2024-10-03, 13:30–13:50, Maria Theresia Seminar room (Conference Center Laxenburg)
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.
Open-Earth-Monitor Cyberinfrastructure (Grant agreement ID: 101059548)
Gregory Duveiller holds a PhD in agronomical science and biological engineering from the Université catholique of Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium. After his PhD, he spent 10 years working at the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), in Ispra, Italy. He has specialized in developing methods to combine different satellite remote sensing data streams to better monitor and understand land processes, including crop yield monitoring, land cover change and land-atmosphere interactions. Since 2021 he is a project group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. His main research aims at improving our understanding of the role of terrestrial ecosystems in the Earth System by using data-driven yet process-based thinking applied to satellite Earth Observation data. A key focus is on exploring the complexity and diversity of terrestrial ecosystems, and how their specific functional properties affect land-atmosphere interactions.