Rethinking Human Impacts on the Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems in the Urban Era

Karen Seto, Yale University, karen.seto@yale.edu (Presenter)

Three mega-trends are currently reshaping how human impact ecosystems and impacting carbon cycles globally: planetary-scale urbanization, the growing integration of markets and economies, and the emergence of new land-use agents. Although the implications of such human impacts on ecosystems and the carbon cycle are profound, global in reach, and large in scale, the current methods for describing and understanding these impacts are incomplete. For example, the dominant lens to characterize the effects of urbanization is to measure the direct impacts. Using such an approach, we conclude that urbanization’s global footprint is less than 5% of the global terrestrial land cover, and as consequently small and unimportant. I argue that this view is overly simplistic and fails to account for the indirect impacts of urbanization, such as the distal connections among places and processes of production and consumption, and the linkages between land uses across geographic space and across time. In this talk, I will present novel work from researchers who are pushing us to rethink urbanization’s impact beyond that of direct land cover change.

Presentation Type:  Plenary Talk

Session:  Theme 4: Human influence on global ecosystems

Presentation Time:  Wed 9:30 AM  (18 minutes)