A new review article, “Ecological Feedbacks in the Earth System” (DOI: 10.1029/2025EF006478), has been published in the AGU journal Earth’s Future. The paper synthesizes evidence from marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems, demonstrating that ecological feedbacks—how organisms respond to and actively shape their environment—play a central role in regulating climate, biogeochemical cycles, and ecosystem stability. The study highlights that many current Earth system models underrepresent these processes, which limits our ability to anticipate and respond to rapid environmental change. The authors stress the importance of cross-scale integration and call for urgent action to incorporate ecological feedbacks into Earth system analyses.
IMBeR Perspective
The study was developed as part of the activities of the Integrated Marine Biosphere Research Project (IMBeR), a large global initiative focused on ensuring ocean sustainability in the context of global change. IMBeR is a Large-Scale Ocean Research Project under the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) and a Global Research Network under Future Earth. During the development of the IMBeR Science Plan and Implementation Strategy over a decade ago, the team began to highlight the need to improve understanding of ecological feedbacks in the Earth system and this became one of IMBeR’s Innovation Challenges: Innovation Challenge 3 – To advance understanding of ecological feedbacks in the Earth System.
Over the past decade, IMBeR has undertaken a number activities in this area, including a conference session at the Future Oceans 2 Open Science Conference in 2019, which marked an important step forward. Following subsequent discussions, the team decided to generate a paper highlighting the operation of ecological feedbacks and examining their role in the Earth system. At that stage, the need for an integrated view encompassing terrestrial and freshwater systems was also recognized, leading to an expanded author team. The resulting paper represents an output of IMBeR Innovation Challenge 3 and Grand Challenge 2. The study was led by Eugene Murphy, IMBeR former Vice-Chair and Lead of Innovation Challenge 3, together with Dr Emma Cavan and Dr Jess Williams from Imperial College London. The study also identifies a series of future research priorities, and emphasizes that better integration of ecological feedbacks in Earth system analyses is essential for providing robust scientific advice to policymakers facing accelerating climate and biodiversity crises.
Overview Article
An overview article summarizing this work is now available on the Imperial College London website, providing an accessible summary of the study for a broader audience: Read the article here