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We are in a climate and ecological emergency, where climate change and direct anthropogenic interference with the biosphere are risking abrupt and/or irreversible changes that threaten our life-support systems. Efforts are underway to increase the resilience of some ecosystems that are under threat, yet collective awareness and action are modest at best. Here, we highlight the potential for a biosphere resilience sensing system to make it easier to see where things are going wrong, and to see whether deliberate efforts to make things better are working. We focus on global resilience sensing of the terrestrial biosphere at high spatial and temporal resolution through satellite remote sensing, utilizing the generic mathematical behaviour of complex systems—loss of resilience corresponds to slower recovery from perturbations, gain of resilience equates to faster recovery. We consider what subset of biosphere resilience remote sensing can monitor, critically reviewing existing studies. Then we present illustrative, global results for vegetation resilience and trends in resilience over the last 20 years, from both satellite data and model simulations. We close by discussing how resilience sensing nested across global, biome-ecoregion, and local ecosystem scales could aid management and governance at these different scales, and identify priorities for further work. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Ecological complexity and the biosphere: the next 30 years’.

Fish constitute important high protein products to meet the demands of an increasing global population. However, the continued depletion of wild fish stocks is leading to increased strain on the aquaculture sector in terms of sustaining the supply of fish and seafood to global markets. Despite the fact that aquaculture is more diversified than other agriculture sectors, there are significant pressures on the industry to continue innovating in order to enable sustainability including increased fish production, improved appropriate selection of species, disease mitigation, reduced wastage, preventing environmental pollution and generating more employment globally. This viewpoint article addresses how digital transformation can help support and meet expansion needs of the fisheries/aquaculture industries that includes exploiting and harnessing ICT, IoT, Cloud-edge computing, AI, machine learning, immersive technologies and blockchain. Digital technologies are bringing significant operational benefits for global food chain, improving efficiencies and productivity, reducing waste, contamination and food fraud. The focus on digital technologies has recently evolved to Industry 5.0 where AI and robotics are coupled with the human mind in order to advance human-centric solutions. This viewpoint describes the role of Quadruple helix Hub (academic-industry-government and society) in delivering a convergent holistic approach to meeting the diversity of fishery industry needs by connecting and placing fisheries centrally in a defined ecosystem of stakeholders. This includes specialist training, testing technologies, providing access to finance and fostering disruption through aquaculture accelerator initiatives such as that provided by Hatch Blue. Connecting digital Innovation Hubs trans-regionally, nationally and internationally will also help mitigate against significant risks for the fisheries and aquaculture industry including climate change, global pandemics and conflicts that can jeopardize fish and seafood production and supply chains. There is also a commensurate need to avail of digital technologies in order to increase awareness of key industry issues across the value chain, such as through social marketing. Thus, addressing key challenges by way of the global digital transformation of fishery and aquaculture industry will meet several sustainable development goals of the United Nations catered around the application of disruptive technology. yes

This paper presents a novel agent-based model of land use and technological change in the agricultural sector under environmental boundaries, finite available resources and changing land productivity. In particular, we model a spatially explicit economy populated by boundedly-rational farmers competing and innovating to fulfill an exogenous demand for food, while coping with a changing environment shaped by their production choices. Given the strong technological and environmental uncertainty, farmers learn and adaptively employ heuristics which guide their decisions on engaging in innovation and imitation activities, hiring workers, acquiring new farms, deforesting virgin areas and abandoning unproductive lands. Such activities in turn impact on land productivity, food production, food prices and land use. We firstly show that the model can replicate key stylized facts of the agricultural sector. We then extensively explore its properties across several scenarios featuring different institutional and behavioral settings. Finally, we showcase the properties of model in different applications considering deforestation and land abandonment; soil degradation; and climate impacts.

Photovoltaic production is growing globally thanks to climate change mitigation efforts. However, this growth is seldom planned which can lead to conflicts with other land uses, mostly agriculture and biodiversity conservation. There is, therefore, urgent need for adequate planning to minimise potential conflicts. We demonstrate how to identify priority areas for photovoltaic development to meet projected targets for 2050, as well as critical areas for the maintenance of different types of agriculture and biodiversity conservation, using Catalonia (NE Spain) as a case study. We tested three planning scenarios simulating alternative photovoltaic development models: setting targets at the whole regional scale or splitting those targets across counties distributing them equitably by county energy demand or area available for photovoltaic development. Photovoltaic targets could only be achieved when setting targets at the whole of Catalonia scale, although leading to heterogeneous distribution of development efforts and associated impacts on agriculture and biodiversity across counties. Setting targets for each county based on energy demand was far from achieving the regional photovoltaic development target, driven by the limited land available in some highly urbanised counties, where energy demand concentrates. On the other hand, setting targets based on area available within each led to the most equitable distri bution of potential impacts of photovoltaic development, while also approaching the regional photovoltaic development target. Adequate planning of photovoltaic development will be key to ensure that photovoltaic development does not flourish at the expenses of other land uses, like maintenance of agricultural production or biodiversity. VH was funded by an Emergia contract funded by Juta de Andalucía (EMERGIA20_00135). A.M.O was partially funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation through the GREENRISK project (PID2020–119933RB-C22). This research is a contribution to the Steppe-Forward chair (UAM-CTFC-TotalEnergies).