wind and precipitation, leading to more extreme weather events (Arndt et al., 2018). At the same time, warming may have already begun altering ocean circulation patterns, influencing the distribution of nutrients and oxygen, the energy exchange of ocean-atmosphere, and the uptake of CO2 (Toggweiler and Russell, 2008). Great changes have also occurred across the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems, and climate-vegetation interaction has changed the greenness, phenology, carbon sequestration capacity of vegetation, landscape pattern, and the habitat quality for wildlife (Chen et al., 2020; Peng et al., 2013; Piao et al., 2022). These perturbations have reverberated throughout the Earth system and will continue to do so well into the foreseeable future (Tortell, 2020). Although tremendous progress has been made in understanding the interaction between Earth systems and human activities, societies need knowledge that will allow them to cope with global environmental risks while simultaneously meeting social and economic development goals.
Processes: environmental changes in the social-ecological systems
Environment connecting the hydrosphere, geosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and social development in the social-ecological systems present key elements, processes, and their relationships for promoting the global or regional sustainable development. Since the age of industrialisation, various types of environmental pollution have always been the focus of monitoring, assessment, and governance due to their damage to ecosystems and potential risks to human health (Lelieveld et al., 2015). As well in the bio-geophysical feedbacks and biogeochemical cycles, carbon emissions are proved to significantly dominate global warming, and net-zero emissions has been taken as an important action of climate mitigation (Ou et al., 2021). Contributed by the climate change and land-use transformation, ecosystems might be degraded, damaged, or destroyed, thus leading to the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services related to human well-being. Recent modelling of scenarios showed that about 27% of world’s protected area networks would experience rapid climate change and land-use change by 2050 (Asamoah et al., 2021); and up to 4.5 billion and 5 billion people might face higher water pollution and reduction in crop production, respectively (Chaplin-Kramer et al., 2019). From the perspective of social-ecological systems, the food-energy-water nexus provides the connection among three necessary resources for human life (Huntington et al., 2021). Considering the trade-offs and synergies of generating or consuming food, energy, and water, it is predicted the consumption of food and energy will increase by about 60% along with an increase of 17% in water consumption without new responding policies during 2015–2050 (Van Vuuren et al., 2019).
Consequences: sustainability dynamics of the social-ecological systems
The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2020 showed that the global development path appeared to be moving further away from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic (UN, 2020). By 2030, the SDGs are unlikely to be realized on schedule (Naidoo and Fisher, 2020), and it is urgent to explore ways to accelerate the realization of SDGs with the scientific base of interrelationships among SDGs. Various modelling approaches have been applied to explore the synergies/trade-offs relationship of SDGs and their nonlinear changes (Hopkins et al., 2021; Wu et al., 2022). Meanwhile, the realization of SDGs required attention to the collaboration and feedback of various factors in the social-ecological system (Fu et al., 2022; Reyers and Selig, 2020). Therefore, current sustainable development research has paid more attention to the complex coupling mechanism of social-ecological systems (Bodin et al., 2019), particularly to its vulnerability and resilience to uncertain risks of global change (Grafton et al., 2019).
From the perspective of social-ecological system resilience, connecting the natural capital and the social capital with multi-stakeholder participation is an effective measure to improve risk mitigation (Bastien-Olvera and Moore, 2021). The application of the tele-coupling perspective can strengthen the analysis of the cross-regional transmission of disturbances in the social-ecological system and promote the cooperation and win-win of multi-system sustainable development at different scales (Liu et al., 2018). Human drivers such as policy, trade, infrastructure development, and resource input also provided important contributions to social-ecological system resilience and human well-being (Thacker et al., 2019; Tu et al., 2019). The social-ecological network analysis has also provided a deeper understanding of the structure and feedback of social-ecological systems (McGowan et al., 2019). At present, it is still necessary to further focus on the dynamic coupling process of social-ecological factors, the impact of human activities as well as the constraint of local natural conditions on the sustainability of social-ecological systems, and the targeted SDGs trade-offs with multi-scenario simulations across temporal and spatial scales.
Content of this journal
Transactions in Earth, Environment, and Sustainability welcomes original, high-quality research articles, review articles, short communications, perspective articles, and editorials on, but not limited to, the following themes.
Transactions in Earth, Environment, and Sustainability publishes work on a wide range of topics as outlined above. There are no methodological, theoretical, or geographical limitations. As regards the types of articles, this journal will publish the following categories of content:
Transactions in Earth, Environment, and Sustainability will feature unscheduled special issues on timely and important topics. Special issues can be commissioned to guest editors. We welcome proposals from prospective guest editors who wish to submit a call for papers and a supporting case for consideration by the editors of Transactions in Earth, Environment, and Sustainability. Materials can be sent to the most appropriate editor depending on the topic. Guest editors will typically be responsible for sending papers out for review, reaching initial editorial decisions, and ensuring timely submission of the whole set of papers comprising their special issue.
In conclusion, we hope that scientists, planners, policy makers and analysts from a wide range of disciplines will consider this journal as a conduit through which to share and learn innovative approaches and thinking about the cascade linking Earth, environment, and sustainability at global or regional scale with multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary perspectives, in order to gain further understanding on the interactions of social-ecological systems in such a sustainability-challenged world.
We hereby express our warmest gratitude to our publisher SAGE for being receptive to launching this journal. We welcome the submission of papers, as well as proposals for special issues.