From teleconnection to telecoupling: taking stock of an emerging framework in land system science

Friis, Cecilie; Nielsen, Jonas Østergaard; Otero, Iago; Haberl, Helmut; Niewöhner, Jörg; Hostert, Patrick

doi:10.1080/1747423x.2015.1096423

Cited by 149 publications

(127 citation statements)

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“…Liu et al 93 has similarly been arguing for a hierarchical integration of relevant subsystems at finer spatial and temporal resolutions to address global sustainability challenges that we face, such as safe operating space for humanity in terms of resource use. Such efforts have led to the emergence of the notion of tele-coupling in Land System Science (LSS), 94 where location-specific land cover dynamics is influenced not just by local drivers of change such as population pressure but also distal coupled social environmental/land cover dynamics through flows such as trade of goods and of knowledge.…”

Section: Future Challenges: Spatial Dimension Of Socio-hydrologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Progress in socio‐hydrology: a meta‐analysis of challenges and opportunities

2016

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Socio-hydrology was introduced 4 years ago into the scientific lexicon, and elicited several reactions about the meaning and originality of the concept. However, there has also been much activity triggered by the original paper, including further commentaries that clarified the definitions, and several papers that acted on the definitions, and through these activities further clarified and illustrated the meaning and usefulness of socio-hydrology for understanding coupled human-water systems and to assist with sustainable water management. This paper restates the case for socio-hydrology by articulating the need to consider the two-way feedbacks between human and water systems in order to explain puzzles, paradoxes, and unintended consequences that arise in the context of water management, and to suggest ways to avoid or overcome these challenges. The paper then presents a critical review of past research on socio-hydrology through the prism of historical, comparative, and process socio-hydrology, documenting both the progress made and the challenges faced. Much of the work done so far has involved studies of socio-hydrological systems in spatially isolated domains (e.g., river basins), and phenomena that involve emergent patterns in the time domain. The modeling studies so far have involved testing hypotheses about how these temporal patterns arise. An important feature that distinguishes socio-hydrology from other related fields is the importance of allowing human agency (e.g., socioeconomics, technology, norms, and values) to be endogenous to the systems. This paper articulates the need to extend sociohydrology to explore phenomena in space and in space-time, as the world becomes increasingly globalized and human-water systems become highly interconnected. The endogenization of human agency, in terms of values and norms, technology, economics, and trade must now be extended to space and to spacetime. This is a necessity, and a challenge, for water sustainability, but presents exciting opportunities for further research. © 2016 The Authors. WIREs Water published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. How to cite this article:WIREs Water 2017, 4:e1193. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1193 INTRODUCTIONH umans have been exploiting the Earth's natural resources at an accelerating pace ever since intense economic activity was triggered by the industrial revolution. This exploitation of the Earth's natural resources facilitated, and was in turn facilitated by, technological innovations. These innovations included extraction of iron ore, the steam engine, and faster ships, railroads, and several other means This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.subsequently that connected people worldwide through trade. Concerted ambitions of humans in different parts of the world with their unique niches, now connected through trade, fuelled the...

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Section: Future Challenges: Spatial Dimension Of Socio-hydrologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Progress in socio‐hydrology: a meta‐analysis of challenges and opportunities

2016

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“…The concept of 'teleconnection and telecoupling' offers one such conceptual framework with which to analyze distal drivers of land use change under conditions of global social and environmental change (Friis et al 2015;Seto et al 2012). As set out originally, the framework starts from a systems-theoretical perspective and assumes that human and natural systems are coupled.…”

Section: The Telecoupling Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualizing Distal Drivers in Land Use Competition

Niewöhner

Nielsen

Gasparri

et al. 2016

Land Use Competition

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This introductory chapter explores the notion of 'distal drivers' in land use competition. Research has moved beyond proximate causes of land cover and land use change to focus on the underlying drivers of these dynamics. We discuss the framework of telecoupling within human-environment systems as a first step to come to terms with the increasingly distal nature of driving forces behind land use practices. We then expand the notion of distal as mainly a measure of Euclidian space to include temporal, social, and institutional dimensions. This understanding of distal widens our analytical scope for the analysis of land use competition as a distributed process to consider the role of knowledge and power, technology, and different temporalities within a relational or systemic analysis of practices of land use competition. We conclude by pointing toward the historical and social contingency of land use competition and by acknowledging that this contingency requires a methodological-analytical approach to dynamics that goes beyond linear cause-effect relationships. A critical component of future research will be a better understanding of different types of feedback processes reaching from biophysical feedback loops to feedback produced by individual or institutional reflexivity.

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“…These include linking spatial pattern analyses more closely with actors and their networks of interaction, identifying causal mechanisms that bring about landscape change, analyzing land-use conversions and intensification jointly, assessing land system states and possible regime shifts between them (Ramankutty and Coomes 2016), and exploring how landscapes are increasingly 'telecoupled' (i.e. incorporated in global networks of trade, information sharing, capital flows, and interaction of actors (Friis et al 2016)). Using these new analytical lenses and tools in landscape research have tremendous potential to increase our understanding of why and how cultural landscapes are changing, and which policies and other management initiatives might be effective in steering change in these landscapes into desired directions.…”

Section: Challenges For Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%