Environmental problems of our time (known as Anthropocene) are complex and usually associated with coupled natural–human systems and can benefit from a geospatially integrated systems approach. While geography has a long history of emphasizing place and space and debating the nature and scope of geography in the context of physical geography and human geography, its dualism as well as idiographic versus nomothetic approaches, the use of the geospatial framework to understand complex and coupled natural–human systems with a place-based approach that aims to integrate knowledge from local and global scales facilitates an intellectual framework where the power of geographical thinking and spatial analytical capabilities can be harnessed to be known as a ‘discipline of science of integration’ as opposed to involving an ‘integration of sciences’ as suggested by Goodchild (2013) without reverting to unidirectional disciplinarity.