Event-Based Environmental Governance: Sparse Asynchronous Coordination in Interdependent Earth–Human Systems

Coordination in an interdependent environmental field cannot run on continuous shared monitoring. The parties hold different instruments, observe at different rhythms, guard some of their records, and share no representation into which a common state could be assimilated. This paper develops the alternative reporting layer indicated in the earlier papers of its series: governance coordination conducted through events, sparse asynchronous reports that something consequential has changed, emitted by the party that observed the change, in its own terms, against its own record. The method is conceptual with a formal core borrowed from established literatures. The paper defines the event as a governance primitive, distinguishes it from the alarm, the indicator, and the disclosure, states its content requirements, and separates six classes of event whose triggering conditions and record requirements differ. Four insights organise the development. Event-triggered reporting concentrates communication where a field is moving, and results in control engineering establish that sparse triggered communication can maintain bounded deviation where periodic reporting of the same frequency cannot, so sparseness is a design principle and not a compromise. Events among distributed parties admit no global ordering: the order of unrelated events is undefined, only causal order is available, and governance procedures that presuppose a single timeline are therefore unsound for distributed fields. The determination of what counts as an event, the threshold of consequence, carries the arrangement's power and follows the distribution of records. And silence is systematically ambiguous among ordinary conditions, instrument failure, inadequate baselines, and strategic withholding, so an arrangement's treatment of non-reporting is as consequential as its treatment of reports. The paper surveys event-triggered control, distributed systems theory, event-based epidemic surveillance under the International Health Regulations, notification duties in international environmental law, incident-reporting regimes in aviation safety, disturbance ecology, complex event processing, and neuromorphic sensing, states what each owns, and identifies the residue. It reports no empirical study; its formal claims are borrowed and their sources stated.