The research, conducted by Niantao Jiao and Yiyan Zhang of Shandong Technology and Business University, draws on the concept of general resilience. Unlike hazard-specific assessments, which measure exposure, sensitivity, and recovery from a named threat such as a storm surge or harmful algal bloom, general resilience asks a broader question: does the system possess the diversity, redundancy, connectivity, learning capacity, and governance structures needed to handle uncertain disturbances of many kinds? A taller seawall may improve resilience to one particular storm, the authors note, but it does nothing for nutrient accumulation, industrial volatility, or ecological threshold shifts. Conversely, habitat diversity and cooperative networks may not hold back any single wave, yet they provide alternative pathways and coordination when unfamiliar crises strike.

To make this abstract idea measurable, the team built a three-tier framework with ten attributes. The first tier, system attributes, covers diversity, slow variables such as soil conditions and shoreline morphology, and ecosystem services. The second, dynamic adaptation, captures openness, redundancy, innovation capacity, and social capital. The third, governance coordination, includes modularity, overlapping governance, and tight feedbacks between monitoring and decision-making. Crucially, the researchers treated several attributes as having ecological optima rather than simple linear benefits: too little connectivity starves a system of replenishment and information, while too much connectivity allows pollution, disease, and disturbance to spread rapidly. Indicators were standardized accordingly, scoring units by their distance from an appropriate range rather than rewarding maximum values blindly.

The framework was applied at two nested scales. At the national level, the authors assessed 290 county-level land units covering roughly 248,300 square kilometers of coastal mainland China, alongside marine waters of about 304,700 square kilometers represented on a grid of cells roughly 8.09 kilometers wide. A nominal 2025 baseline drew on Landsat 8/9 and Sentinel-2 land-cover data, MODIS vegetation products, soil information, marine environmental observations from MODIS and VIIRS, aquaculture records, county statistics, and governance documents. Slowly updated variables, such as soil properties and aquaculture distribution, used the nearest reliable earlier products, with actual observation years documented to keep the temporal window transparent rather than pretending to a synchronized snapshot.

The national results reveal a striking contrast between land and sea. The mean general resilience capacity index was 0.359 for coastal land but 0.470 for coastal waters, on a scale where higher values indicate greater coping potential. On land, low and relatively low classes together accounted for 39.75 percent of the assessed area, forming continuous belts along parts of the Bohai coast, the Liaodong coast, and intensively developed eastern shoreline segments. In the waters, moderate and relatively high classes dominated, jointly covering 65.48 percent of the assessed area, with low values concentrated around the Yellow River estuary and Laizhou Bay and near the Yangtze River estuary, where land-based inputs, shifting sediments, and competing uses converge.

Spatial statistics confirmed that these patterns are far from random. Global Moran’s I, a measure of spatial autocorrelation, reached 0.6123 for coastal land and 0.9743 for coastal waters, both highly significant under 999 random permutations. In practical terms, high and low resilience cluster geographically: degraded belts extend across multiple counties, and marine low-value zones pool around estuaries and semi-enclosed bays. The authors interpret these clusters as hypotheses for verification rather than proven causes. Northern land belts may reflect wetland loss, salinization, low soil organic carbon, and fragmentation by urban and industrial shorelines, while southern high-value areas in Hainan, the western Beibu Gulf, and the southeast may benefit from intact vegetation, diverse habitats, and stronger ecological buffers.

The second, finer scale focused on Rongcheng, a city at the eastern tip of the Shandong Peninsula whose 492-kilometer convoluted shoreline of bays, headlands, and islands supports some of China’s most intensive kelp and shellfish aquaculture. Here the grid resolution dropped to roughly 180 meters on land and 264 meters at sea, and locally enhanced indicators were added: 20-meter habitat patches, nutrient variability, aquaculture duration, raft permeability, integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, cooperative networks, and water-quality sampling frequency. The authors stress that these local variables could enter the index only when their theoretical meaning mapped cleanly onto one of the ten shared attributes, preventing local data abundance from inflating the framework without discipline.

The Rongcheng results exposed heterogeneity invisible at the national scale. Across nearly 39,000 land cells, the mean index was 0.5826, with moderate and relatively low classes jointly covering 68.30 percent of the domain; central high-value patches sat alongside low-value belts near the coast and margins. The marine domain was even more internally divided: relatively low and relatively high classes together accounted for 56.33 percent of cells, and the coefficient of variation of 0.282 signaled pronounced bay-to-bay differences. In Rongcheng’s bays, restricted water exchange, dense raft structures, nutrient fluctuations, and benthic habitat degradation may combine into low-capacity pockets, while better-exchanged waters with diverse production and monitoring feedback score higher.

Perhaps the most important methodological message of the study is what it refuses to do. Because the national and Rongcheng assessments differ simultaneously in indicators, weights, and spatial support, their scores cannot be ranked against each other, and the finer detail in Rongcheng cannot be attributed to resolution alone. The authors also showed that classification choices matter: the share of national coastal land placed in the two lowest classes was roughly 39.7 percent under Jenks natural breaks, a startling 0.3 percent under equal intervals, and 40.4 percent under quintiles. Categorical maps, they argue, should always be read alongside continuous scores and spatial clustering, or readers risk drawing conclusions from cartographic convention rather than data structure.

The practical payoff is a chain of evidence linking screening to governance. National maps identify broad regions for monitoring priorities, while nested local diagnosis pinpoints bays, shoreline segments, and patches that warrant field verification. The authors propose keeping aquaculture pressure in a separate layer from the capacity index, so that diagnostic combinations such as high pressure paired with low capacity can be identified and matched to appropriate responses, from restoration and pressure reduction to capacity-based early warning. They call for repeated assessments over multiple periods, sensitivity testing of weights and thresholds, and independent observations of disturbance and performance to validate whether higher capacity actually translates into smaller functional losses when compound disturbances arrive. In an era when coastal pressures arrive unpredictably and interact across scales, measuring the conditions for adaptability—rather than merely the risk of any single hazard—may prove the more durable investment for the world’s crowded shorelines.

Subject of Research: Multiscale assessment of general resilience capacity in China's coastal social-ecological systems

Article Title: A multiscale assessment of general resilience capacity in China’s coastal social-ecological systems: a national baseline and nested diagnosis in Rongcheng

Article References: Jiao, N., & Zhang, Y. (2026). A multiscale assessment of general resilience capacity in China’s coastal social-ecological systems: a national baseline and nested diagnosis in Rongcheng. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 14, Article 1969265. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2026.1969265

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2026.1969265

Keywords: general resilience, coastal social-ecological systems, multiscale assessment, China coastline, Rongcheng, aquaculture, social-ecological resilience, spatial autocorrelation, land-sea governance, ecosystem services, resilience indicators, multiscale

The scale of the problem is enormous. Global deforestation runs at roughly 10 million hectares per year, and the net loss of forest area between 2015 and 2020 was 4.7 million hectares annually, according to the FAO. Forests shelter 80 percent of amphibian species, 75 percent of bird species, and 68 percent of mammal species, yet in 2023 alone more than 1.4 million hectares vanished within forested Key Biodiversity Areas. Agriculture drives 73 percent of tropical forest loss, with international demand for beef, soybeans, and palm oil pushing frontier expansion across Africa and South America. But these headline numbers conceal a deeper complexity: the drivers of forest loss shift dramatically depending on the political and territorial context, and nowhere is that more true than in zones of armed conflict.

The review’s most counterintuitive insight concerns what researchers call gunpoint conservation. Armed actors sometimes function as de facto environmental regulators. In Colombia, the FARC-EP controlled vast stretches of Amazonian forest for decades, imposing measures that proved effective in conserving trees, restricting megaprojects, and deterring extractive activities through the threat of extortion and intimidation. Similar dynamics have been documented elsewhere: forced displacement of populations can reduce pressure on forests or even allow them to recover, as studies from Colombia to the Polish Carpathians have shown. War, in other words, is not uniformly bad for forests, and peace is not uniformly good for them.

The Colombian case provides the starkest quantitative evidence. After the 2016 peace agreement, deforestation in municipalities where the FARC-EP had been present surged by 177.4 percent, compared with 90.8 percent in municipalities without that presence. Overall, Colombian deforestation rose by 44 percent following the accord. Once the guerrillas demobilized and abandoned their forest strongholds, private investment flowed in, previously controlled forests became freely accessible, and governance vacuums opened across the landscape. In the Catatumbo municipality of Tibú, coca cultivation drove deforested areas up by as much as 709 percent. The pattern is not unique to Colombia: in the Iran–Iraq War borderlands of the Zagros forests, agricultural expansion increased deforestation between 1976 and 1984, and then accelerated again during the post-conflict period from 1988 to 1998.

To map the field, the authors conducted a PRISMA-guided search of Scopus covering 2002 to 2026, combining Boolean terms for deforestation, resilience, and peace, then filtering by document type and excluding sixteen irrelevant subject areas such as medicine, mathematics, and chemistry. The final corpus of 349 records was analyzed in VOSviewer, which builds networks where node size reflects keyword frequency and link thickness reflects co-occurrence strength. The resulting network is highly connected, with climate change and deforestation acting as central hubs, and the largest nodes being climate change, deforestation, biodiversity, sustainable development, and environmental protection. Resilience links directly to climate change, sustainable development, and biodiversity, but no direct link between resilience and armed conflict appears anywhere in the network.

That absence is the review’s central alarm. Armed conflict appears in the literature mainly as a bridge node connected to conservation, protected areas, and land use change, not to resilience thinking. Even more telling, the exact keywords peace, peacebuilding, postconflict, and peace agreement are barely represented among indexed keywords; peace-related concepts often appear in abstracts and full texts but are rarely formalized as author keywords, making the entire peacebuilding dimension nearly invisible to bibliometric searches. The literature, in short, discusses war’s environmental effects but has not built a coherent framework for assessing how forest social-ecological systems absorb, adapt to, or transform under the disturbances that conflict and peace processes create.

Conceptually, the review leans on the distinction between general and specific resilience. General resilience describes a system’s capacity to cope with any disturbance, including novel ones; specific resilience asks resilience of what, against what, in the formulation of Carpenter and colleagues. The authors frame forests as Forest Social-Ecological Systems, or FoSES: tightly coupled human-nature systems characterized by self-organization, the ability to spontaneously reorganize structures and functions through internal dynamics rather than external control. Resilience here is not a simple bounce back to a pre-disturbance state but an emergent property encompassing absorption, reorganization, adaptation, and transformation. Existing assessment methods, from remote sensing of vegetation optical depth in the Amazon to hierarchical frameworks of principles, criteria, and indicators, mostly measure generic resilience rather than the specific resilience of forests to deforestation in conflict-affected territories.

The publication landscape mirrors this fragmentation. The 349 records appeared across 173 sources, with a classic long-tail distribution: 113 journals published only one relevant article each, while the five most productive outlets, Ecology and Society, Forest Policy and Economics, Forest Ecology and Management, Ecological Indicators, and Trees, Forests and People, together accounted for just 14.3 percent of output. Geographically, the Global North dominates: the United States leads with 114 documents, followed by the United Kingdom with 62, Germany with 42, and Canada with 34. Colombia is the striking exception from the Global South, with 41 publications, a direct reflection of its half-century of internal armed conflict and its globally significant post-2016 peace experiment. Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, Mexico, and Indonesia contribute smaller but meaningful shares, each at different stages of forest transition from accelerated loss to reforestation.

From the corpus, the authors extracted a preliminary set of candidate indicators spanning eight dimensions: annual forest loss rate and forest fragmentation on the ecological side; effective institutional presence under governance; dependence of livelihoods on forests as a measure of social vulnerability; land tenure security; historical presence of armed actors as a conflict variable; changes following peace agreements or demobilization; and community organization as a marker of adaptive capacity and collective action. Each indicator draws on identifiable data sources, from Landsat and Global Forest Watch to cadastres and conflict event databases. The authors are careful to stress that these are candidates, not a validated composite index; operational definitions, weighting, sensitivity analysis, and validation with experts and local communities remain future work.

The stakes extend far beyond academic taxonomy. The reviewed literature proposes adaptive multilevel governance, community participation, territorial planning, restoration, and sustainable livelihood alternatives as responses to post-conflict forest loss, and recent work introduces concepts such as Protective Pathways to connect environmental peacebuilding with territorial recovery. But without an integrated, indicator-based framework for assessing the specific resilience of forest social-ecological systems, planners cannot identify which components of a landscape have the lowest response capacity or where interventions should be prioritized. The authors argue that resilience assessment should be built into peace agreements themselves, so that land abandonment, the removal of access restrictions, and expected deforestation surges are anticipated and negotiated in advance rather than discovered afterward. As peace processes unfold from Colombia to Ukraine, the review’s message is clear: ending a war is only the beginning of a second, quieter struggle, this one between accelerating human pressures on forests and the scientific tools we have to understand and manage them. Right now, the tools are lagging behind, and the forests are paying the price.

Subject of Research: Social-ecological resilience of forests to deforestation in armed conflict and peacebuilding contexts

Article Title: A systematic bibliometric review of social-ecological resilience to deforestation in conflict and peacebuilding contexts

Article References: Cortés, Y., & Toro, J. (2026). A systematic bibliometric review of social-ecological resilience to deforestation in conflict and peacebuilding contexts. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101530. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101530

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101530

Keywords: deforestation, social-ecological resilience, armed conflict, peacebuilding, Colombia, FARC-EP, forest governance, bibliometrics, VOSviewer, post-conflict, FoSES, environmental peacebuilding