Land use and sustainability as key challenge of a globalized world: A Telecoupling Approach
Land use is essential to our well-being and therefore central to many of the largest sustainability challenges of today, including global food security, climate change mitigation, and biodiversity conservation.
Finding pathways for a sustainable land use is challenging because of the complex processes of globalization that tie distant places together. For example, the products we consume are often directly or indirectly connected to far away land-use changes such as deforestation of the tropics.
These links are embedded in a net of long-distance flows of products and raw materials, but also of people, information, policies, technology, and capital. These complex flows are difficult to untie and lead in many places to abrupt and unexpected land-use changes.
Scholars in the field of land system science have started analysing such global connections through the concept of telecoupling. COUPLED puts the approach of telecoupling into action for contributing to a better understanding of processes and actors that influence land use in an increasingly interconnected world. By this, we aim to solve sustainability challenges for land use.