Editorial: Contributions of place-based social-ecological research to address global sustainability challenges
Summary
Humanity depends on nature for life support, but human activities are changing ecosystems around the world in profound ways (Díaz et al., 2019). In parallel, this enterprise has expanded into the Anthropocene and resulted in a highly interconnected world with cross-scale interactions linking human communities and ecosystems. In essence, this means that local events can escalate into global challenges and local places are continuously shaped by global dynamics. For example, we are now witnessing how the exploitation of wild species, the rapid expansion of urban settlements and the associated deforestation in one particular area have combined to produce the COVID-19 pandemic with unprecedented global health and socioeconomic impacts, all from a virus that once circulated harmlessly among bat species (Settele et al., 2020).
