摘要：Over 40% of the earth's land surface are drylands that are home to approximately 2.5 billionpeople. Livelihood sustainability in drylands is threatened by a complex and interrelated range of social,economic, political, and environmental changes that present significant challenges to researchers, policymakers, and, above all, rural land users. Dynamic ecological and environmental change models suggestthat climate change induced drought events may push dryland systems to cross biophysical thresholds,causing a long-term drop in agricultural productivity. Therefore, research is needed to explore howdevelopment strategies and other socioeconomic changes help livelihoods become more resilient and robustat a time of growing climatic risk and uncertainty. As a result, the overarching goal of this special featureis to conduct a structured comparison of how livelihood systems in different dryland regions are affectedby drought, thereby making methodological, empirical, and theoretical contributions to our understandingof how these types of social-ecological systems may be vulnerable to climate change. In introducing theseissues, the purpose of this editorial is to provide an overview of the two main intellectual challenges of thiswork, namely: (1) how to conceptualize vulnerability to climate change in coupled social-ecologicalsystems; and (2) the methodological challenges of anticipating trends in vulnerability in dynamicenvironments
