Open Earth Monitor — Global Workshop 2024

The UN has declared this to be the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, which should foster the development of restoration projects in many parts of the world suffering from land degradation. In parallel, there is growing demand for deforestation-free and sustainably produced products, as reflected partly by the establishment of the new EU Regulation on Deforestation-free products. The combination of these trends will likely lead to local land use changes resulting in increases in landscape heterogeneity. Here we place an interest in the effects that such changes have on biophysical variables that directly impact the Earth system and the local climate, such as short-wave radiation, land surface temperature and evapotranspiration, as estimated diurnally from geostationary satellite observations. In this study, we explore how the tree density and tree spatial arrangement in different ecosystems of the African continent have an impact on the energetic budget at local and regional scales. We perform a space for time analysis where local changes on vegetation are used to disentangle the effect of land cover transitions on biophysical variables. We expect the results of the study to provide insights into where increasing landscape complexity may provide additional benefits in terms of ecosystem services and thereby contribute towards guidelines in sustainable land planning.

Here we propose a planetary health diagnostic framework, which aims to track, understand, and characterize the Earth system during the onset and progression of both chronic change (such as climate change) and abrupt disruptions (stemming from climate extremes and socio-economic shocks). However, monitoring a single component of the Earth system to guide policy, but ignoring other essential components, could lead to misleading diagnostics and maladaptation of global sustainability. To gain insights into the integration of climate, biosphere, and society, we apply an interactive dimensionality reduction to the annual variability of multi-stream global data from 2003-2022, including data representing the biosphere and climate combined with national socio-economic indicators.

We find that the interactions between biosphere, atmosphere and socio-economy can be captured by three principal axes, which cumulatively explain 17.3%, 22.8% and 24.5% of the variability condensed by non-interactive dimensionality reduction in each individual domain, respectively. The 1st and 2rd pairs of Biosphere-atmosphere-socioeconomic interactive axes describe terrestrial vegetation and land surface water syndromes. The first axes positively correlate to terrestrial vegetation productivity, air temperature, and technology and public health. The second axes negatively correlate to soil moisture, potential evaporation, and reflect several combined socioeconomic aspects such as land use and inequality. We find distinct trajectories across countries with high-income countries more resistant COVID-19-induced economic shock. High and low income groups show contrasting trajectories that are related to poverty reduction and methane emission in the low-income country group. This study advocates for a data-driven paradigm to jointly monitor the recent trajectories of the biosphere, atmosphere, and society that could provide a better understanding and early warning of the state of the Earth system for human well-being.