Ten facts about land systems for sustainability

Abstract

Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, general, empirical support. These facts help to explain the challenges of achieving sustainability in land use and thus also point toward solutions. The 10 facts are as follows: 1) Meanings and values of land are socially constructed and contested; 2) land systems exhibit complex behaviors with abrupt, hard-to-predict changes; 3) irreversible changes and path dependence are common features of land systems; 4) some land uses have a small footprint but very large impacts; 5) drivers and impacts of land-use change are globally interconnected and spill over to distant locations; 6) humanity lives on a used planet where all land provides benefits to societies; 7) land-use change usually entails trade-offs between different benefits—"win–wins" are thus rare; 8) land tenure and land-use claims are often unclear, overlapping, and contested; 9) the benefits and burdens from land are unequally distributed; and 10) land users have multiple, sometimes conflicting, ideas of what social and environmental justice entails. The facts have implications for governance, but do not provide fixed answers. Instead they constitute a set of core principles which can guide scientists, policy makers, and practitioners toward meeting sustainability challenges in land use.

Which of the plethora of tree-growing projects to support?

“…Although global mapping efforts often suggest that extensive land is available for growing trees, 12,13 people live on and earn their income from a large portion of these lands through agricultural and pastoral activities. 14 As a result, the single most important factor that consistently determines project success or failure is whether local stakeholders (individuals, communities, and organizations) benefit from the project and are included meaningfully from the planning stage through the project life cycle (goal setting/visioning, planning, implementation, maintenance, monitoring, and adaptive management). 1,4,7,15 Ideally, projects should be led by local stakeholders and draw on local knowledge, in order to provide income for those involved in implementation and maintenance and dramatically increase the likelihood of ongoing project buy-in and success (Figure 1).…”

Redefining “abandoned” agricultural land in the context of reforestation

“…Finally, forest cover changes must be evaluated at sufficient scale to determine whether there is a net increase over a region or the globe, given documented cases in which ceasing agriculture in one location has led to displacement (i.e., "leakage") of agriculture to other locations (Meyfroidt et al, 2010;Yan, 2019), with any increase in forest cover in the first location being partially or completely offset by deforestation elsewhere (Figure 1, outcome 5). This displacement of deforestation can be challenging to quantify, as it may happen far from the study region given the ever-increasing globalization of the trade of forestry and agricultural products (Meyfroidt et al, 2010(Meyfroidt et al, , 2022.…”

Structuring the Complexity of Integrated Landscape Approaches into Selectable, Scalable, and Measurable Attributes

“…Humanity is facing combined and unprecedented challenges related to climate change, environmental degradation, and biodiversity loss, while food insecurity and poverty continue to be the daily reality of millions of people (Díaz et al 2019;Hoegh-Guldberg et al 2019). These global challenges fuel intensifying conflicts over land use creating trade-offs on ecological, economic, and social outcomes across scales, and across different groups of people (Meyfroidt et al 2022). The resulting governance challenges, often referred to as 'wicked problems', are highly complex, often interconnected and further compounded by the diversity of temporal and spatial scales of processes, feedback loops, and stakeholders they involve (Rittel and Webber 1973;Balint et al 2011;Defries and Nagendra 2017).…”