Regional Environmental Change now enters its 17 th volume, having published 1161 papers in 75 issues through its existence, 209 of them in 2016 alone. As editors, we are quite proud about this. We also know just how much work this represents, first of all by the authors presenting their work to us, and then through the huge time investment and intellectual contribution made by subject editors, guest editors and reviewers. Much of this work is carried out in anonymity, and so authors have little opportunity to thank for the invaluable support of their work they are receiving through this process. But we know this work is appreciated! For the papers submitted during the period of Nov 1, 2015 to Oct 31, 2016, in total 387 reviewers provided advice, often in the form of detailed and constructive statements including specific remarks for parts of the manuscript. On behalf of the authors, we as editors wish to thank these colleagues, and also all other reviewers, for their hugely important contribution. From next year onwards we plan to give this work some recognition by listing the full list of reviewers in the last issue of any year. We are pleased to be able to work with a strong group of handling editors – also they contribute large amounts of their time to the common objective of producing publications of high academic quality and interdisciplinary standards. Three of them deserve to be mentioned specifically, since they are now stepping down from work for our journal, after many years of unfaltering support: Elena Bennett, Helmut Geist, and Will Steffen have each been handling many papers, engaged in discussions with reviewers, authors and chief editors, and generally sorted out numerous small and large problems before papers were published. We want to use this space to point out just how grateful we are for their support! Now, with the first issue of 2017, we have decided to reorganize the journal's crucial support structure, its Editorial Board. In the past, the board consisted of a large group of colleagues (64 at the time of writing) who had all supported us by a great number of reviews and other activities. From now on, we plan to make their contributions visible by listing all reviewers at the end of a given annual volume. The Editorial Board, from now, on, will be composed of only the active handling editors, a group that is growing in number and also in diversity across disciplines and countries of residence. It currently includes – but several more colleagues will join us in the near future. So we thank the old Editorial Board for its reviewing activities (which we hope will continue), and we welcome our new Editorial Board with whom we plan to engage also in terms of discussing more generic issues of journal development.