Developing Transdisciplinary Approaches to Sustainability Challenges: The Need to Model Socio-Environmental Systems in the Longue Durée
, Adrian C. Newton 1,3, Philip Riris 1,2, Marc Vander Linden 1,2, Jennifer Bates 4, Elena Cantarello 3, Daniel A. Contreras 5, Stefani A. Crabtree 6,7, Enrico R. Crema 8, Mary Edwards 9, Tatiana Filatova 10, Ben Fitzhugh 11, Hannah Fluck 12, Jacob Freeman 13, Kees Klein Goldewijk 14, Marta Krzyzanska 8, Daniel Lawrence 15, Helen Mackay 16, Marco Madella 17,18,19, Shira Yoshi Maezumi 20,21,22, Rob Marchant 23, Sophie Monsarrat 24,25, Ryan Rabett 28,29, Mehdi Saqalli 32, Rick Stafford 3, Jens-Christian Svenning 24, Nicki J. Whithouse 33 and add
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Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
See attached file.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
We thank the reviewer for their comments and appreciate their enthusiasm for our paper. As the reviewer did not make any suggestions for changes there is not hing else to reply to.
Reviewer 2 Report
This is an interesting, well-written and well-reasoned paper dealing with the relevance of transdisciplinary research to study the Socio-Ecological Systems evolved over long temporal and spatial scales. It addresses the complex problem of integrating different theories and data on environmental and social change from the longue durée and from recent studies with sustainability science to face modern societal challenges.
The complexity of the problem includes:
- the lack of consistent and comparable historical, archaeological, and palaeoecological time-series to develop new methods to understand the processes that shape SES at vast spatial and temporal scales
- the prevailing concept that humans are inherently entangled with the environment, to which is added the issue of how to theorize the role of humans in SES
- the absence of an effective transdisciplinarity among the numerous disciplines that can potentially contribute to studying SES (data heterogeneity and different perspectives, scales and epistemologies underlying various datasets).
The paper provides a useful review of the theoretical or analytical frameworks of paramount importance to the study of long-term SES and gives examples of meaningful data types from different discipline contributing to the understanding of multi-scalar SES.
Following this thorough analysis, the Authors propose formal computational modelling as a platform for solving many of the issues raised. They also prove to have a good (and from different perspectives) background on socio-environmental dynamics to share, based on which they suggest a convincing exploratory roadmap for a unified approach to the study of SES.
This article features well-argued ideas that flow logically and cohesively, also supported by relevant and update literature. Despite the challenging and complex topic, the article has fully achieved his goal of providing a manifesto for an integrated scientific approach to the study of SES over the long term.
Therefore, in my opinion the paper is suitable for publication in the present form.
Author Response
We thank the reviewer for their comments and appreciate their enthusiasm for our paper. As the reviewer did not make any suggestions for changes there is nothing else to reply to.
