Achieving Sustainable Earth Futures in the Anthropocene by Including Local Communities in Critical Zone Science

Abstract

Critical Zone Science (CZS) explores the deep evolution of landscapes from the base of the groundwater or the saprolite‐rock interface to the top of vegetation, the zone that supports all terrestrial life. Here we propose a framework for CZS to evolve further as a discipline, building on 1st generation CZOs in natural systems and 2nd generation CZOs in human‐modified systems, to incorporate human behaviour for more holistic understanding in a 3rd generation of CZOs. This concept was tested in the China‐UK CZO programme (2016–2020) that established four CZOs across China on different lithologies. Beyond conventional CZO insights into soil resources, biogeochemical cycling and hydrology across scales, surveys of farmers and local government officials led to insights into human‐environment interactions and key pressures affecting the socio‐economic livelihoods of local farmers. These learnings combined with the CZS data identified knowledge exchange (KE) opportunities to unravel diverse factors within the Land‐Water‐Food Nexus, that could directly improve local livelihoods and environmental conditions, such as reduction in fertilizer use, contributing toward Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and environmental policies. Through two‐way local KE, the local cultural context and socio‐economic considerations were more readily apparent alongside the environmental rationale for policy and local action to improve the sustainability of farming practices. Seeking solutions to understand and remediate CZ degradation caused by human‐decision making requires the co‐design of CZS that foregrounds human behavior and the opinions of those living in human modified CZOs. We show how a new transdisciplinary CZO approach for sustainable Earth futures can improve alignment of research with the practical needs of communities in stressed environments and their governments, supporting social‐ecological and planetary health research agendas and improving capacity to achieve SDGs.

Bringing Social Science Into Critical Zone Science: Exploring Smallholder Farmers' Learning Preferences in Chinese Human‐Modified Critical Zones

“…For example, use of social science methods in our study allowed identification of the most pressing issues (and thus SDGs) for local people—this allowed us to determine what is most valuable for farmers to learn for to directly improve their livelihoods, environmental outcomes as well as delivery toward SDGs and national policy objectives. Narratives on fertilizer costs gleaned from local farmers can now be usefully combined with the scientific data arising from the CZ projects documenting high nitrogen levels (Naylor et al., 2023), to design a tailored KE program that will help reduce costs for farmers, reduce environmental impacts of excess nitrogen and thus improve their livelihoods by reducing poverty as their farming will become more economically efficient. These measures would also dovetail nicely into national‐scale policy shifts, such as no increase in synthetic fertilizer use in agriculture.…”

“…This requires a re‐framing of CZ science so that it is more human‐centric, by incorporating local knowledge and study of the social dynamics of the actors shaping CZ processes to build trust with local actors (Karcher et al., 2022) as an integral part of future CZ science (Latour, 2021). In CZOs with large rural populations such as those in China, farmers as stewards of the land (Zhang et al., 2016) are key agents of CZ function, but also have a wealth of local knowledge of their environment, agricultural practices, ecological suitability (e.g., for agroforestry, Rigal et al., 2018; Girard, 2015 for agricultural innovation) and their cultural, social and political context (Naylor et al., 2023; Wu & Pretty, 2004). We describe this integration of local and scientific knowledge as a 3rd generation approach to CZ science (Naylor et al., 2023), in which key stakeholders co‐design and co‐produce research initiatives that create new dialogs and training opportunities.…”

“…Specifically, we sought to understand who smallholder farmers learn from, what they learn about and how they prefer to learn. Findings from interviews and questionnaires during this phase allowed us to develop an initial conceptual understanding of learning processes and pathways, along with data on human impacts, pressures on livelihoods and current sustainable farm management experiences (Buckerfield et al., 2019a; Naylor et al., 2023; Oliver et al., 2020) that could guide KE activities of the Karst CZO project. However, the richness of the data on social dynamics in the studied villages (see analysis below), and our realization of how these social processes strongly influenced to whom and how CZ science could be shared, led us to investigate these social processes in more detail.…”

“…Fortunately, additional funding was secured (see Naylor et al., 2023) enabling us to increase the depth and spatial breadth of our work, to undertake a more extensive comparative analysis between three regions (Figure 1). Phase 2 surveys took place in 2018 and 2019 and included a detailed follow‐up series of interviews in the primary case study location, in Puding County (Figure 1), to further explore farmers' learning networks, to improve understanding of local social dynamics within and between groups and to identify any new actors involved in smallholder agricultural practice.…”

“…Critical zone scientists are increasingly working in human‐modified systems, with researchers studying 2nd generation, agricultural CZOs (Critical Zone Observatories) including a component of knowledge exchange (KE) in their research programmes (Kumar et al., 2018; White et al., 2015). Newly emerging transdisciplinary CZOs for sustainable earth futures (3rd generation CZOs), which combine traditional CZ science with social science (see Naylor et al., 2023), illustrate how Critical Zone science (CZS) can usefully draw on local knowledge and social science research principles to develop CZO programmes to meet scientific as well as wider socio‐ecological system benefits, such as improving achievement against sustainable development goals (SDGs).…”