The emergence of land systems as the nexus for sustainability transformations

Ariane De Bremond

doi:10.1007/s13280-021-01519-9

Abstract

This perspective recognizes the seminal Ambio articles of Sombroek et al. (1993), Turner et al. (1994) and Brussaard et al. (1997), identifying their individual and collective role in laying the ground work for a global change research agenda on land and its human use through increased understanding of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics and global change, and furthering nascent interdisciplinary efforts within the global change science community to better understand the ‘human driving forces’ of change. From these efforts, land system science, as a systemic science focused on complex socio-ecological interactions around land use and associated trade-offs and synergies, emerges as an ‘interdiscipline’ challenged to better understand land systems as the ‘meeting ground’ for multiple claims on land for biodiversity, carbon, livelihoods, food production among others, and support pathways to sustainability for people and nature.

Highlights

Land lies at the nexus of crucial societal and environmental challenges, offering a means to address food security and livelihoods, ending poverty, women’s empowerment, access to water, biodiversity loss, and climate change among others
A key process of global environmental change is change in land use: the purposes and activities through which people interact with land and terrestrial ecosystems, which at the same time, generates many sustainability challenges (Meyfroidt et al 2018)
The consideration of the articles’ legacy as carried forth through ongoing efforts in land system science, to better understand land systems as the ‘meeting ground’ for multiple claims on land, and asking, how is land system science poised to contribute to devising pathways to sustainability and to global environmental and human development policy priorities?

Summary

INTRODUCTION

30 years ago, the pages of this journal offered some of the first glimpses of how scientists in this new and rapidly consolidating global change science community would lay out, craft, and envision core elements of their scientific agenda, new data needs, methodological frontiers and challenges, and importantly, how they would articulate frameworks for future research that would serve to structure and enable international collaboration for a new generation of global change science This reflection recognizes three such seminal articles, identifying their individual and collective role in laying the ground work for a global change research agenda on land and its human use. The consideration of the articles’ legacy as carried forth through ongoing efforts in land system science, to better understand land systems as the ‘meeting ground’ for multiple claims on land (for biodiversity, carbon sequestration or food security among others), and asking, how is land system science poised to contribute to devising pathways to sustainability and to global environmental and human development policy priorities?

TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEM DYNAMICS AND GLOBAL CHANGE

ADVANCING THE SCIENCE OF LAND SYSTEMS THROUGH THE GLOBAL LAND PROGRAMME

CHALLENGES ON THE HORIZON