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Sustainability Scholar Jack Liu on Globalization and "Telecoupling"

Environmental damage has never respected boundaries, political or otherwise, but we’re existing right now with a whole new level of being able to harm at a very long distance. If you’re living in the United States, Australia, Europe, or wherever, the...

Environmental damage has never respected boundaries, political or otherwise, but we're existing right now with a whole new level of being able to harm at a very long distance. If you're living in the United States, Australia, Europe, or wherever, the impacts of your life are felt far out of sight and out of mind. This is globalization: as technology has enabled the world market, it's also enabled that Ikea table you bought in Manhattan to lead to deforestation in Russia. Looking at these and other kinds of connections among human and natural systems over long distances hasn't had a name until very recently, when Jack Liu, director of the Human-Nature Lab/Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University, began a whole new scientific conversation with the "Telecoupling of Human and Natural Systems" symposium held at last month's AAAS conference in D.C.

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Motherboard talked to Liu earlier this week about how we can even start to get a handle on complex relationships over vast distances that change over time. And Pandas.

Maybe we should start with a telecoupling example
Telecoupling has many, many examples. One is wood trade. Timber wood harvested in one area is exported for use in another area. You cut down the trees here, and you affect the natural system here and you affect the people here. And the timber exported to another area, will have an impact on people in this new area. And then they may benefit from the wood, for furniture or construction of a house, for example. But also there's an impact on the natural systems as well—you save some trees [where the wood is imported to] but also may lose other trees due to invasive species such as Emerald Ash Borer in North America that originated from Asia. So the consequences of telecoupling can be bad or good.

How did telecoupling as a scientific concept come into being?
Telecoupling is an umbrella concept which includes many things. I just gave you one example, the wood trade and forests, but there are other things. Like export and import of virtual water. In one area you use water to grow crops and then the food may be exported to another area for use. So the importing country or area is actually using the water in another area, that was used to produce food.

The same goes for land. If you want to grow crops, you need land. It's the importing country which used that land virtually, so that they can use their own land for some other purpose. There are many other examples. Like biodiversity. Like Pandas in the Wolong Nature Reserve of China sent to zoos in other areas, such as Washington D.C. for people see.

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So we needed to have an umbrella concept that would capture all different kinds of connections among human and natural systems in different areas. That will help us more systematically understand connections between different regions. That way we should be able to develop more consistent and comprehensive policies to help protect the environment, conserve the natural systems, and benefit the people.

What are some of the biggest technological enablers of telecoupling?
The world is getting smaller and smaller and the linkage is getting faster because of things like technologies. The internet, for example. Airplanes can get us faster to a new place. And tools for telecommunications, like the Internet and and cell phones, help us get the information from other areas instantly. So we are not just working with people and with the natural systems nearby, but also sometimes we even have more interactions with people and the natural systems far away than with our neighbors.

Is it possible to even understand all of these connections? Going from a local ecosystem to an impact transferred around the planet and through so much more complexity seems a large step.
It's more complicated, more complex. But it's also important to understand those linkages. We can not just deal with the issues within the administrative boundaries of a place. Or political or national boundaries. We need to look at everything at the global level. That way will help us understand the linkages better and help us to find better solutions and make better decisions.

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There must be a good side to telecoupling
The positive sides are many. Like the transfer of useful information from one area to another. We can disseminate successful examples of resource management and environmental protection from one area to another. And transfer better technology from one country to another. And also the experience and lessons learned in one country can be beneficial to to another. There are numerous positive examples.

But there are also numerous negative impacts. For example, you could transfer a lot of harmful stuff from one country to another. One country could produce something for another country by using its resources and leaving the pollutants behind. That's not good for the exporting country. At the global level right now, because everything is connected, there are feedbacks.

The feedbacks are very important. Usually people don't pay attention to them because they take time to emerge and people usually don't see them easily. Because of the time lags, people usually see things in short term. Sometimes the impacts might not be seen until years or even decades later. That's the complication of telecoupling. It is more complicated than what happens in a local area.

It would see very difficult to get these kinds of long-distance effects under control.
I think not necessarily. We need to understand why the telecoupling happens, how it's formed, what factors affect it, and what positive and negative impacts are. Then, we can see how we can do something about it.

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Sometimes it's easier to deal with telecoupling because its impact is larger. I'll give you an example: In China a few years ago, there was a big chemical factory spill into an international river. That got serious attention because it was not just a domestic issue. It had a huge international impact. The polluted water flew to Russia. Russia had complaints and the entire international community was watching. China took more dramatic actions than with many domestic environmental problems that might have been bigger than that one.

So, telecoupling is not necessarily difficult to address. As long as we can understand the mechanisms, the factors, and also the players and the impacts, it is possible to address telecoupling effectively.

What comes next in telecoupling research?
This is just the beginning. We have a lot of work to do, to understand how telecoupling emerges from different interactions among various areas. What are the special and temporal patterns of the telecoupling? They change all the time. They vary in different locations. It's not just a linear relationship. It's a very complex system we are looking at.

We also need to understand the consequences. Short-term, long-term, positive, negative. I'm sure we can achieve these goals as long as we have sufficient resources. There's a lot of work to do but I'm confident that there's more that can be discovered and that knowledge generated will be useful for policy-makers and the general public.

The more we can do, the more we can discover, the more we can understand. The impact from distant places is getting more dramatic and significant. This is the reality we have to address. Because it's more complicated, we need to put more resources toward it.

Related:
Sci-Fi City: 23 ft Above Ground, Zero Emissions, Real.
8 Innovative Ways U.S. Cities Help the Earth
Brian Eno on Ecological Thinking

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv

Image: Sue Nichols