Systemic human-biosphere-atmosphere monitoring and diagnostics

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. 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. First principal components are related to long-term trends in global warming, land surface dimming, and socio-technical development, while the second and third components are related to changes of other processes under climate and biospheric extremes and socioeconomic shocks. These processes include vegetation dynamics, land surface and atmospheric water demand, life and environmental inequality. We find distinct trajectories across countries with the most distinct cluster is Middle East and North Africa that exhibit climate extremes in 2010 and 2016, socio-financial shocks between 2010-2012 and COVID-19 in 2020. 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.