Telecoupling Research Towards Sustainable Transformation of Land Systems

Livelihoods, markets and conservation

This blog post summarises a recently published article based on in-depth mixed method research in a national park in northern Laos. The paper sets out the livelihood implications of increasing conservation interventions coupled with accelerating marketisation of resident livelihoods. The authors draw out the major livelihood strategies pursued by residents and highlight the inequitably distributed costs and benefits of conservation actions at the village sites.

Land systems’ insights from the pandemic and lock down

The organizers and several participants of a recent Working Group Meet & Greet put together this blog post summarizing the discussions held during the event. Although it will take time to make sense of the myriad changes the COVID-19 pandemic has brought and continues to bring into their lives as scientists, and into the socio-ecological land systems that they study, they identified several likely patterns of long-term change.

Globally sharing land and its ecosystem functions through international trade

This blog post looks at which functions of land should be shared, how international trade of agricultural commodities affected the share of land between humans and other species over the last few decades, and what is the fair share of cropland between producing and consuming countries constrained by planetary boundaries. The blog post summarises work presented in a webinar hosted by the GLP Telecoupling Research Working Group in April 2021.

Governing telecouplings - Discussing evidence on company policies for reducing commodity-driven forest loss

In this blog post, Dr. Janina Grabs and PhD candidate Sam Levy share some first insights from their work on the effectiveness of zero deforestation commitments (ZDCs) in the Brazilian Amazon’s cattle sector and the Indonesian palm oil sector. The blog post summarises their work as presented in a webinar hosted by the GLP Telecoupling Research Working Group in December 2020.

The challenge of modelling telecoupled land-use change

In this blog post, the authors introduce two new models, the TeleABM and the FLUTE, that are designed to study telecoupled land-use change but using different modelling approaches. Both models use soybean, one of the most traded commodities in the world, as an exemplary case to illustrate the ways in which they tackle the challenges of cross-scalar dynamics. The post reports on a joint webinar hosted by the GLP Working Group on Telecoupling Research held in September 2020 and featuring presentations by the three first authors.

Linking local-global nature conservation: a telecoupling perspective

This post summarizes the insights from the GLP Telecoupling Working Group's second webinar, which featured featuring working group member Sébastien Boillat and COUPLED PhD students Joel Persson and Siyu Qin. The post also discusses the importance of looking at conservation through a telecoupling lens.