Urban-rural interdependencies from an Earth system’s view

Urban-rural interdependencies from an Earth system’s view

Global demand for resources such as food, building materials and water is rising, while land take —driven significantly by urbanization—is accelerating and has become a critical factor. This surge in demand is accompanied by the spatial decoupling of production and consumption regions, leading to unevenly distributed environmental damage. Consequently, issues like soil degradation, water pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions are externalized and cause the deterioration of natural conditions in the hinterland or in teleconnected rural areas. Accordingly, sustainability balancing ecological, social and economic aspects can hardly be achieved.

While the Earth system sciences in the Anthropocene also deal with the cumulative effects of human activity on environmental change, research on urban-rural interdependencies in the context of global sustainability remains rare. However, compliance with Earth system boundaries requires integrated approaches across resources, sectors and spatial scales. This necessitates rethinking urban-rural relationships beyond the traditional dichotomy of producers and consumers and instead views them as cooperative socio-ecological systems.

Based on the thematic examples of food, material, water and land use, we highlight regional approaches and derive three fundamental principles—‘circularity’, ‘spatial justice’, and ‘participation’—alongside with two heuristic perspectives: ‘socio-ecological systems thinking’ and ‘framing and governance'. hey are used to propose an advanced research agenda covering (i) an integrated framework for system knowledge on the complex and dynamic urban-rural interdependencies, (ii) scientific references for regional target knowledge informed by Earth boundaries, and (iii) the examination of governance structures as transformation knowledge to enable cross-regional design and implementation.