Achieving sustainability in the Anthropocene requires understanding how coupled social–ecological systems (SES) evolve through time under accelerating human and environmental pressures. We present a dynamic framework that integrates multidecadal socioeconomic, biophysical, and sedimentary ancient DNA records from China’s Lake Taihu watershed—one of the world’s most densely populated and industrialized regions. By quantifying rates of change in key social and ecological variables, we reconstructed transient SES trajectories over the past century and identified two major transitions with contrasting feedbacks. The first, beginning in the mid-20th century, reflects intensified coupling between agricultural expansion, industrialization, and ecological degradation, leading to eutrophication and loss of resilience. The second, emerging in the early 2000s, reveals a marked decoupling between economic growth and eco-environmental degradation, indicating the onset of a potentially more sustainable regime driven by institutional innovation, ecological restoration, and technological transformation.
This rate-based coevolutionary approach provides new insights into how feedback among water, food, and energy subsystems can shift from reinforcing to balancing interactions. It highlights the value of long-term records for identifying early signals of transformation and for designing adaptive management strategies that align socioeconomic development with ecosystem recovery. Lessons from the Yangtze River Delta offer a transferable framework for navigating water-energy-food nexus challenges across other rapidly developing regions.
 

Resilience, Anthropocene, Transition dynamics, decoupling, freshwater ecosystem