Research Projects

Fifteen individual PhD research projects put the telecoupling research approach into practice. They are are grouped in three overarching, interrelating work packages.

Processes

How inter-dependent are land and resource systems in today’s world, and what are new or unexpected actors and processes creating the telecouplings that produce these dependencies?

01: Understanding conservation telecouplings
Siyu Qin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

02: Social-ecological metabolism approaches to analyse telecouplings related to international trade
Nicolas Roux, Institute for Social Ecology, Vienna

03: How can private companies promote sustainable land use through their supply chains
Simon Bager, Université catholique de Louvain

04: Impacts of changing lifestyles and ecosystem service demands
Perrine Laroche, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

05: Measuring the effectiveness of corporate zero deforestation commitments in South East Asia
Floris Leijten, Unilever U.K.

Distance

How is sustainability governance of land use and land-based products affected by differences in the type of linkages and telecouplings and the scale at which they operate?

06: Sustainable sourcing of agricultural commodities, spill-over effects, and global-local relations
Pin Pravalprukskul, University of Copenhagen

07: Environmental impact assessments in a telecoupled world
Claudia Parra Paitan, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

08: Justices and injustices in the soy value chain
Finn Mempel, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

09: Characterisation and visualization of telecouplings in Large Scale Land Acquisitions
Gabi Sonderegger, University of Bern

10: The Stickiness or Geographic Sourcing Patterns in the International Trade of Agricultural Products
Tiago Reis, Université catholique de Louvain

Impacts

Which enabling conditions are required to generate opportunities for a more sustainable allocation of resources in a telecoupled world?

11: Global flows and local ventures in artisanal and small-scale gold mining
Anna Frohn Pedersen, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

12: Governance institutions for sustainability in globally telecoupled systems
Johanna Coenen, Leuphana University of Lüneburg

13: Land use impacts of the clean development mechanism in a telecoupled world
Louise Marie Busck Lumholt, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

14: Telecouplings, supply chain analysis and transparency
Sahar Sajjad Malik, Earthworm Foundation

15: Disentangling the links between global conservation discourses and local land-use practices in protected area governance
Joel Gustav Persson, University of Copenhagen

The work packages provide a platform for collaborative, comparative and cross-sectoral research. Each PhD fellow is grounded in one of the three work packages, but also interact with the others as well as contribute to the synthesis activities. This enables us to combine methodological expertise and disciplinary lenses to
quantify the impacts of telecouplings,
explore causal links in them,
and use their collective insights to identifying leverage points aimed at balancing trade-offs.