The safety and stability of regional water resource systems (WRS) are increasingly challenged by climate change and human activities. Assessing the water resource system resilience (WRSR) and understanding its driving mechanisms are essential for informed and integrated water resource management. We propose a comprehensive framework for evaluating WRSR based on three key components: supply, demand, and support (encompassing societal, economic, institutional, and ecological factors). WRSR is defined as the overall capacity of social-ecological systems to absorb, adapt to, and transform in response to various disturbances, such as water scarcity, droughts, floods, and pollution. Using the inland river basins of Hexi in northwest China as a case study, we investigate the spatiotemporal patterns of WRSR and its influencing factors from 2011 to 2019. The results show an overall fluctuating upward trend in WRSR, with resilience decreasing from upstream to downstream and from west to east across the region. Institutional support and economic development emerged as the main factors shaping the spatial variation in WRSR. Rising temperatures were found to enhance WRSR in most regions. Limited economic development was identified as the primary barrier to improving WRSR in the Hexi region, followed by inadequate water supply capacity and low water use efficiency. These findings highlight the need to balance economic growth with environmental protection and sustainable water use. The proposed framework offers an effective approach for integrated WRSR assessment and provides practical guidance for improving water management strategies in the Hexi region and beyond.

High-mountain systems act as the planet's vital water towers, sustaining freshwater supplies for billions of people. Climate change is exacerbating hydrological imbalances in these regions, yet the moisture sources maintaining their precipitation—the primary water input—remain poorly quantified. Here, we combine two atmospheric moisture tracking methods to analyze 73 water tower units (WTUs), revealing that terrestrial evaporation contributes approximately half of total precipitation (52% UTrack, 50% WAM-2layers) over these regions, with inland WTUs relying more on land-sourced moisture than coastal systems. Transpiration from short vegetation dominates terrestrial contributions globally, while forest transpiration (e.g., Amazon) and bare-soil evaporation (e.g., interior Tibetan Plateau) are regionally significant. Importantly, oceanic moisture drives snowfall, whereas terrestrial transpiration sustains rainfall—except in the southern Tibetan Plateau. These findings refine the atmospheric water cycle's role in high-mountain hydrology, offering a mechanistic basis to project water tower resilience under global change.

The Arctic has experienced rapid and profound changes due to its heightened sensitivity to global warming and growing regional human pressures. While past research has advanced our understanding of these transformations, a comprehensive assessment within a unified analytical framework is still needed to quantify the ecological impacts of human activity across this fragile region. In this study, we systematically assessed the expansion of human activity and its ecological effects across Arctic and sub-Arctic regions from 2000 to 2020. We combined satellite-based land-cover datasets, vegetation resilience indicator (i.e., lag-1 month temporal autocorrelation of remotely sensed greenness), and species distribution data to track and analyze these changes and impacts. Our findings show that areas affected by human activity—mainly cultivated lands and artificial surfaces—expanded by nearly 13,000 km², equivalent to a rate of 1.8 % per decade. This growth was largely driven by the increase in artificial surfaces (∼77.2 %) and extended to higher latitude. As a result, natural habitats became increasingly fragmented, vegetation resilience declined, and risks of ecological tipping points rose. These impacts threatened the habitats of approximately 97.5 % of Arctic species, including 111 species listed as vulnerable or endangered. Our results highlight that, beyond the effects of climate change, the continued expansion of human activity is intensifying ecological risks in the Arctic. This underscores an urgent need for enhanced ecological protection and transformative social strategies to safeguard the region’s future.

This study investigates how the seven core resilience principles are integrated into assessments of forest system resilience to natural or human-induced disturbances across engineering, ecological, and social-ecological resilience concepts. Following PRISMA guidelines, a literature search in the Web of Science database using the keywords “resilience”, “forest” and “ecosystem services” yielded 1828 studies, of which 330 met the selection criteria. The most commonly used criterion was diversity, a sub-criterion of “diversity and redundancy”, appearing in 50% of studies. The results indicate that social and governance-related principles, learning and experimentation (7%), participation (11%), and polycentric governance (9%) have not been frequently addressed. Although numerous studies have employed various principles for assessing forest resilience, none have considered all seven principles jointly. This highlights a significant research gap, emphasising the need to quantify these principles in forest systems. Understanding forest-community dynamics is essential for enhancing the long-term resilience and sustainability of both systems.

Feedbacks from the climate to other components of the coupled human-Earth system are expected to strongly influence the co-evolution of human society and its environment. Representing these feedback loops between climate and society, via the Earth system's response to human activities and the subsequent effect back onto social systems, is essential in order to fully explore the dynamics of the coupled system. However, focus on these feedbacks has traditionally been limited, or excluded, in prior Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) and IAM-based modelling protocols. This limits the understanding of the effects of climate change and the response of the overall system to future emissions scenarios and policies.

The new IAM Feedback-based knowledge Repository for IntegrateD Assessments version 2.1 (FRIDAv2.1), documented and explored within this paper collection, seeks to address this by internalising the feedbacks between subcomponents of the human-Earth system. Within this new IAM, these connections are therefore a key part of the structure, and are documented and discussed here.

FRIDA represents these climate-to-society feedbacks, conceptualised as climate impacts, through global impact functions. Where possible, they are based on estimates from existing literature, reframed as functions of global climate variables to facilitate their representation within FRIDA. Other impact channels, with insufficient background literature to inform their structure and parameter values, are incorporated via the internal calibration of the IAM.

Since the systematic representation of climate damages within an IAM is a relatively novel endeavour, the approach is constrained by literature limitations and necessary simplifications. In addition, the high level of abstraction of the FRIDA model imposes limits on the set of impacts which can reasonably be implemented, and the level of process detail amongst those included. Nevertheless, FRIDA's endogenous representation of climate feedbacks to human and natural systems enables valuable insights and intuition building on an underexplored topic. The general nature of the climate damage functions aggregated and documented here allows for their incorporation within other models and frameworks.

Global data have served an integral role in characterizing large-scale groundwater systems, identifying their sustainability challenges, and informing on socioeconomic and ecological dimensions of groundwater. These insights have revealed groundwater as a dynamic component of the water cycle and social-ecological systems, leading to an expansion in groundwater science that increasingly focuses on groundwater’s interactions with ecological, socioeconomic, and Earth systems. This shift presents many opportunities that are conditional on broader, more interdisciplinary system conceptualizations, models, and methods that require the integration of a greater diversity of data in contrast to conventional hydrogeological investigations. Here, we catalogue 144 global open access datasets and dataset collections relevant to groundwater science that span elements of the hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, lithosphere, food systems, governance, management, and other socioeconomic system dimensions. The assembled catalogue offers a reference of available data for use in interdisciplinary assessments, and we summarize these data across their primary system, spatial resolution, temporal range, data type, generation method, level of groundwater representation, and institutional location of lead authorship. The catalogue includes 15 groundwater datasets, 23 datasets derived in relation to groundwater, and 106 datasets associated with groundwater. We find the majority of datasets are temporally static and that temporally dynamic data peak in availability during the 2000-2010 decade. Only a small fraction of temporally dynamic data is derived with any direct representation of groundwater, highlighting the need for greater incorporation of groundwater in Earth system models and data collection initiatives across socioeconomic, governance, and environmental science research communities. A small number of countries, led by the USA, Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada, generate most global groundwater data, reflecting a global North bias in the institutional leadership of these data generation activities. We raise three priority themes for future global groundwater data initiatives, which include: data improvements through prioritizing observed and temporally dynamic data; elevating regional and local scale data and perspectives to address challenges relating to equity and bias; and advancing data sharing initiatives founded on reciprocal benefits between global initiatives and data providers.

Anomalous precipitation patterns associated with climate change increasingly threaten global crop supply. Forests, as major moisture source, could potentially buffer these risks, yet their specific role in sustaining agriculture and global crop supply remains underexplored. We investigate global forests’ contribution to crop production and export by estimating moisture flows from forests to agricultural areas and pairing them with traded crop flows. We find that agricultural areas in 155 countries rely on transboundary forests for up to 40% of annual precipitation, whereas in 105 countries, as much as 18% of precipitation is recycled from forests nationally. Moisture from forests globally supports 18% of crop production and 30% of crop export studied. We show that crop producers, exporters and importers are directly and indirectly dependent on upwind forested countries through three typologies. Our study implies that strategically conserving forests located upwind of agricultural areas could be leveraged to safeguard global crop supply.

In celebration of the fifth year anniversary of Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, we ask authors of some of our most impactful articles (with respect to news stories, social media engagement, Altmetric scores, citations, policy mentions and article accesses) to reflect on the successes of their Reviews.

The Earth is greening in many regions under elevated atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, along with increasing temperature and land use changes. However, despite the continued rise in CO₂, greening has stagnated or even reversed in some regions, suggesting a reduced capacity of the land surface to act as a carbon sink. Here, we show that declining water availability and rising atmospheric water demand have coincided with regional browning trends over recent decades in some tropical regions that have historically acted as prominent carbon sinks. A regression analysis considering a balanced set of water- and energy-related variables alongside land cover change and climate extremes confirms that both water availability and atmospheric water demand are important contributors to inter-annual variability in Leaf Area Index (LAI) there. Earth system models mostly reproduce the observed spatial extent of browning and concurrent related coinciding water changes in the multi-model mean, but results from individual models differ strongly. Our findings provide a new constraint for related model development and highlight the need for enhanced monitoring and consideration of observation-based water availability trends as an emerging driver of vegetation in future analyses and model development.