Telecoupled flows across scales

The world has become increasingly telecoupled through distant flows of information, matter, energy, organisms, people, money, and technology. Through connecting people and the environment in one place to those in distant places, the flows can have enormous impacts across telecoupled human and natural systems. The telecoupling framework provides novel perspectives for researchers to investigate the mechanisms and impacts of flows on the human and natural systems that are far away. By considering flows, agents, causes, and effects in a systematic way using the telecoupling framework, researchers can reveal feedbacks, emergent properties, time lags, legacy effects, tipping points, spillover effects and underlying processes of distant interactions.

The goal of this session is to showcase telecoupling studies that use flows across local to global scales as the focal analysis to address important issues relevant to environmental sustainability such as legal and illegal trade, migratory species, and transportation infrastructures. The presentations explicitly uncover the flows, the agents that facilitate or hinder these flows, and/or their socioeconomic and environmental causes and effects on the telecoupled systems. They also demonstrate analytical approaches that are useful for telecoupling research, enhance fundamental understanding of environmental sustainability and human well-being, and provide useful information for effective governance around the world.