Telecoupling Research Towards Sustainable Transformation of Land Systems

We rely on land to produce food, derive shelter, energy and capital, and land constitutes a source of meaning, identity and belonging. Yet, while there is in principle land enough to satisfy current and future populations’ needs, the distribution of land resources across the globe is uneven, and people’s access to land and land-related benefits is likewise very unequal. The pressure on land resources in many regions of the world is increasing; to a large extent exacerbated by a number of other spatially distributed processes, including population growth, urbanisation, changing consumption patterns, climate change impacts, biodiversity and carbon conservation efforts, as well as economic and cultural globalisation. These social, economic and environmental processes lead to new types of interconnectivity between places around the world, either intentionally when different powerful actors seek new locations to meet their various land demands or as unintended spill-over processes in the form of displacements, leakages or cascade effects of land use decisions made elsewhere.

Building a better understanding of how global interconnectivity – or telecouplings – shapes the pressure on land in various places, the spatially distributed trade-offs between different land uses and the implications for social and environmental sustainability is therefore a key challenge and priority area of investigation for Land System Science. Telecouplings furthermore represent a significant challenge in relation to the identification of leverage points for transformative interventions into unsustainable land-use practices and for the design of appropriate land governance mechanisms.