Feedback of telecoupling: the case of a payments for ecosystem services program

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Around the globe, previously isolated rural areas are increasingly connected with other distant places (e.g., cities) by telecouplings (i.e., environmental and socioeconomic interactions over distances) such as payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs, labor migration, and tourism. Although many studies have estimated impacts of telecouplings in rural areas, little is known about how these impacts might in turn affect telecouplings themselves through feedbacks. Using household survey data collected in China's Wolong Nature Reserve for giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), we evaluated an unexpected impact of the telecoupling of the Grain to Green Program (GTGP)-one of the largest PES programs in the world. This impact may trigger a feedback that can strengthen the GTGP in the future. A previous study in Wolong found that afforestation on marginal cropland promoted by the GTGP has significantly intensified crop damage by wildlife on nearby remaining cropland. We evaluated how this change might in turn affect the GTGP by estimating the impact of crop damage induced by the current GTGP on local households' willingness to participate in possible future GTGP. Our results show that due to the impact of the current GTGP on crop damage, local households may enroll 10.4% more cropland that is close to the afforested lands in future GTGP, which suggests a positive feedback that will strengthen the influences of the GTGP in Wolong and beyond. Our study highlights that local human-nature interactions driven by telecouplings, such as human-wildlife conflicts, may trigger feedbacks that affect telecouplings themselves. With improved understanding of telecouplings' feedbacks, scientists, policy-makers, and conservation practitioners can better anticipate the complex interactions among different places and design effective conservation strategies for achieving sustainability objectives such as those set by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

Action needed for the EU Common Agricultural Policy to address sustainability challenges

“…To reduce complexity, financial reporting and reporting for sustainability indicators should be separated. Identify and address global impacts of the CAP especially in the global South , to achieve a reduction of environmental leakage and global negative land‐use effects as well as market distortions by EU agriculture, and to comply with the EU's principle of ‘Policy Coherence for Development’ (Article 208 of the Treaty of the European Union; EC, 2019a; Matthews 2018a, 2018b). The EU needs to strive for a better understanding of the impacts of its agricultural sector on developing countries' ability to meet the SDGs, and the roles of agricultural payments (Yang, Lupi, Zhang, Chen, & Liu, 2018) and unsustainable imports, especially of animal‐derived products, feed and biofuel (Barthel et al, 2018; Matthews 2018a, 2018b; Schulmeister, 2015). Beyond the CAP, strengthening international agreements and environmental governance systems, as well as communicating about sustainable consumption levels that reflect European and global capacity, are options here. Improve governance of the CAP and its reform in order to enhance transparency, accountability, participation and knowledge‐uptake in line with SDG 16, and thereby regain legitimacy and public trust (Pe'er et al, 2019).…”

Complex effects of natural disasters on protected areas through altering telecouplings

“…The characteristics of the telecoupling framework, and the ways in which it differs from other frameworks, are discussed in greater detail in Liu et al 2013. This framework has quickly gained popularity and has been successfully applied to a series of important issues, such as payment for ecosystem services programs , flows of ecosystem services (Liu et al 2016a), international land deals , energy https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol23/iss3/art17/ trade (Fang et al 2016), urban water sustainability , Yang et al 2016, species migration (Hulina et al 2017), species invasion , conservation (Carter et al 2014, Gasparri et al 2016, Wang and Liu 2017, Yang et al 2018, fisheries (Carlson et al 2017), trade of sand (Torres et al 2017), and trade of food and forest products , Liu 2014.…”

Understanding How Smallholders Integrated into Pericoupled and Telecoupled Systems

“…Interactions that occur between systems are intercoupling, while between adjacent systems are pericoupling and between distant systems are telecoupling. Telecoupling, among the three, was the first to be designed, and has been quickly adopted by scholars to explore land use changes [43][44][45][46], food security, and the role played by international trade [47], water transfer [48,49], and development and sustainability issues [26,50,51], to name a few. Later, pericoupling and intracoupling were proposed along with telecoupling to form the comprehensive metacoupling framework [42].…”