Something strange happens when you trace how connected the world is

What does the price of soybeans have to do with the rate of deforestation in the Amazon?

Or a biofuel mandate in one country with food prices and hunger in another?

A lot, says Jianguo “Jack” Liu, University Distinguished Professor and Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability at the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability.

That’s because things like people, goods, species, capital and information don’t stop at borders. Fueled by global trade, migration, and tourism, policy decisions in one place can have ripple effects thousands of miles away.

Liu and colleagues explore what this interconnectedness means for the environment in a new report released Dec. 9. Published every six or seven years by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the Global Environment Outlook is a series of reports on the state and direction of the environment.

The seventh and latest edition is the product of six years of work by 287 scientists from 82 countries. Their 1200-page assessment paints a grim picture: The Earth has already warmed to 1.3 °C above pre-industrial levels. One in eight species are now threatened with extinction. We generate more than 2 billion tons of solid waste each year — an amount that is expected to grow to 3.8 billion tons by 2050.

In a recent interview, Liu answered questions about how these problems intersect, what went into the report, and what it takes to develop sustainability policies that work:

Q: A big theme of the GEO-7 report is that things like climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution are not just environmental issues but also social and economic issues too. You’ve spent much of your career tracing these interlinkages. Tell us about the “telecoupling” framework you developed to help quantify and define them.

“Telecoupling basically means human-nature interactions over distances,” said Liu, who is a member of MSU’s Ecology, Evolution and Behavior Program and the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife.

“The concept was introduced in 2008. At the time, a lot of research on human-nature interactions focused on specific locations. With globalization and environmental change, a lot of things have consequences that spill over across borders. So we needed a new framework to capture those phenomena.”

Q: The report suggests that the telecoupling framework can reveal patterns and processes that are easy to overlook using a more traditional disciplinary lens. What do you mean by that?

Liu: “Animal migration is a good example. Biologists often study migrating animals from an ecological or behavior standpoint. But animal migration can have enormous social and economic impacts too, like when locusts or many other animals migrate from one place to another and devour all the crops. On the other hand, human migration has been extensively studied by demographers and economists, but it also has a lot of environmental impacts. If we consider both socioeconomic and environmental dimensions, animal migration and human migration can be considered as telecoupling processes. Telecoupling is a holistic concept that expands and integrates concepts of distant interactions in traditional disciplines.”

Q: Can you give some examples of how activities or decisions in one place can have unintended consequences elsewhere?

Liu: “Take tourism, for example. Iceland has become a major vacation spot. If you travel from the U.S. to Iceland, and you make a stopover somewhere, that place can be affected too. Maybe you buy some food, go shopping, contribute to the local economy. Even if you don’t stop, your flight emits CO2, and that affects air quality in other parts of the world, not just in the U.S. or Iceland.”

“Or take trade,” Liu added. “Often the focus is on the importing countries and the exporting countries. But other countries are also affected. When China stopped buying U.S. soybeans this year in response to tariffs, Chinese buyers quickly switched to soybeans from Brazil and Argentina.”

“The work that we have been focusing on more recently is to quantify the effects.”

Q: In the context of the GEO7 report, how does the telecoupling framework change the conversation about potential solutions to global environmental challenges?

Liu: “In big way, actually. For example, Brazil ships millions of pounds of beef to the United States. But as U.S. demand for beef rises, so does pressure to convert global biodiversity hotspots such as the Amazon and Brazil's Cerrado region to pastureland. The telecoupling framework enables researchers to generate novel information so that you cannot just say, well, Brazil is totally responsible for the loss of biodiversity there, right? The U.S. is part of the problem, but also hopefully part of the solution too, to address the issue of biodiversity loss. We need to take a more holistic view.”