Overview
Land use change can be seen as consequence and cause of global change and as a solution towards sustainability transformations. For the past 11 years our interdisciplinary community of over 2000 researchers worldwide have been producing knowledge to better understand and guide such transformations under the umbrella of the Global Land Programme (GLP), now a Global Research Project of the Future Earth, a research initiative of the International Science Union (ICSU).
We envision land system science as evolving from research about development of human-environmental systems to research for sustainable development of human-environmental systems.
In order to realize our vision we believe that scientific excellence can and must be linked to societal impact. Accompanying the first years of the recently endorsed 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations, the GLP is working to exemplify how to produce knowledge for sustainability transformations by demonstrating new forms of interaction and collaboration between researchers, policy makers and development practitioners including the development of a science-policy interface on land where policy-makers, civil society, and land system scientists and other researchers can work together to identify pathways for sustainability transformations.
We invite you to join us! For more information contact admin@glp.earth.
Social innovations can help revive mountain economies, including through alternative economic pathways. The panelists will share and discuss findings on a regional initiative in the Swiss Alps and experiences from civil society initiatives in the Hindu Kush Himalaya, Georgia, and Ecuador. The event is an opportunity to jointly reflect on how social innovations can be fostered for the benefit of mountain economies.
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED! The GLP Socio-Ecological Land Systems of Latin America working group is happy to invite you to their next webinar led by Sébastien Boillat. This webinar aims at bringing together different perspectives of decolonizing land system science with a focus on Latin America, including indigenous perspectives on the land, knowledge co-construction, cartography and representation, and challenges faced by land system researchers in Latin America.
In a webinar on 21 February 2023, authors of The Land Gap Report joined The Global Land Programme (GLP) and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) to share their findings that countries’ climate pledges rely on unrealistic amounts of land-based carbon removal.
The Anthromes, CO2, and Terrestrial Carbon meeting seeks to explore the inter-relationship of CO2-fertilization, people, and land ecosystems through the lens of terrestrial carbon source-sink dynamics during the deep past, through major cultural transitions, and in the net-zero motivated near-future. Deadline to register: 13 March 2023
A new paper in Landscape Ecology examined how studying the Covid-19 pandemic's severe impacts on land users and landscapes around the world allow a better understanding of how global shocks, cascading disruptions, and reconnections influence contemporary land systems. The paper grew out of a collaboration between multiple GLP Working Groups.
This three-part, advanced training builds on previous ARSET agricultural trainings. Here they present more advanced radar remote sensing techniques using polarimetry and a canopy structure dynamic model to monitor crop growth. Series is free and open to the public.
The GLP is currently seeking to nominate two to three new SSC members, starting June 2023. The continuing success of GLP relies on the input of these people. In seeking nominations, we are looking for scientific excellence and a high level of commitment to actualizing GLP goals and activities. Deadline: 1 April 2023
Effective monitoring and management of critically important and biodiverse ecosystems requires a comprehensive suite of data and analysis tools. The use of NASA Earth Observations (EO), in particular the combination of multispectral and hyperspectral optical imagery, thermal infrared data, and laser altimeter (LiDAR) data, can provide an increased understanding of ecosystem function. Join ARSET for four free, 1.5 -hour sessions between 27 March and 5 April 2023 to learn more.
A new article in People and Nature that grew out of discussions at GLP's 2019 Open Science Meeting in Bern looks at what happens after shifting cultivation and finds eight transitions with varied consequences for people and nature.
Nations, companies, and other institutions are responding to the accelerating climate crisis challenge by making net-zero pledges. But the magnitude of the transformation required has led to a lot of wishful thinking. Join GLP, IATP and authors of The Land Gap Report for a discussion about how we can more forward when the land required offsets in national climate plans is already equivalent to the total amount of land that is in cropland today.
This is a new type of scientific congress aimed at bridging the science-policy-practice nexus for achieving sustainable development. The overall goal of the Transformation Labs is to identify research that can help sustainable socio-ecological transformations within planetary boundaries. All events are open to the public, free of charge, and being held online. Deadline to register: 1 February 2023
The Global Land Programme (GLP) IPO moved to its new home at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences in the United States on 1 February 2023. This transition was made possible by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant in support of the land science community as a key part of international global change research infrastructure.
A new article in Regional Environmental Change draws on insights from politics of scale to present a framework for analysing the multiple environmentalities of environmental governance in protected areas focusing on the construction of Nam Et-Phou Louey National Park in Lao PDR.
Global Sustainability recently published an overview of "Ten new insights in climate science 2022" including a chapter by the Global Land Programme on how sustainable land use can make a difference in meeting climate targets.
Clarivate Analytics, the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to enable researchers to accelerate discovery, published its annual Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list for 2022 with 31 GLP Members, SSC Members, and GLP Fellows on it.
A new article in Sustainability investigates the extent and impact of oil spills on different land use types, protected areas, and species in the Niger Delta of Nigeria by using vegetation indices and remote sensing.
A new article in Environmental Research Letters found that while many RSPO certified growers make real changes to achieve certification, these changes do not always address core sectoral performance concerns.
A new article in Nature Communications shows eliminating deforestation from the supply chains of all firms exporting Brazilian soy to the EU or China from 2011-2016 could have reduced net global deforestation by 2% and Brazilian deforestation by 9%.
A new article in Environmental Research Letters leverages timeseries of spatially explicit corporate commodity sourcing data and ZDCs to assess the current and potential effect of ZDCs within soybean supply chains on forest loss and biodiversity.
GLP Executive Officer Ariane de Bremond presented the PNAS paper and companion report on “Ten Facts about Land Systems for Sustainability” to the Future Earth Open Science Conference in Paris, France, on September 21, 2022. The paper was co-authored by 50 leading land use scientists from 20 countries, and the companion report offers specific examples to help policymakers and the public understand what’s at stake.
The newest issue of Mountain Research and Development is now available. This focus issue illuminates the dynamic and complex interconnections between hazards, underlying vulnerabilities, integrated disaster risk management, and resulting impacts in mountains.
A new paper in Environmental Research Letters uses a novel household dataset and a quasi-experimental design to estimate household-level changes in agricultural productivity and other LSLA outcomes in Tanzania.
To be eligible, projects must involve communities at the grassroots level and deliver practical action that is founded on science. Deadline: 31 October
A new paper in Environmental Research Letters assesses how much savanna area had changed over the 3 decades (area loss, fragmentation), and of this how much was due to direct human intervention versus vegetation transition.
In 2022, fifty years on from the UN Summit, the International Science Council, Future Earth and the Stockholm Environment Institute convened an Expert Writing Group of natural scientists, social scientists and humanities scholars to modernize and extend the historical call of the Menton Message of 1972 on the eve of Stockholm+50. Read and share the letter...
NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing Training Program (ARSET) has opened a new open, online introductory webinar series: Measuring Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide from Space in Support of Climate Related Studies. This 4-part training, delivered in English and Spanish, will provide an overview of atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements from space with the OCO-2 and OCO-3 satellite mission and demonstrate how to access, search, filter and display XCO2 data using Jupyter Notebook. Course Dates: May 24, 26, 31, and June 2 English Session: 12:00-14:00 EDT (UTC-4) Spanish Session: 15:00-17:00 EDT (UTC-4)
Join us for an informal Meet & Greet with GLP members, especially new members. We will do introductions and networking, using breakout rooms as needed.
A recent article in Biological Conservation examines fake controversies produced by a small group of active Brazilian researchers that have seriously impacted environmental conservation, particularly in issues related to deforestation and climate change.
A recent paper in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability highlights the diversity of ways in which theories, as assemblages of different elements that can serve a variety of purposes, can emerge within inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary processes.
A new paper published in Conservation argues that the bioeconomy may help conserve or restore habitats, improve knowledge on biodiversity, valorize livelihoods and increase social participation, and aid in moving beyond the commodification of nature. However, none of these achievements can be taken for granted.
In this paper, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors develop an innovative framework to identify and evaluate leverage points along land-use trajectories that account for path dependency. They apply this to the biodiversity hotspot north-eastern Madagascar, where they identify opportunities for sustainable land-use in fallow-derived vanilla agroforestry.
The International Forest Policy Meeting (IFPM) is a biannual event bringing together scholars working on forest and forest related policy issues. The 4th IFPM will be a virtual, free of cost event and is organized by the European Forest Institute’s Governance Programme in collaboration with Wageningen University & Research and EFI’s Forest Policy Research Network coordinated by the University of Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU). This year’s meeting will focus on the science-policy and the science-media interfaces in forest policy.
SSC member Rachael Garrett will be a keynote speaker at this conference that brings together researchers and policymakers working on issues associated with finance and economics and their impact on biodiversity.
The Journal of Land Use Science dedicated their first issue of 2022 to 'Women in Land Science'. The journal is co-edited by two of GLP's SSC members, Dr. Daniel Müller and Dr. Darla Munroe, and strives to itself be a strong representation of excellence in the field as well as representation by gender.
The Sustainability Research & Innovation Congress is a series of gatherings that unite global research leaders, experts, industries and innovators to inspire action and promote a sustainability transformation.
Not Rocket Science episode in Threshold podcast look at some models for how we can realistically meet the 1.5C goal and get to net zero by 2050.
The second SRI Inkundla Conference will strive to build bridges between the sciences, sectors, community members, and countries by focusing on the power of science to transcend conflict and foster peaceful transitions to sustainability. The conference offer two interactive conversations with different speakers with both academic and lived experience in advancing peaceful dialogue through science. Dates and time: 28 March 2022 – 2:30 pm to 4:00 pm South Africa Standard Time (SAST) 31 March 2022 – 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm South Africa Standard Time (SAST)
Sustainability leaders, experts, industry and innovators from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific are invited to share their knowledge on sustainability challenges and opportunities in the Oceania region as part of a major international sustainability event.
This free three-part webinar series will introduce bottom-up and top-down methods for tracking emissions and removals of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) from the atmosphere. The training will explore how to combine this information to produce a more complete and transparent global stocktake, and support efforts to reduce net emissions and mitigate their impact on the climate. Course Dates: 2 hours daily sessions on May 11, 18, & 25, 2022.
This free online course gives you an introduction to the STEPS Centre’s core conceptual approach, the Pathways Approach to sustainability.
The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy seeks a director to lead its Latin America and Caribbean programming for a two-year period with an option to continue beyond two years. Deadline 1.July.2022
A new report released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) is a call to action for policymakers worldwide seeking to develop sustainable and equitable solutions to our most urgent global challenges. “Ten Facts about Land Systems for Sustainability” was co-authored by 50 leading land use scientists from 20 countries, convened by the Global Land Programme. A companion report offers specific examples to help policymakers and the public understand what’s at stake at this critical moment in global development.
There are growing calls in recent years for research on “solar geoengineering“, a set of entirely speculative technologies to reduce incoming sunlight on earth in order to limit global warming. This initiative stands against such emerging initiatives to explore planetary techno-fixes as a climate policy option.
Watch this poetic TEDxGeneva talk in which Stephen Bell brings historical insights of global farmland abandonment, zooms in to studying this process in Spain, and argues about the importance of changing the focus from post-factum abandonment to proactive retirement of lands.
On January 19 we held a webinar on new research published in 2021 (PNAS and Annual Review of Environment and Resources) on how human use of land has been transforming Earth's ecology for millennia. From hunting and foraging to burning the land to farming to industrial agriculture, increasingly intensive human use of land has reshaped global patterns of biodiversity, ecosystems, landscapes, and climate. Watch the event recording and download the presenters' slides.
We invite you to join us for a webinar on new research published in 2021 (PNAS and Annual Review of Environment and Resources) on how human use of land has been transforming Earth's ecology for millennia. From hunting and foraging to burning the land to farming to industrial agriculture, increasingly intensive human use of land has reshaped global patterns of biodiversity, ecosystems, landscapes, and climate.
On December 2, 2021, the GLP Agricultural Land Abandonment as a Global Land-Use Change Phenomenon Working Group and GLP European Nodal Office held an introductory webinar and discussion of agricultural land abandonment as a global phenomenon. Watch the recording
A new paper in PNAS demonstrates an approach to identify homesteads of forest-dependent people and to track their resource base over 30 years across the entire South American Gran Chaco (1.1 million km2). The transferable and scalable methodology puts forest smallholders on the map and can help to uncover the land-use conflicts at play in many deforestation frontiers across the globe.
A new paper in Environmental Research Letters uses Brazil as an example of how a legality criterion adopted by consumer countries is insufficient to protect forests and other ecosystems and may worsen deforestation and conversion risks by incentivizing the weakening of social-environmental protection by producer countries.
All GLP Members are invited to this first event of the GLP Agricultural Land Abandonment as a Global Land-Use Change Phenomenon Working Group. An introduction of “land abandonment” will run for approximately 30 minutes and will be followed by a discussion.
Clarivate Analytics, the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to enable researchers to accelerate discovery, published its annual Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list this week with 32 GLP Members, SSC Members, and GLP Fellows on it.
This 2-part, hands-on advanced training will provide participants with the skills to combine in situ measurements and optical remote sensing data, such as chlorophyll-a concentration, sea surface temperature, and suspended particulate matter, to assess water quality for their area of interest.
Join us for a special end-of-year informal Meet & Greet with GLP members, especially new members. We will do introductions and networking, using breakout rooms as needed.
Michigan State University’s Jianguo “Jack” Liu was honored this month with the Gunnerus Award in Sustainability Science – the first major international prize for outstanding scientific work that promotes sustainable development globally. It followed on his September receipt of the World Sustainability Award for his leadership in integrating the needs of both humans and nature and succeeding in having the work translated into policy and practice.
This four-day virtual and interactive Congress will bring together scientists, practitioners, Indigenous Peoples, development organizations, and policymakers to share and advance scientific research, nature-positive solutions, policies, and practices.
The Wyss Academy for Nature is seeking a dynamic and innovative personality working at the interface of science and development who is driven to explore and develop new ways of transforming knowledge into action that benefits both people and nature and supports systems transformation through the Regional Stewardship Hub in East Africa. Deadline: 10 October 2021
The Wyss Academy for Nature is seeking an outstanding, highly dynamic and passionate candidate to build, lead, and inspire the Regional Stewardship Hub in East Africa. Deadline: 10 October 2021
The GLP Socio-ecological Land Systems of Latin America Working Group is very excited to announce their next webinar to be held on October 28th 2021 at 16:00 CEST (UTC+2) where Martha Bonilla (INECOL, Mexico) and colleagues will share about social-ecological networks of Mexico.
Three of our GLP Working Groups are planning a joint hands-on event to exchange and synthesize insights and observations deriving from the “COVID-19 global shock”. The event will be a combination of brief talks and focused discussion, including crowdsourced insights from participants via micro-posters. The event is open to all GLP members, but micro-posters are due by 27 October, so learn more today!
Join us for an informal Meet & Greet with GLP members, especially new members. We will do introductions and networking, using breakout rooms as needed.
Human–wildlife interactions have become a frequent phenomenon in peri-urban landscapes, making them arenas of human-wildlife interactions. There is a need to identify and implement effective governance approaches to avoid conflicts and alleviate the negative impacts of human-wildlife interactions in peri-urban landscapes. The workshop offers a platform for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to exchange and network on human-wildlife interactions in peri-urban landscapes.
Join the Food Systems Summit Dialogue on Land Rights. This Global Independent Dialogue is convened by the Land Portal Foundation to draw attention to improved land governance as a cross-cutting thread that underpins success of the Summit’s 5 Action Tracks. The Land Portal Foundation is partnering with the European Commission, the International Land Coalition (ILC), LANDac - The Netherlands Land Academy, RVO, and Welthungerhilfe as Co-Convenors.
The African Land Policy Centre (ALPC) will hold its Land Policy in Africa Conference on 2-4 November 2021 in a hybrid format: partly online and partly in Kigali, Rwanda. The theme is Land governance for safeguarding art, culture and heritage towards the Africa We Want. The Conference will consist of plenary sessions, parallel sessions, masterclasses, side events and exhibitions.
An increasing number of voices highlight the need for science itself to transform and to engage in the co-production of knowledge and action, in order to enable the fundamental transformations needed to advance towards sustainable futures. But how can global sustainability-oriented research networks engage in co-production of knowledge and action? A new article in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability introduces a strategic tool called the ‘network compass’ which highlights four generic, interrelated fields of action through which networks can strive to foster co-production. The Global Land Programme is one of the 11 networks involved in the study.
Join us for an informal Meet & Greet with GLP members, especially new members. We will do introductions and networking, using breakout rooms if attendance warrants it.
This conference aims to bring together scholars and practitioners on forests as a commons. We will cover traditional dimensions of forest commons such as community managed forest systems as well as other forms of forest systems governance. Participants working on protected forests, forest ecosystem services, self-governance and polycentric forest governance are encouraged to contribute to the conference. The week will be shared with an additional virtual conference on land commons, given the interconnection of the two topics.
This conference aims to bring together scholars and practitioners on land as a commons. We will cover traditional land commons topics such as pastoralism, governance of land, land degradation, land rights and conflicts as well as how to conceptualize and analyze the multi-scalar nature of commons such as biodiversity, agrobiodiversity, ecosystem services/nature’s contributions to people (NCP), among others. The week will be shared with a second virtual conference on forests, given the interconnection of the two topics.
A combined team of researchers from ETH Zurich, Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science and Newcastle University, has found via statistical analysis and modeling that rainfall in Europe could be increased by planting more trees. In their paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the group describes using data from rain gauges across Europe to build their models.
The new Open Up Guide on Land Governance is a resource aimed to be used by governments from developing countries to collect and release land-related data to improve data quality, availability, accessibility and use for improved citizen engagement, decision making and innovation.
Come to the Field School to learn the key design elements of a successful PM project, and how to use various PM techniques to represent complex problems and gain insight into the actions that can be taken to address them.
The UNESCO Division aims to support Member States at a national, regional and global level in advancing science and capacity for sustainable management of their natural resources and biodiversity, through its programs in Earth and Ecological Sciences towards the implementation of Agenda 2030. A special focus is given to UNESCO’s two global priorities, Africa and Gender.
The Equator Prize 2021 will be awarded to outstanding local community and Indigenous peoples initiatives that advance innovative nature-based solutions for sustainable development. The winners will join a prestigious network of 255 leading community-based organizations from 83 countries that have been awarded the Equator Prize since 2002.
A new Perspective piece in Nature Sustainability proposes ways for conservation science, policy and practice to deliver more effective and socially just conservation outcomes by taking a pluralistic perspective on biodiversity.
Read an update on GLP Fellow Lin Zhen's work on "The methodology and indicator system for assessing ecological restoration technologies and evaluation of global ecosystem rehabilitation technologies," one of China's National Key Research and Development Programs that ran from 2016 to 2020.
This 2-part training, developed and presented by members of the POPGRID Data Collaborative, will focus on the different global population grids and their application to a range of topics related to development planning and monitoring of the SDGs (e.g., environment, hazards, and access to resources). Attendees will be exposed to the latest data and methods used to produce global grids, how the grids incorporate remote sensing inputs, and how population grids can be used in conjunction with other types of data.
If you are interested in policy approaches on how to encourage investors to invest in brown fields, we provide a link to an online workshop in Germany to learn more.
The Second Order Draft (SOD) of the Values Assessment of IPBES is now out for review by external experts, including governments. The first draft of the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) is also available for review.
We are pleased to announce three new GLP Working Groups that launched at the start of 2021. They are: Agricultural Land Abandonment as a Global Land-use Change Phenomenon, Global Dryland Socio-Ecological Systems and Remittance Dynamics and Land Change. If these topics are of interest to you, please join one or more of the WGs today.
This paper examines land use patterns of rural households and the association with food production and income across three different zones of various forest proximity across a landscape gradient (remote, intermediate and on‐road) in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region of Bangladesh.
The authors of this new study used an expert participatory process to identify suitable Sustainable Land and Water Management practices in Myanmar, which can inform future development projects in rural the country.
Clarivate Analytics, the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to enable researchers to accelerate discovery, published its annual Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list this week with 27 GLP Members, SSC Members, and GLP Fellows on it.
Escaping from the current ‘Pandemic Era’ requires a radical revision of governmental, economic, and societal systems, warns a new IPBES report from 22 global experts, including SSC Member Unai Pascual.
A revolution in archaeology has exposed the extraordinary extent of human influence over our planet's past and its future. Read a new article in Aeon that expands on Lucas Stephens and Erle Ellis' 2019 paper in Science on the results of their ArchaeoGLOBE Project.
Forrest Fleischman and colleagues highlight ten pitfalls of tree planting, and discuss how a focus on people who manage landscapes will work in BioScience.
A new comment in Nature encourages leaders to enhance and empower the networks that have emerged in India's slums, Brazil's favelas and Africa's marketplaces in response to the pandemic.
The GLF Biodiversity Digital Conference will be held October 28-29. Held under the theme ‘One World – One Health’, this two-day event will reach tens of millions of people, spotlight ecosystem restoration and contribute to the UN CBD’s POST-2020 GLOBAL BIODIVERSITY FRAMEWORK, making 2020 the super year for nature and biodiversity.
The International Conference on Sustainable Development (ICSD) provides a forum for academia, government, civil society, UN agencies, and the private sector to come together to share practical solutions to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This conference will be held virtually Sept 21-22.
The theme of the summit, being held virtually Sept 8-11, is "Feed the Cities, Grow the Continent: Leveraging Urban Food Markets to Achieve Sustainable Food Systems in Africa" and is a call to action to rethink our food systems to deliver resilient, better nourished, and more prosperous outcomes for all.
This event from early August explored two recent media stories raising questions about the grand park development plan, which has the support of several powerful U.S. senators.
GLP Members look at the soy trade in Brazil, the world's largest exporter, to analyze supply chain stickiness and explain why it is essential to curb deforestation. The research was published in One Earth.
NASA's ARSET program makes remote sensing possible for audiences worldwide through free, online and in-person trainings on NASA satellites, sensors, and their applications. Over 40,000 individuals from over 170 countries have attended ARSET trainings since 2009, and GLP regularly features the events on our website. Learn more about the program's history and accomplishments during its tenth anniversary year.
This S4D4C European Science Diplomacy Online Course is completely free of charge for you. The launching of the platform has been funded within the EU project S4D4C by the European Commission. The sucessful completion of the course is awarded by an offical certificate. Our online course offers you eight modules, in which six modules (2-7) include learning content.
The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) is organising a virtual workshop series on “Strengthening and connecting science for policy eco-systems in Europe” between September 2020 and May 2021. The deadline to register for the September and October sessions is 7 August 2020.
The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission is organising a virtual workshop series entitled "Strengthening and connecting science for policy eco-systems in Europe". The first workshop in the series is "Science for Policymaking at the Centre of National Government" followed by sessions on science for policymaking in member states and in Parliaments in September and October. Deadline to register is 7 August 2020.
SSC Member Gete Zeleke was featured recently in an EcoAgricultural Partners blog post. The piece covers his background, current work with 'landscape learning' at a pilot site, and motivations for his work.
AGTER and the International Coalition for Access to Land are offering an online course to analyze the phenomena of land grabbing in the world, understand its nature and work together to build responses to the threat they pose to all of us. Course offered in French, English and Spanish on different dates. Deadline for next course (in French) is 29 March 2020.
GLP Fellow Erle Ellis published an op-ed with colleagues Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis in The New York Times that says focusing on trees as the big solution to climate change is a dangerous diversion.
Research practice, funding agencies and global science organizations suggest that research aimed at addressing sustainability challenges is most effective when ‘co-produced’ by academics and non-academics. The authors of a new paper in Nature Sustainability, including GLP Fellow Harini Nagendra and Executive Officer Ariane de Bremond, and several leaders and coordinators of Future Earth's global research projects (GRPs), propose a set of four general principles that underlie high quality knowledge co-production for sustainability research. Using these principles, they offer practical guidance on how to engage in meaningful co-productive practices, and how to evaluate their quality and success.
A December article in the journal Science distills for the scientific community the most salient and novel findings, messages and policy options of the Global Assessment Report, which was approved by representatives of the 132 member Governments of IPBES in May last year. It emphasizes five priority interventions ("levers") and eight leverage points for action to address these indirect drivers of social and economic systems, where they can make the greatest difference. Several GLP Fellows, SSC Members and GLP members were authors of the paper, which is open access.
Several GLP Members and SSC Member Patrick Meyfroidt are the guest editors of a focus collection in Environmental Research Letters. The ERL issue explores new ways to put tools and data to work towards improving our understanding of direct and indirect land-use change caused by governance interventions.
In light of continuing global biodiversity loss, one ambitious proposal has gained considerable traction amongst conservationists: the goal to protect half the Earth. A new analysis by Working Group Coordinator Julie Zähringer and colleagues suggests that at least one billion people live in places that would be protected if the Half Earth proposal were implemented within all ecoregions.
Clarivate Analytics, the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to enable researchers to accelerate discovery, published its annual Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list this week with twenty-seven GLP Members, SSC Members, and GLP Fellows on it.
It aims at providing an international exchange platform for global leaders and stakeholders (policymakers, academics, businesses, entrepreneurs, and NGOs) to present and discuss worldwide initiatives, practices and visionary trends about sustainability. The ultimate goal is to achieve the long-lasting development of an inclusive and equitable society whereby prosperous growth goes together with a sustainable environment.
Earth system science professor Eric Lambin has been honored with the 2019 Blue Planet Prize, an award widely considered the Nobel Prize for science that contributes to solving global environmental problems.
A new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the summary of which was approved at the 7th session of the IPBES Plenary, meeting last week (29 April – 4 May) in Paris, identifies changes in land and sea use as the most significant direct driver of changes in nature.
The Global Land Programme (GLP), one of Future Earth’s global research projects, convened its bi-annual open science meeting in Bern, Switzerland, April 24-26, 2019. The meeting was hosted by the University of Bern and its Centre for Development and Environment (CDE). The conference themes were: 1. What are the visions for the planetary land system? Land as the nexus for addressing global challenges 2. What do people want from land? Navigating the trade-offs and fostering synergies in land systems. 3. How do we support transformation? New frontiers in studying and governing land systems
Scientists and government officials meet this week in Paris to finalise a key assessment on humanity's relationship with nature. The Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, will issue the first report of this type since 2005. It will detail the past losses and future prospects for nature and humans. SSC Member Unai Pascual and GLP Member Sandra Díaz are quoted in this BBC piece.
The development of sustainable regions requires an understanding of the land systems that supply the needs of nature and people. At the Open Science Meeting in Bern the Spanish land-use scientist and post-doc María Piquer-Rodríguez explains why the isolated view of disciplines does not correspond to the idea of sustainability – and why a holistic approach pays off.
This recent article in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability (COSUST) was written by members of the GLP community for an upcoming GLP Special Issue in COSUST. The paper argues that normative positions are increasingly required of sustainability science and lays out principles that served to guide the themes and organization of the 4th GLP Open Science Meeting.
From 24 to 26 April 2019, over 600 leading scientists from all over the world will meet in Bern for the 4th Open Science Meeting of the Global Land Programme (GLP). Its theme: Transforming Land Systems for People and Nature – What research and policies are needed to achieve ecologically, socially, and economically sustainable land systems? Ariane de Bremond, senior research scientist at the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) of the University of Bern and executive officer of the GLP International Programme Office, discussed the role of the conference.
The GLP working group on co-production held its fifth webinar, on ethical and contextual considerations in knowledge co-production and lessons learned from the webinar series, in March. View a recording of the full webinar, download copies of the presentations, and more.
Our approach of integrating complementary analytical frameworks to identify and understand land-cover regime shifts can help policymakers to preempt future regime shifts in Tanintharyi (Myanmar), and can be applied to the study of land change in other regions.
After a long process of research and consultation, CDE and MRLG are thrilled to announce the release of the book: “State of Land in the Mekong Region”. The first publication of its kind in the Mekong Region, it brings together key data and information on the current status of, and changes in, land resources, their social distribution, and the conditions of governance that shape them.
Clarivate Analytics, the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to enable researchers to accelerate discovery, published its annual Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list in November with twenty-two GLP Members, SSC Members, and GLP Fellows on it.
The GLP working group on co-production is pleased to invite you to the fifth and final webinar of the webinar series on co-production in the field of land system science. The webinar is open to people already engaged in co-production, as well as to newcomers to the topic, who are not currently engaged in this exciting work. This webinar will focus on the ethical and contextual considerations in knowledge co-production. It will also review lessons learned from the webinar series on co-production in the field of land system science.
The European Space Agency (ESA) and Future Earth are recruiting a Research Coordinator to be a liaison between the ESA Climate Office (part of the Science, Applications and Climate Department at ESA ECSAT) and the Future Earth Global Secretariat.
The overall goal of the workshop is to familiarize the workshop participants with the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT v4.7); the Cropping System Model (CSM) for the simulation of crop growth and yield, soil and plant water, nutrient, and carbon dynamics; and the application of models to real world problems, such as crop and resource management, climate change and climate variability, carbon sequestration, food security, biofuels, and environmental sustainability.
This introductory webinar series will share lectures, case studies, and demonstrations with representatives of indigenous peoples' organizations and will focus on how Earth observations (EO) data and tools can provide spatial information for forest monitoring, mapping ,and responding to ecosystem threats.
We are pleased to inform you about the Call for Applications for the second cohort of the Postdoc Academy for Transformational Leadership and kindly ask you to forward the call to postdocs who conduct sustainability research and encounter challenges of and with “scale” and “scaling”.
The MAUPP project (Modelling and forecasting African Urban Population Patterns for vulnerability and health assessments) is a four-year research project (2014-2018) funded by the STEREO-III program of the Belgian Science Policy (BELSPO). A free conference and a workshop will be organized in Nairobi, Kenya, both to present and discuss the scientific results of the project and to demonstrate the potentialities of the developed datasets.
The GLP working group on co-production held its fourth webinar, on co-designing sustainable land systems with spatial analysis and mapping tools in the field of land-system science, in December. View a recording of the full webinar, download copies of the presentations, and more.
If the world hopes to make meaningful progress on climate change, it won’t be enough for cars and factories to get cleaner. Our cows and wheat fields will have to become radically more efficient, too. That’s the basic conclusion of a sweeping new study issued in December by the World Resources Institute, an environmental group. The report warns that the world’s agricultural system will need drastic changes in the next few decades in order to feed billions more people without triggering a climate catastrophe, writes The New York Times.
SSC Member Ricardo Grau has a new book in Spanish out, "The Argentine Puna: Nature and Culture."
The GLP working group on co-production is pleased to invite you to the fourth webinar of the webinar series on co-production in the field of land-system science. The webinar is open to people already engaged in co-production, as well as to newcomers to the topic, who are not currently engaged in this exciting work. The webinar will focus on co-designing sustainable land systems with spatial analysis and mapping tools.
In a recently published study, GLP Members Katharina Schulze, Žiga Malek and Peter Verburg developed global maps of forest classes and uses by downscaling global FAO Forest Resource Assessment statistics.
The GLP working group on co-production held its third webinar, on participatory modelling, scenario building and forecasting techniques in the field of land-system science, in November. View a recording of the full webinar, download copies of the presentations, and more.
The GLP working group on co-production held its second webinar, on adaptive landscape approaches using role-playing games for co-production in the field of land-system science, in October. View a recording of the full webinar, download copies of the presentations, and more.
An excellent overview of how the global land change research community is applying a governance lens to telecoupled phenomena, building on the recent "Governance in Telecoupled Land Systems" workshop held in Berne, Switzerland, earlier this year.
GLP Fellow Erle Ellis has published an opinion piece in The New York Times urging people to start talking about what kind of planet we want to live on.
New research published in Nature Sustainability by GLP Members Zia Mehrabi, Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty finds dealing with the biodiversity crisis by giving nature more space could result in losing a lot of food.
New analysis, from Trase, identifies the deforestation risks associated with the supply chain of one of the world´s most traded agricultural commodities – Brazilian soy, linking the companies and consumer countries to the regions where the soy is grown.
The GLP working group on co-production held its first webinar, a kick-off session for anyone interested in co-production in the field of land-system science, in June. View a recording of the full webinar, download copies of the presentations, and more.
GLP Fellow Morgan Grove is spearheading a project for the U.S. Forest Service that matches non-profits employing formerly incarcerated workers who deconstruct abandoned buildings in big metropolises such as Baltimore with private companies looking for a dependable supply of reclaimed lumber.
In a new paper GLP Member Dr. Qiangyi Yu and colleagues, combined the number of cropland patches with the total cropland area for a more comprehensive characterization of cropland change in China based on GlobeLand30.
GLP Member Dr. Qiangyi Yu has been working on the "harvested area gap", a relatively new concept that measures the potential harvested area if all croplands are cultivated as frequently as possible. Here he summarizes several of the resulting publications.
Future Earth has named 12 leading sustainability innovators to its recently-formed Advisory Committee, which will guide the next phase of Future Earth’s research and engagement. The new members of this committee come from the worlds of research, business and politics; they include a former member of Mongolia’s parliament, as well as a technology CEO named one of Time magazine’s most influential people. This group of inspiring innovators join co-Chairs Johan Rockström and Leena Srivastava, who were appointed to the Committee late last year.
Worsening land degradation caused by human activities is undermining the well-being of two fifths of humanity, driving species extinctions and intensifying climate change. It is also a major contributor to mass human migration and increased conflict, according to the world’s first comprehensive evidence-based assessment of land degradation and restoration.
Biodiversity – the essential variety of life forms on Earth – continues to decline in every region of the world, significantly reducing nature’s capacity to contribute to people’s well-being. This alarming trend endangers economies, livelihoods, food security and the quality of life of people everywhere, according to four landmark science reports released in March, written by more than 550 leading experts, from over 100 countries, including several GLP Members.
The International Resource Panel is seeking volunteers to contribute a very short (750-1500 word) policy chapter on one of the SDGs addressing the (a) co-benefits and possible costs/tradeoffs of land Restoration for the SDG, and (b) strategies for using land restoration to achieve the SDG. The chapters should be written for policymakers, and supported by at least several references. Responses from scientist-practitioners with both specialized knowledge of individual SDGs and an understanding of sustainable land management/restoration/rehabilitation are particularly welcome.
A major reduction in global deforestation is needed to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss. Recent private sector commitments aim to eliminate deforestation from a company’s operations or supply chain, but they fall short on several fronts. Lead author GLP Fellow Eric Lambin and GLP Member Robert Heilmayr review current supply-chain initiatives, their effectiveness, and the challenges they face, and go on to identify knowledge gaps for complementary public–private policies.
Plentiful food, clean water and healthy air are among the most valuable and visible benefits of nature to people. This has reinforced the widespread, and increasingly controversial, belief that nature is mainly a source of services or commodities. Writing in the prestigious journal Science, thirty global experts associated with the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and led by GLP Member Professor Sandra Díaz and new SSC Member Professor Unai Pascual, have presented an innovative new approach: the idea of using all of nature’s contributions to people to inform policies and decisions.
In June 2018, the Centre for Mountain Ecosystem Studies will host the second international Mountain Futures Conference. Mountain Futures 2018 will offer unique opportunities to participate in and shape the new activities of the Mountain Futures Initiative, and continue knowledge and innovation-sharing for all with interests in mountain regions.
On behalf of the Canadian Association of Geographers and the Université Laval, North America’s oldest French-language university, we are pleased to invite you to Quebec City to participate in the 2018 International Geographical Union (IGU) Regional Conference - Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG) Annual Meeting - National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) Annual Conference to be held in Canada from August 6 to 10, 2018.
GLP is pleased to announce the 2018 GLP Asia Conference in Taipei September 3-5, 2018. The teleconnections and telecouplings offer conceptual frameworks to evaluate socio-economic and environmental interactions over distances. In order to transition to environmental sustainability, the frameworks are helpful to measure drivers and impacts of the interactions, and to model the interactions from global to local scales.
The meeting May 9-11, 2018, is designed to provide a collaborative, transdisciplinary space for people with diverse perspectives to explore transformations and the SDGs in Africa. It will be a relatively small meeting (300) and is designed to be conference of dialogue and engagement rather than of conventional presentations.
Join a deeply interdisciplinary conference June 6-8, 2018, which aims at exploring the manifold and mutual relationships which are at the basis of the landscape-safety nexus, crosscutting research and practical experiences and policies bridging the landscape and green planning, health, and urban policies fields.
As the Trump administration slashes federal estimates of the future costs of climate change, new research by GLP Member Thomas Hertel and colleagues suggests that even the much higher cost calculated by the Obama administration might be too low.
GLP Fellow Patrick Hostert and GLP Members Volker Radeloff and Crystal Schaaf will serve a five-year term from 2018 to 2023. The team’s primary responsibility is to conduct Landsat-based scientific research and engineering studies, develop useful data products and applications and share the results of its work with the USGS, NASA and others.
Beginning in 2018, Leena Srivastava and Johan Rockström will co-chair the Advisory Committee as it guides Future Earth into the next phase in the organization's evolution as an international platform for research and innovation.
The international research organisations will join forces to catalyse new research to inform evidence-based policy focusing on the world’s biodiversity.
GLP Member Laura Sonter found mining significantly increased Amazon forest loss up to 70 km beyond mining lease boundaries, causing 11,670 km2 of deforestation between 2005 and 2015. This extent represents 9% of all Amazon forest loss during this time and 12 times more deforestation than occurred within mining leases alone.
A century of fire suppression followed by the worst drought in recorded history has put California’s forest landscapes and water supply at risk. A study led by GLP Member Van Butsic of U.C. Berkeley proposes a new way to manage forests.
GLP Member Van Butsic writes in a new PPIC report that California’s headwater forests are not thriving under current management practices, and changes are needed to make them more resilient to periodic drought and long-term climate change.
The first of a series of Future Earth Natural Assets Knowledge Action Network (KAN) workshops was held this past September 12-13 at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
GLP Member Eric Lambin and colleagues have shown there is a surprisingly cheap and easy way to slow the pace of deforestation in Uganda: Just pay landowners small sums not to cut down their trees. A recent article in the New York Times details how it works.
GLP Member Matthias Baumann's research on how Chaco trees are used to make charcoal highlights the threats to dry forests.
SSC Member Ole Mertz found context is very important for understanding different design and outcomes of land sparing and land sharing policies and that more evidence is needed on the processes for integration of rapidly evolving scientific debates in land policy-making in developing countries.
On June 14 Future Earth announced Amy Luers as its new executive director. Dr. Luers has over 20 years experience working on sustainability at the intersection of science, technology, and policy. She will start her new role at Future Earth in September 2017. GLP is a Global Research Project of Future Earth.
GLP SSC Member Allison Thomson recently served on a DuPont panel to help fill a climate exposure and natural resources gap in the company's Global Food Security Index (GFSI).
In developing countries, rural smallholders and communities derive about one-quarter of their income from the forest around them. But a recent study by GLP Member Kathleen Hermans-Neumann indicates that these resources are becoming scarcer, with their availability dwindling over time.
Current research recognizes the inherent complexity of ecosystems and the inability to foresee all consequences of interventions across different spatial, temporal, and administrative scales. Ecosystem management is thus seen as a “wicked problem” that has no clear-cut solution, write GLP Member Ruth DeFries and GLP SSC Member Harini Nagendra in Science.
AidData has announced the public beta launch of geo(query), a geospatial data extraction tool that makes is easier for policy analysts, program evaluators, and scientists to contuct analysis of development policies and programs using geospatial data.
The aim of the conference is to present recent advances in landscape research to enhance the development of sustainable agricultural land use and landscape strategies. The particular objective is to bring together key findings from relevant disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches as well as from basic and application-oriented research.
If increasingly globalized societies are to make better land management decisions, the geosciences must globally evaluate how humans are reshaping Earth's surface, writes GLP Member Erle Ellis and colleagues.
GLP Members Verena Seufert and Navin Ramankutty published a commentary on CNN.com showcasing their conclusions about organic versus convention agriculture on three key fronts: environmental impact, producer and consumer benefits. They discovered that organic farming does matter -- just not in the way most people think.
Stitching together production, trade and customs data, GLP Member Javier Godar and his colleagues at the Stockholm Environment Institute and Global Canopy Program have produced detailed maps of the flow of beef and soy from Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. With an aim to help companies, financial institutions and governments understand the social and environmental impacts of the global trade in agricultural commodities, Trase is connecting each link in the supply chain, from source to port.
Despite advanced monitoring systems and global initiatives and policies aimed at preserving the world’s rainforests, controversy remains over whether deforestation rates are, in fact, declining, writes GLP Member Navin Ramankutty.
GLP IPO staff, along with Future Earth and other colleagues, are leading a lively set of presentations at the Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty.
Written by an interdisciplinary team of leading researchers, this report describes a science research agenda toward improved probabilistic modeling and prediction of multiple breadbasket failures and the potential consequences for global food systems.
Ecosystem services are a way of thinking about – and evaluating – the goods and services provided by nature that contribute to the well-being of humans. This MOOC from the University of Geneva will cover scientific (technical), economic, and socio-political dimensions of the concept through a mix of theory, case-studies, interviews with specialists and a serious-game.
GLP Scientific Steering Committee member Prof. Harini Nagendra of Azim Premji University in Bangalore, India, has been chosen as a Lead Author of the IPCC's report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC: an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty (SR1.5).
In this paper, GLP Member Qiangyi Yu and colleagues introduce a smartphone-based app, called eFarm: a crowdsourcing and human sensing tool to collect the geotagged ALS information at the land parcel level, based on the high resolution remotely-sensed images.
New research from GLP Members Peter Alexander and Calum Brown at the University of Edinburgh reveals almost 20 per cent of the food made available to consumers is lost through over-eating or waste.
In Nature, Erle Ellis and colleagues call social science and land use essential to defining the Anthropocene: Involving social sciences in defining the Anthropocene
Teaming with colleagues in geography, archaeology and anthropology, GLP Scientific Steering Committee member Erle Ellis writes: "The causes of Earth’s transition are human and social... so scholars from those disciplines must be included in its formalization." The global history of land use changes by agriculture and urbanization and their environmental and social consequences is key to understanding how and why Earth has entered a new epoch of geological time.
In the Anthropocene, human societies have emerged as an Earth-changing force, with all of its complexities, demanding answers to some hard questions.What are human societies doing with Earth? What can be done better? By engaging the most robust science across disciplines to codesign land systems and land governance strategies, the GLP is working on answering these questions.
The Global Land Programme (GLP) holds its 3rd Open Science Meeting in Beijing, China
The Global Land Programme (GLP), one of Future Earth’s core projects, convened its bi-annual open science meeting in Beijing, China October 24-27, 2016. The meeting was hosted by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS). In response to the recently endorsed Agenda 2030 and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the conference theme was ‘Land system science: understanding realities and developing solutions’.
Education and capacity building in the field of water management hold the key to many of the present most pressing water challenges on the regional to local scale.
The upcoming Symposium on Eco-Innovation for the Water-Energy-Food Nexus is addressing innovative strategies and solution to reduce adverse effects of climate change on the W-E-F-Nexus in the MENA Region.
Understanding atmospheric processes, both physical and chemical and their interrelationships with Earth-surface processes, including changes in surface characteristics and terrestrial ecosystems remain still incompletely understood scientific challenges. An recent international workshop shed some light on these and related issues.
Supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, China has recently launched 37 National Key Research and Development Programs on "Ecological restoration and protection in the typical ecological fragile zones" led by GLP Scientific Steering Committee member Prof. Dr. Lin Zhen.
Future Earth (FE) has been designed to provide the knowledge needed to support transformations towards sustainability. In addressing major sustainability challenges in the MENA Region, FE provides a tangible and adequate framework to achieve significant and lasting progress. In this context, the creation of a FE MENA Regional Center at the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia, Cyprus (FEMRC; http://fe-mena.cyi.ac.cy/index.php), is considered particularly relevant.
We would like to draw your attention to three fully-funded 4-yr PhD positions that are open for applications as part of an international research project focusing on “Continuous satellite-based indicators for mapping subtropical forest degradation and its environmental impacts (ReForcha)”, funded by the Belgian Science Policy.
The Land Systems Science Symposium at American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in Boston will focus on advances in research on land systems and land systems change, focusing particularly on geographic perspectives.
The European Space Agency together with GEO, FAO and EU are organising the WorldCover 2017 Conference. The event will be hosted in ESA-ESRIN from 14 to 16 March 2017.
The meeting will focus on the approaches, methods, tools, and indicators to assess how, where, and why governing forest and forest mosaics for improving livelihoods works, and how it can be strengthened.
As a significant contribution to the growing literature on interdisciplinary sustainability studies, the book by GLP Member Helmut Haberl and colleagues introduces the purpose and nature of Social Ecology and then places the Vienna School of Social Ecology within the broader context of socioecological and other interdisciplinary environmental approaches.
Nature in the City describes ecological changes in the urbanizing landscape of Bengaluru, one of the world's fastest growing cities, using a deep historical dive from the 6th century CE to current times. SSC member Harini Nagendra’s new book is a compelling account of the ecological history of one of the world's fastest growing cities adds to our limited knowledge of urban change in the global South.
GLP Scientific Steering Committee member Erle Ellis presented a plenary presentation on GLP and GLOBE, entitled "Globalizing Ecology in the Anthropocene: Networks, Cyberinfrastructure, and Analytics" at the First International Long Term Ecological Research (ILTER) Open Science Meeting 9-13 October in 2016 in Skukuza, South Africa.
The GLP community extends a warm welcome to the new North America Nodal Office to be housed at the Center for Global Change & Earth Observations (CGCEO) at X Michigan State University, USA.
There may be many ways to feed a growing world population without losing more forests. That is the conclusion of a new study led by Karlheinz Erb, a professor at the Institute of Social Ecology at the University of Klagenfurt in Vienna.
The Third Open Science Meeting of the Global Land Project will take place from 24-27th October, 2016 at China National Convention Center, Beijing.
The first GLP Open Science Meeting 'Land Systems, global change and sustainability' took place at Arizona State University and aimed to bring together large parts of the international research community working on land change issues, showcase the width and scope of ongoing research, help build a community in this highly interdisciplinary field, inspire new research, and facilitate review, theory building and extrapolation.