ABSTRACT

The Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) is one of the fastest developing bay areas in the world and covers a vast land area of 56,000 km2 over the Pearl River Basin (PRB) and 20,000 km2 of adjacent ocean. It has a population exceeding 80 million and aspires to become a global technology and innovation hub under national development strategies. Ensuring the GBA’s sustainable development will require a healthy and resilient environment as determined by the sustainability of the regional earth system (RES) composed of the lithosphere (land), the hydrosphere (oceans and rivers), the atmosphere and the biosphere (living things) — the “spheres”.

The RES of the GBA is regulated primarily and intrinsically by each sphere’s dynamic processes and influenced extrinsically by interactions among the spheres. For example, the terrestrial (land) processes of the PRB are controlled by complex interactions between the land, aquatic environments, and atmosphere, which collectively regulate the freshwater volume as well as nutrient and pollutant loadings that are discharged into the adjacent ocean from the Pearl River. As such interwoven physical and biogeochemical processes occur at multiple spatiotemporal scales in the RES and respond to intensifying human activities and climate change, they form an integrated land-ocean-atmosphere-human activity-climate system, which determines the short- and long-term environmental sustainability, the carbon budget required to achieve neutrality, and the prosperity and development trajectory of the GBA.

A single discipline alone cannot holistically address the complex and pressing environmental challenges in a particular region. RES research has thus become a key national initiative to better understand and realize environmental sustainability in many countries but remains in its infancy globally. The proposed project will therefore take an unprecedented holistic approach to investigate the interactions among natural forcings, human activities, and climate change using an integrated system to create an RES framework in the GBA. This pioneering interdisciplinary project will also develop a digital twin or a digital model that integrates all streaming data and provides a visual interface to understand the spatiotemporal status and evolution, and simulate the future of the RES for facilitating data-driven decision-making in the GBA. By integrating interdisciplinary perspectives, advanced methodologies, and a world-class research team, this project will provide comprehensive knowledge and science-based mitigation strategies grounded in the human-RES integrated assessment framework to safeguard the environment and the development of the GBA and present a case study for similar bay areas worldwide.