The global tourism sector is responsible for 8% of total greenhouse gas emissions, meaning it has a role to play in fighting climate change. As transport between origin and destination explains three quarter of this impact, reducing the distances traveled, especially by airplane and car, has been proposed as a way to go. To achieve…

In this blog post, I reflect on some lessons learned from writing a manuscript with 14 co-authors, submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The paper aims to synthesize the results of our COUPLED ITN. Here I share my experiences in leading such a collaborative endeavour. This blog post is targeted at any (potential) lead…

Livestock provides important services to humans such as transforming grass into food, recycling kitchen waste or providing organic fertilizers. In addition, livestock provides a labor force in non-mechanized agricultural systems, is often linked to ancient cultural heritage, and supports the livelihood of more than a billion producers and retailers. However, livestock production considerably contributes to…

Brazil plays a central role in Western depictions of and narratives on tropical deforestation. In this contribution, we gather a large text corpus from Western media outlets with articles on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado biomes. The sources include outlets from Europe, the US, Canada and Australia and span a time period from…

Telecoupling and the challenge of attributing causality This article illustrates the potential of the telecoupling framework to improve causal attribution in land system science (LSS). We shed light on the distinct analytical approaches that have characterized telecoupling research to date, how these can contribute to LSS with new insights, and whether such insights can improve…

Conservation Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) are crucial actors in global conservation governance. They shape resource flows, establish cross-sector and cross-scale networks, and influence conservation discourses and practices. While research on conservation NGOs is growing, less attention has been paid to how conservation NGOs structure their networks. In this article, we interrogate the interpersonal social relationships that…

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an ambitious effort to increase trans-continental connectivity and cooperation mainly through infrastructure investments and trade. On the one hand, this globally unparalleled initiative is expected to foster economic growth, but on the other hand, it can have substantial environmental implications. The BRI creates new challenges and opportunities for…

Why would it make a difference whether Brazilian soybeans are exported to France or to China? Almost two years ago, I was working on a paper analyzing how changes in the mix of origins of agricultural imports affected ecosystems on land (Roux et al., 2021). I had noticed that agricultural products were increasingly not only…

In this study, we explore the power asymmetries and local resistance that shape a globalised land system. In land system science, the globalisation of land use is often understood via trade flows. Fewer studies have explored the power asymmetries and local resistance that shape global connections. Consequently, calls for a deeper engagement with power and…

In this study, we analyzed the impacts of two cocoa production systems, full-sun and agroforestry, at the farm-level and beyond the farm-level. This study shows that the impacts of cocoa production can only be accurately accounted for when the land use dynamics arising in producing landscapes are taken into account. Impact assessments of value chains…

International land use scientists urge policymakers to adopt new approaches to addressing climate change, biodiversity and other global crises. 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…

European Year of Youth: three young MSCA researchers helping to build a brighter future for generations to come! To kick-start the ‘European Year of Youth’, the EC’s Research Executive Agency (REA) interviewed three young inspiring MSCA researchers to discuss their projects and their hopes to build a brighter future through their work! Claudia Parra Paitan…

Land-use frontiers, such as agriculture expanding into forests, remain a major driver of biodiversity loss, and often lead to conservation responses. To better understand the geographies of conservation, connecting conservation with tools used widely in Land System Science – particularly the frontier concept – allows assessing the patterns, actors, and drivers of conservation. We propose…

Many companies sourcing agricultural commodities with high deforestation risk have committed to zero deforestation, meaning they intend to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains. While previous research has attempted to assess progress against such initiatives, little is known about how the characteristics of sourcing patterns may influence the adoption and potential effectiveness of zero-deforestation commitments.…

By Nicolas Roux No country in the world has achieved minimum social requirements in the past three decades without overshooting planetary boundaries. This was found out by a team led by the Sustainability Research Institute in Leeds, and with the participation of COUPLED Fellow Nicolas Roux. Their results go even further: by 2050, no country…

By Joel Persson Protected areas have long been the mainstay of efforts to conserve nature and biodiversity across the world. Global agreements like the Convention of Biological Diversity and international organisations like the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) carve out an important role for protected areas, and some conservation…

By Anna Frohn Pedersen Transparency is often considered key for more just and sustainable value chains, and various certification schemes and transparency policies have been implemented across the globe. Often, these policies provide consumers with more information about the origin of the products. More consumer awareness is expected to create more demand for sustainable, fair…

By Perrine Laroche Over the last decade, the total area covered by natural rubber plantations has grown by 20%, causing massive land conversion in the tropics. In Southeast Asia, the hotspot of natural rubber production, at least 1.5 million hectares of land have been turned into rubber plantations since 2010. Moreover, natural rubber has been…

By Finn Mempel In today’s world, most of us are aware of many environmental problems, ranging from climate change to plastic pollution and deforestation in tropical rainforests. The prominence of these topics in public discourse makes them appear to be part of our own lives. We hardly ever reflect about the fact, that these problems…

By Johanna Coenen and Gabi Sonderegger Communicating our research results to fellow scientists, but also policy makers, practitioners, journalists and the general public, is a core task in science. It is particularly important if we aim to facilitate evidence-based decision-making and aspire to have a real-world impact with our research. Visualizations play a powerful role…

By Simon Bager IN BRIEF EU imports of products contribute significantly to deforestation in other parts of the world. In a new study, published in One Earth, researchers from UCLouvain and Chalmers, among them COUPLED fellow Simon Bager as lead author, evaluated more than a thousand policy proposals for how the EU could reduce this…

By Anna Frohn Pedersen How does the future look for the millions of people whose livelihoods depend on non-renewable resources, and how can such livelihoods become more sustainable? Together with Jonas Ø. Nielsen, Cecilie Friis and Jesper B. Jønsson, I explore these questions, taking departure in the artisanal and small-scale gold mining sector of Tanzania.…

By Gabi Sonderegger To many of us scientists, visuals are key to many of our research activities. We use them to structure our thoughts during initial brainstorming sessions, to share and discuss ideas during moments of fruitful exchange with colleagues, or to identify relevant trends and patterns in our preliminary results. And probably most common,…

By Nicolas Roux Today, you may have eaten your favourite chocolate bar. A lovely mix of milk, cocoa and fat. Turn the packaging and have a look at everything that is in the chocolate bar. Take a minute to guess which products may have been needed to produce what is written on it, and where…

Cover Photo: Traditional family house in the Brazilian Cerrado. Photo by Thiago Foresti. By Tiago Reis (ESR 10) with contributions from Mairon G. Bastos Lima A new scientific study in the journal World Development brings systematic evidence of the negative impacts of global demand for soy on the Brazilian savannahs of the Cerrado. It shows…

Cover Photo: Village nestled in the a national park – credit: Joel Persson In June 2020, ESRs Siyu Qin and Joel Persson participated in a webinar on telecoupling perspectives on nature conservation. The participants then summarised their thoughts in this blogpost. By: Dr Sébastien Boillat, Joel Persson, Siyu Qin, Dr Julie Zähringer, Dr Cecilie Friis…

Cover Photo by Thiago Foresti By Simon Bager and Tiago Reis, PhD-candidates at UCLouvain, Belgium and ESR fellows at COUPLED In a new paper published in One Earth, we argue that trade agreements could help to protect human rights, critical ecosystems, and the climate—but only if sustainability becomes a cornerstone of international trade. This blog…

Cover Photo: Moračica Bridge of the Bar-Boljare Highway in Montenegro / photo taken by Johanna Coenen By Johanna Coenen and Simon Bager China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a young, yet fast developing framework of activities aimed at improving regional and trans-continental cooperation and connectivity through investments, trade, and infrastructure projects. In fall 2013,…

Cover photo: Soy infrastructure. Tocantins, Brazil, 2019. Photo by Thiago Foresti. Written by Tiago Reis The products we consume on a daily basis are supported by a very complex supply chain that operates all over the world. Raw materials are sourced from different places across the globe, from iron ore in Australia to coffee in…

The global COVID-19 pandemic is affecting people’s work-life balance across the world. For academics, confinement policies enacted by most countries have implied a sudden switch to home-work, a transition to online teaching and mentoring, and an adjustment of research activities. In this article, the authors, led by COUPLED member Esteve Corbera, discuss how the COVID-19…

By Floris Leijten Background Agricultural expansion is the most important driver of global forest loss. Commodities that are most commonly associated with agriculture-driven deforestation include palm oil, soybean, beef, and timber. Recognizing the need to halt deforestation, over 480 companies involved in the production, processing, or distribution of these commodities have therefore issued commitments to…

By Perrine Laroche Livestock products constitute 29% of the energy content of Western diets. Because animals swallow large amounts of feed to produce the calories that are finally ingested by humans, land use for feeding Western citizens is considerable. The CO2 emissions cumulated along the food production process translate into environmental burdens that our planet…

A team including COUPLED researchers Jonas Østergaard Nielsen, Helmut Haberl and Beatriz Rodríguez‐Labajos analyses the relationship between economic growth and biodiversity conservation. The authors show that by increasing resource use and emissions, economic growth contributes to biodiversity loss. The paper also shows that most international policies on biodiversity and sustainability advocate economic growth. To solve this…

By Louise Marie Busck Lumholt, Johanna Coenen, Perrine Laroche, Nicolas Roux, Kathrin Trommler Travel-related emissions and the proportion of academia’s carbon-footprint has become a debated issue, especially among researchers working on sustainability. While some “walk the talk” and fly less individually, others urge for stronger collective government action. Our European Innovative Training Network (ITN) COUPLED aims to…

By Anna Frohn Pedersen Together with my research assistant Patric Mkai, I set out to explore the mining practices and livelihoods of artisanal and small-scale gold miners in Tanzania, during the summer and autumn of 2019. The overall aim of the research is to understand how Nyarugusu, a small mining village in the northern part…

This is a blog post based on an earlier text from September 2019. It was published here as an engament with the contributions by COUPLED fellow Tiago Reis on his fieldwork in Brazil. Cover photo: NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview, Fire Information for Resource Management…

In this post, I finish this series of three, where I describe my fieldwork and draw some reflections about the experience. Here I discuss development, science, consumerism and colonialism and how they make sense, or not, to me and according to what I saw in the field Cover photo: Road sunset in Maranhão, Brazil, September…

In this post, I continue discussing the fieldwork I did in Brazil between July and October 2019, which you can read about here. I feel responsible for clarifying a few aspects of the media fire crisis that hit Brazil in the same period. I will explain why I call it a media fire crisis, but…

After a few months of traveling the soy fields of Brazil trying to figure out the complex relationships that drive agricultural supply chains, COUPLED PhD Tiago sent us a postcard with his initial reflections from his fieldwork. Written by Tiago Reis Every day I ask myself: What am I doing, and why am I doing…

One of our PhD students, Louise, spent some weeks in Argentina exploring the complex relationships involved in implementing a large-scale development initiative in the Gran Chaco. She sent us a postcard with her initial reflections. Written by Louise Marie Busck-Lumholt The Gran Chaco is divided between Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil. It is a biodiversity…

Written by Siyu Qin As the cornerstone of conservation, protected areas (PA) are often expected to provide permanent protection to nature, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. In reality, however, legal changes made to loosen the PA restrictions (downgrade), shrink the PA boundaries (downsize), and remove the protection status (degazette) are widespread and through the history of…

Written by Johanna Coenen (ESR 12) A full year has passed since I started my PhD. Now it’s time to reflect on some experiences and lessons learnt. Here are 10 practical tips, I would have liked to know from day one of my PhD journey. They can be useful for anybody currently doing a PhD or…

Written by Nicocas Roux (ESR 02) and Floris Leijtenen (ESR 05) On the occasion of the 250th birthday of the famous geographer Alexander von Humboldt, Humboldt University of Berlin hosted the KOSMOS conference between August 28 – 30, as part of a broader movement to help society navigate the sustainability transformation in the 21st century.…

Our PhD student Joel has spent the past month in Northern Laos. He sent us this postcard of his initial reflections and experiences from a village nested in a stunning mountainous landscape inside one of Laos’ most renowned national parks, Nam-Et Phou-Louey. Laos is a country undergoing rapid changes in land-use, which has great impacts…

Eric Lambin, earth system science professor at Universite Catholique de Louvain and Stanford University, has been honored with the 2019 Blue Planet Prize. This award is widely considered the Nobel Prize for science that contributes to solving global environmental problems. Eric’s current research tries to understand how globalization affects global land use, and how private…

ATC 11 – Qualitative Research Methods at the Centre for Development and Environment, University of Bern, 27 April 2019 Written by Sahar Malik, ESR 14 After three days of intense discussions and networking at the Global Land Programme Open Science Meeting 2019 in Bern, the group of ESRs spent a rainy Saturday at the Centre…

Written by Gabi Sonderegger, ESR 09 In late April, the Early Stage Researchers, supervisors and many other partners of COUPLED travelled to the beautiful town of Bern in Switzerland to attend one of the most important conferences in our field, the 4th Open Science Meeting Global Land Programme. Hosted by the University of Bern, the…

Written by Perrine Laroche, ESR 04 Last February (2019), I went for my academic secondment at the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. An academic secondment is a mandatory opportunity, in Innovative Training Networks such as COUPLED, to experience a different research environment and build up interdisciplinary collaboration. For one month, I sat closer to Thomas…

Written by Simon Bager & Tiago Reis, Ph.D. candidates at UCLouvain in Belgium and Early Stage Researchers in COUPLED This blog post expands upon a letter recently published in Science, signed by 600+ scientists (including the authors of this post) and 300 Indigenous Peoples groups. Human consumption of food and agricultural products has a significant…

Written by Sébastien Boillat, Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland This blog post was written as part of a series of external contributions on topics related to telecoupling. Biological diversity on the planet is declining fast. To curb this crisis, governments, associations and private foundations have joined forces to create vast networks of national…

Written by Julie Zaehringer and Andrew K. Carlson. This blog post was written as part of a series of external contributions on topics related to telecoupling. Telecoupling is a relatively new framework that helps to describe how human-environment systems across the globe are connected across through flows of goods, money, information, and so on. A…

Advanced Training Course “Scientific Writing”, 11-15 March 2019. Written by Finn Mempel. It is no secret that some of the most creative painters have looked for inspiration by visiting and immersing themselves into natural and cultural landscapes. While producing academic papers might seem a world apart from the color-splashing, emotive process of creating a piece…

In a newly published book, COUPLED researchers examine how global land-use change can be better understood through ‘telecoupling’ Land use is essential to our well-being and therefore central to many of the largest sustainability challenges in the 21st Century, including global food security, climate change mitigation, access to clean water and air, and biodiversity conservation.…

Advanced Training Course “Governance and Justice in Telecoupling”, 5-7 March 2019. Written by Joel Persson. On Tuesday morning, ESRs gathered at the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (or for the non-catalan-speakers amongst us, ICTA) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona for nearly three days packed full with stimulating content, exciting presentations and non-stop intense…

Chocolate demand can promote the expansion of cocoa plantations and displace previously cultivated crops to new areas, starting a chain of deforestation events or other types of land use change in different places. Image source: pexels.com and commons.wikimedia.org. Written by Claudia Parra Paitan. Sometimes it is difficult to be aware of all the impacts that…

Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Written by Nicolas Roux, Louise Marie Busck Lumholt, Tiago Reis, Manan Bhan, PhD candidates from COUPLED and HEFT*. The world’s forestlands and native vegetation are disappearing at an alarming rate. Most of this loss is due to the production of agricultural commodities for export to distant places. The products consumed in…

Written by Anna Frohn Pedersen. Postcards from a gold mine in Tanzania. In October 2018, I travelled to Tanzania, seeking to understand how an increased global focus on sustainable mining has affected small scale mining practices. What I encountered was a sector with much entrepreneurship and where hope and risk go hand in hand. It…

Written by Joel Persson. The Long Road Ahead – Reflections on a few weeks of preliminary fieldwork in Laos. When I arrived in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, I had, luckily, already established a few leads and contacts to get me going during these initial few days. While in Vientiane, I spent most of my…

Advanced Training Course on Place-based Assessments of Land Systems Louvain-la-Neuve, 28-30 November 2018 After two intense days in Amsterdam, COUPLED PhD students boarded the Thalys train to Brussels before arriving with the local train in Louvain-la-Neuve on Tuesday evening. We almost lost our coordinator on the way, but it turned out that Prof.Jonas Nielsen had…

Advanced Training Course on Modelling Land-Use Change (Amsterdam, 26-27 November 2018) After two days of intense work the goals were accomplished, the fear of models was gone and our understanding of land use models notably increased, up to the point where some of the PhD fellows realized they knew a lot less than they thought.…

We are very happy to introduce our PhD fellow Gabi! Gabi Sonderegger (ESR 09), supervised by Andreas Heinimann, will be working on the research project Characterisation and visualisation of telecouplings in Large Scale Land Acquisitions in Southeast Asia, based at University of Bern. Gabi has a multi-disciplinary background in Geography, Sustainable Development and International Development studies.…

Photo: Forests burning in Brazil’s agricultural frontier (by Thiago Foresti/IPAM) Forests and food production at stake in Brazilian elections? By Tiago Reis and Simon Bager, PhD candidates at Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium *Any views expressed in this article are those of the authors and not of COUPLED This blog post is a modified and commented…

We are very happy to introduce our PhD fellow Johanna! Johanna Coenen (ESR 12), supervised by Jens Newig, will be working on the research project Governance Institutions for Sustainability in Globally Telecoupled Systems, based at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. After studying abroad, Johanna is now back in her home country to do a PhD at Leuphana University…

In mid-September, the PhD fellows of COUPLED convened in Vienna, Austria. At Institute of Social Ecology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), located in the heart of the city, we spent five days immersed in an intense learning environment. We met to complete two courses: one on “Assessing Flows of Land-based…

In mid-September, the PhD fellows of COUPLED convened in Vienna, Austria. At Institute of Social Ecology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), located in the heart of the city, we spent five days immersed in an intense learning environment. We met to complete two courses: one on “Assessing Flows of Land-based…

We are very happy to introduce our PhD fellow Floris! Floris Leijten (ESR 05), supervised by Sarah Sim (Unilever UK) and Peter Verburg (VU Amsterdam), will be working on the research project Measuring the effectiveness of corporate zero deforestation commitments in South East Asia, based at Unilever UK. Floris holds a MSc degree in Environmental Economics from…

We are very happy to introduce our PhD fellow Finn! Finn Mempel (ESR 08), supervised by Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos, will be working on the research project Justices and Injustices in the Soy Value Chain, based at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Finn is from Germany, where he completed his undergraduate studies in Environmental and Resource Management,…

We are very happy to introduce our PhD fellow Anna! Anna Frohn Pedersen (ESR 11), supervised by Jonas Østergaard Nielsen, will be working on the research project Exploring telecouplings between mining and land change in Africa, based at Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin. Anna holds a master in Visual Anthropology from University of Manchester and in…

We are very happy to introduce our COUPLED fellow Simon! Simon Bager (ESR 3), supervised by Eric Lambin, will be working on How can private companies promote sustainable land use through their supply chains, based at the University of Louvain. Until recently, Simon worked at COWI, a Scandinavian environment and engineering consultancy with offices in…

I walked into a very complex world, and I, myself, cannot answer all of those interesting questions. But knowing that there is a whole network of people all pursuing slightly different pathways, looking at slightly different subjects, but all trying to answer this one question, is for me the most exciting part of COUPLED. Siyu Qin…

We are very happy to introduce our next COUPLED fellow, Claudia! Claudia Parra Paitan (ESR 07), supervised by Peter Verburg, will be working on the research project Environmental impact assessments in a telecoupled world, based at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Claudia comes from Lima, the capital city of Peru. She has a Bachelor in Biology from…

We are very happy to welcome a new COUPLED fellow, Perrine! Perrine Laroche (ESR 04), supervised by Nynke Schulp, will be working on the research project Impacts of changing lifestyles and ecosystem service demands, based at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Perrine comes from France  She first studied Geography and Spatial Planning (BSc) in Lyon. She then…

We are very happy to welcome a new COUPLED fellow, Siyu! Siyu Qin (ESR 01), supervised by Tobias Kuemmerle, will be working on the research project Understanding conservation telecouplings, based at Humboldt University, Berlin. Before COUPLED, Siyu was working at Conservation International’s Moore Center for Science as a researcher and project manager. Her work involved…

We are very happy to welcome a new COUPLED fellow, Tiago! Tiago Reis (ESR 10), supervised  by Patrick Meyfroidt, will be working on the research project 10, Stickiness in international trade of agricultural and forestry products, based at the University of Louvain. Until recently, Tiago worked at IPAM, a Brazilian science-based NGO located in Brasília and…

A new paper by our Advisory Board member Jianguo Liu et al. (among others our colleagues Ed Challies and Cecilie Friis) on Spillover systems in a telecoupled Anthropocene: typology, methods, and governance for global sustainability has been published. The paper is the outcome of a collaboration based on a symposium at the Conference of the International Association…

We are very happy to welcome our first COUPLED fellow, Joel! Joel Persson (ESR 15), supervised  by Ole Mertz, will be working on the research project 15, International forest conservation discourses and local decisions as telecoupled systems, based at the University of Copenhagen. Joel completed his Master’s programme in International Development and Management at Lund…

The  Research Group on Governance, Participation and Sustainability, affiliated both with Leuphana’s Faculty of Sustainability and with its Centre for the Study of Democracy,  seeks highly qualified and motivated candidates for 1 PhD position (3 years) in Governance Institutions for Sustainability in Globally Telecoupled Systems, starting from 01 July 2018 (preferred). We seek a candidate with an…

The Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) at University of Bern (Switzerland) seeks highly qualified and motivated candidates for 1 PhD position (3 years) in Characterisation and visualisation of telecouplings in Large Scale Land Acquisitions in Southeast Asia, starting from 01 July 2018 (preferred). We seek a candidate with MSc in Geography, Sustainability Science, Environmental Science or related disciplines.…

The Institute of Social Ecology Vienna (SEC) at Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt (UNI-KLU) seeks highly qualified and motivated candidates for 1 PhD position (3 years) in Socio-ecological metabolism approaches to analyse telecoupling related to international trade, starting from 01 September 2018 or earlier. We seek a candidate with an above-average MSc (or equivalent degree) in interdisciplinary environmental sciences such…

The first papers of a special issue on Telecoupling: A new frontier for Global Sustainability in Ecology & Society have now been published and are available online: https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/issues/view.php?sf=125. It was guest-edited by Jack Liu, one of our Advisory Board Member. We are happy that Cecilie Friis and Jonas Ø Nielsen contribute to the Telecoupling Issue…

Thank you very much for submitting applications for the COUPLED Innovative Training Network We do appreciate the time that you invested in this application. The application window is now closed. But please check our website and social media channels for updated information in case we might re-open the call for some of the positions: http://coupled-itn.eu/. Thanks…

Start you PhD with us!   Are you interested in land-use change?   Would you like to be trained in the telecoupling framework and be on the forefront of understanding processes and actors that influence land-use in an interconnected world?   Would you like to become an expert in trans- and interdisciplinary concepts and methodologies?…

The network “COUPLED – Operationalising Telecoupling for Solving Sustainability Challenges for Land Use” is a joint graduate school of Humboldt University in Berlin, other European universities and partner organisations from business and civil society. It is funded by the European Union. The program will run until 2022 and will train outstanding PhD students in trans-…