National parks as protected areas have been on the spotlight because they are essential in achieving ecological civilization in China. Despite the profound achievements of national parks to conserve nature, the benefits of national parks for local residents remain lacking. Under the theory of harmonious coexistence between human and nature, this study focused on the development of local people's livelihood in Qinghai's national parks. We systematically explored the establishment of the national parks in Qinghai Province, analyzed the current problems, and provided the main measures for developing people's livelihood in protected areas in Qinghai. This study put forward the viewpoint that national parks should set a long-term goal, and gradually advance based on the environmental conditions and appropriately prioritize the improvement of local people's wellbeing in the future.

The Baltic Sea is essential for marine ecosystem services (MES) provision and the region's socio-economic dynamics. It is considered one of the busiest and most polluted regional seas in Europe. In recent years a collective effort in enforcing European and regional environmental policies and directives (e.g. Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC, 2000; Marine Strategy Framework Directive 2008/56/EC, 2008; Maritime Spatial Planning Directive 2014/89/EU, 2014) has been carried out. Ecosystem Services assessment and mapping is integrated into these directives. An increasing number of scientific studies, projects, and other works were developed in this context, generating a vast body of knowledge. Despite all efforts to improve the Baltic Sea's environmental status, the targets established were not fulfilled. It is also important to analyze if current methodological approaches for assessing and mapping MES are robust enough to provide the needed results. This perspective paper analyses the status of assessment and mapping methodologies. The results showed that most of the studies were focused on qualitative assessments, with limited validation and reliability. Although the number of robust and quantitative works is increasing, more are needed. It is vital to carry out quantitative assessments to inform decision-makers better and standardize MES practices across the Baltic Sea.

The relationships between vegetation and environmental factors have always been a core concern of ecologists. The dynamic characteristics of plant communities during the growing season can directly reflect these relationships, so we examined this issue for three typical ecosystems on the Tibetan Plateau. During the growing season, the dominant species remained stable while non-dominant species changed significantly in the alpine meadow and alpine steppe and a mono-dominant community was found in the temperate desert shrub. Due to the seasonal variations of temperature and soil water content, plant species diversity varied significantly during the growing season. Patrick richness, Pielou evenness and Simpson diversity indices differed significantly in the alpine meadow and alpine steppe. The total biomass of these three ecosystems was the largest during the middle growing season. Biomass was greater in the alpine meadow than the alpine steeps or temperature desert. The root-to-shoot ratio was the lowest during the middle growing season for the alpine meadow and alpine steppe and largest during the early growing season for temperate desert shrub. RDA showed the belowground and total biomass were greatly affected by soil physicochemical factors. Multiple linear stepwise regression showed the above ground biomass was greatly affected by relative atmospheric humidity and belowground and total biomass were greatly affected by soil organic carbon, total nitrogen at 0-20 cm soil depth and pH at 10-20 cm soil depth. These findings provide insights into understanding the relationships between vegetation and environmental factors and promote the sustainable utilization of local grasslands on the Tibetan Plateau.

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) is a region with unique and distinctive natural landscapes and cultural characteristics and presents a useful case to improve understanding of sustainable development for regions with extreme environments and unique social backgrounds. Research has been conducted for small-scale regions, however there has been insufficient exploration of the problems and countermeasures for sustainable development in Tibet. This study analyzes different functional zones (urbanized zones, agricultural zones, pastoral zones and ecological security zones) of the QTP. Then it develops a sustainable livelihood index (SLI) based on the sustainable livelihood analysis framework resulting in three main findings. First, sustainable livelihoods vary greatly across functional zones. The SLI for farmers and herdsmen in the urbanized zones is the highest, with a value of 3.57, followed by the agricultural zones of 3.07. In comparison, the SLI values in the ecological security zones and pastoral zones are 2.92 and 2.85, respectively, indicating that the two zones present challenges for sustainable development in the QTP. Second, all counties had few natural, social or physical assets, indicating the need to expand assets to achieve sustainable livelihoods. Finally, urbanized and agricultural counties had more robust livelihood strategies than ecological and pastoral counties. In light of these results, strategic options have been formulated to promote sustainable development. These options include: accelerating construction of the third pole national park group; establishing a pattern of green mining; promoting the biological resources industry; and initiating a carbon trading market in the QTP.

With the emergence of new types of data (e.g. social media data) and cutting-edge computer technology (e.g. Natural Language Processing), the shortcomings of traditional methods(subjective and objective ways) for detecting urban livability can be overcome by an integrated approach. This study aims to develop a comprehensive approach to measure urban livability based on statistic data, geo-data (e.g. points of interest), questionnaires survey, and social media data (Instagram), from both objective and subjective angles. Hong Kong, as a city with a high level of urbanization and contrasting urban environments, is chosen as the study area in this research. Through this study, the question “which area of Hong Kong is more suitable for living” is answered by the visualization of GIS-based analysis. Also, the correlation between livability scores and individuals’ sentiment scores are explored. Specifically, the results show that central areas of Hong Kong with a higher level of urbanization are relatively more livable than suburban regions. However, through sentiment analysis, individuals who post Instagram in suburban areas of Hong Kong usually express more positive content and happier emotion than those who post Instagram in central urban areas. The study could offer useful information for the policy action of authorities as well as the residential location choices of citizens.

Government interventions to manage and improve trade-offs in social and ecological systems are made through various policy instruments. The conditions of the social ecological system (SES) are a function of the cumulatively implemented policy instruments. Although both policy instruments and social ecological system frameworks have played important roles in theoretical developments in resource management, they have largely been considered in isolation from each other. By including policy instruments into the SES framework, the proposed conceptual model serves as a template to examine how governing takes place by deciphering: 1) how the biophysical system has been understood in resource governance; 2) how the social system has been set up in resource governance; and 3) how the trade-off between dynamic biophysical and social systems has been managed in the governance of SESs. This model can assist identifying any absent, overlapping or contradictory policy instruments in the governance of an SES.

Land-surface greening has been reported globally over the past decades. While often seen to represent ecosystem recovery, the impacts on biodiversity and society can also be negative. Greening has been widely reported from rangelands, where drivers and processes are complex due to its high environmental heterogeneity and societal dynamics. Here, we assess the complexity behind greening and assess its links to various drivers in an iconic, heterogeneous rangeland area, the Iberá Wetlands and surroundings, in Argentina. Time-series satellite imagery over the past 19 years showed overall net greening, but also substantial local browning both in protected and unprotected areas, linking to land use, temporal changes in surface water, fire, and weather. We found substantial woody expansion mainly in the unprotected land, with 37% contributed by tree plantations and the remaining 63% by spontaneous woody expansion, along with widespread transitions from terrestrial land to seasonal surface water. Fire occurrences tended to reduce greening with unprotected areas experiencing widespread and frequent fire. However, protected areas had more browning in unburnt areas than burned areas. Temporal variation in annual precipitation and temperature tended to nonlinearly influence fire occurrences with an interplay of human fire management, further shaping the vegetation greening, pointing to high complexity behind the observed rangeland greening involving interactions among local drivers. Our findings highlight that the observed overall greening is an outcome of multiple trends with clear negative impacts on biodiversity and the local livestock-oriented culture (notably expanding tree plantations) and spontaneous vegetation dynamics, partly involving spontaneous woody expansion. The latter has positive potential for biodiversity and ecosystem services in terms of woodland recovery, but can become negative in such a natural savanna region if expansions develop on a too broad scale, highlighting the importance of ensuring recovery of natural fire and herbivory regimes in protected areas along with sustainable rangeland management elsewhere.

The global outbreak of COVID-19 requires us to accurately predict the spread of disease and decide how adopting corresponding strategies to ensure the sustainable development. Most of the existing infectious disease forecasting methods are based on the classical Susceptible-Infectious-Removed (SIR) model. However, due to the highly nonlinearity, nonstationarity, sensitivities to initial values and parameters, SIR type models would produce large deviations in the forecast results. Here, we propose a framework of using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method to estimate the model parameters, and then the data assimilation based on the Ensemble Kalman Filter to update model trajectory by cooperating with the real time confirmed cases, so as to improve the predictability of the pandemic. Based on this framework, we have developed a global COVID-19 real time forecasting system. Moreover, we suggest that big data associated with the spatiotemporally heterogeneous pathological characteristics, and social environment in different countries should be assimilated to further improve the COVID-19 predictability. It is hoped that the accurate prediction of COVID-19 will contribute to the adjustments of prevention and control strategies to contain the pandemic, and help achieve the SDG goal of “Good Health and Well-Being”.

The implementation of strategies to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is frequently hindered by potential trade-offs between priorities for either environmental protection or human well-being. However, ecosystem services (ES)-based solutions can offer possible co-benefits for SDGs implementation that are often overlooked or underexploited. In this study, we cover this gap and investigate how experts from different countries value the SDGs and relate them with ES. A total of 66 countries participated to the survey, and answers were grouped into three macro-regions: Asia; Europe, North America, and Oceania (ENO); Latin America, Caribbean and Africa (LA). Results show that the most prioritized SDGs in the three macro-regions are usually those related to essential material needs and environmental conditions, such as SDG2 (Zero Hunger), SDG1 (No Poverty), and SDG6 (Clean Water). At a global scale, the number of prioritized synergies between SDGs and ES largely exceeded trade-offs. The highest amount of synergies was observed for SDG1 (No Poverty), mainly with SDG2, SDG3 (Good Health), SDG5 (Gender Equality), and SDG8 (Economic Growth). Other major synergies among SDGs include SDG14-15 (Life below water - Life on land), SDG5-10 (Gender Equity - Reduced Inequality), and SDG1-2 (No poverty - Zero Hunger). At a global scale, SDG15, SDG13, SDG14, and SDG6 were closely related to ES like climate regulation, freshwater, food, water purification, biodiversity, and education. SDG11 (Sustainable Cities) and SDG3 were also relevant in Asia and in LA, respectively. Overall, this study shows the potential to couple future policies that can implement SDGs' strategies while adopting ES-based solutions in different regions of the world.