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.

The rainforests of South America and Africa are considerably reliant on rainfall supplied by evaporation from the rainforests themselves through moisture recycling. Thus, rainforest loss in these areas can reduce evaporation as well as subsequent rainfall in the wider forested region. During dry periods, a dampened water cycle may potentially aggravate rainforest water stress. However, few studies have investigated dry-period moisture recycling statistics within rainforests over longer records and consistently compared the rainforest moisture recycling in both continents. Here, we analyze dry-season anomalies of moisture recycling for mean-years and dry-years, in the South-American (Amazon) and African (Congo) rainforests over the years 1980–2023. We find that dry-season rainfall reliance on rainforest moisture increases slightly, but statistically significantly, by 5% (from a mean annual of 21% to 22%) in the Amazon and up to 12% (from 24% to 27%) in the Congo. At the same time, a lower fraction of rainforest evaporation stays within the rainforest during the dry season: 21% less from the Amazon (from 41% to 32%) and 22% less from the Congo rainforest (from 32% to 25%), which further decreases with increasing dryness. In response, areas downwind of the rainforests gain a higher dependency on rainforest moisture during dry seasons, amplified during dry years. For example, rainforest-sourced rainfall in Ecuador increases from (Formula presented.) annually to (Formula presented.) in the dry season. The findings highlight the critical role of rainforests in maintaining rainfall during periods when water is already scarce.

The notion of people and nature as intertwined and embedded in the biosphere is gaining traction in contemporary scientific discourses. But what does it mean for a human being to be intertwined? Here, we explore this question through two lenses: looking at the human body as an open living system in continuous exchange with the chemical elements on Earth; and looking across the biosphere, at the intricate functioning of the web of life in mediating these exchanges. The first lens focuses on relationships between chemical elements and life processes within us humans, relationships that are critical for our bodies to operate and function. We then expand the perspective to show how microorganisms, fungi, plants, and animals in ecosystems shape and mediate the elemental flows through the air, water, and food that our bodies require for survival. The two lenses highlight that humans have evolved as part of, and remain integrated with, these complex and dynamic life–element interdependencies, spanning all scales and domains across the biosphere. In the Anthropocene, humans remain as bodily dependent on life-mediated elemental cycles as ever, irrespective of culture, economic development, or technological advances. This inseparability reflects the core reality of existing in the biosphere, with implications for how to approach and understand human–environment relations and confront the challenges of the Anthropocene. It further implies that biosphere stewardship is not only a cognitive or ethical orientation, but also an embodied practice: one that involves learning about, caring for, and enhancing the living relations that mobilise, regenerate, and circulate life-sustaining elements.

Precipitation partitioning into blue (runoff) and green water (transpiration) flows is a fundamental hydroecological process shaping freshwater availability across vegetated and hydrologically active land areas. This partitioning is determined by interactions among climatic conditions, land surface characteristics, and vegetation dynamics, which change with rising temperatures and CO2 concentrations. Yet, future global shifts in blue–green water partitioning, their controlling factors, and their broader implications remain uncertain. We address this knowledge gap using Earth system model simulations and define the Blue–Green Water Share (BGWS) metric to quantify changes in the relative partitioning of precipitation into runoff and transpiration. Here, we show that projected BGWS changes are spatially heterogeneous rather than dominated by a uniform global shift. Increases in extreme five-day precipitation are most strongly associated with these changes, favouring larger blue water shares. This effect is independent of mean precipitation increases and occurs under both drying and wetting conditions. Additionally, increases in leaf area index tend to favour larger green water shares and counteract the blueward influence of stronger precipitation extremes. Our results provide a process-based perspective on projected blue–green water partitioning and its hydroecological implications.

Dominant traditions in Western science have traditionally separated humans from nature, a division that is reproduced in the distinction between natural and social sciences. This rift has persistently hampered the ability of sustainability science to comprehensively understand and address the profound challenges of the Anthropocene. In this perspective, we aim to challenge entrenched separations between humans and nature by emphasizing the embeddedness of humans in the biosphere. We conceptualize embeddedness from a systems perspective and illustrate it using case studies on human microbiomes and freshwater availability. We discuss how a focus on embeddedness can increasingly be adopted in sustainability research through developments in sensing, modeling, and commoning practices. By highlighting these conceptual and practical opportunities for studying embeddedness in the biosphere, we seek to support transdisciplinary dialogues and practices toward sustainable futures.

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.