Promoting a coupled human and natural systems approach to addressing conservation in complex mountainous landscapes of Central Asia

Global climate change, nonpoint source pollution, watershed and wildlife habitat destruction, and unsustainable development are damaging the natural world, threatening the socio-cultural integrity of communities, and jeopardizing the livelihood security of peoples worldwide. Despite the past 50 years of progress in addressing environmental damage in the United States and elsewhere, intractable problems have arisen that to date have eluded successful technological or policy responses. Solutions have been sought by recognizing that these problems are very complex and demand interdisciplinary approaches that require building effective partnerships among relevant academic institutions, governmental agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and private business, as well as levering various disciplines and traditional knowledge systems. Such thinking has evolved to now consider humans to be an integral part of nature, which is captured in the idea of the ‘human ecosystem’, where biophysical, socioeconomic, and cultural systems interact via a complex set of organizational, spatial, and temporal ‘couplings’. Within such a context, environmental problems can be viewed as coupled human and natural systems, which afford unique and novel approaches to their solutions. This paper discusses the development of the coupled systems approach as a scientific methodology, reviews its key characteristics and principles, provides an example of how it has been applied to assess conservation issues in alpine areas of Northwest Yunnan Province, China, and recommends how this scientific approach might be further developed for use in mountainous landscape regions of Central Asia and elsewhere.