In a new study, researchers say that land inequality is rising in most countries. Worse, new measures and analysis proves that land inequality is significantly higher than previously recorded, with data reporting a 41 percent increase compared to traditional census data.

The report, Uneven Ground: land inequality at the heart of unequal societies, is the first of its kind, shedding new light on the scale and speed of this growing phenomenon and providing the most comprehensive picture available today. The report was informed by 17 specially commissioned research papers as well as analysis of existing data and literature under a wide partnership led by the International Land Coalition, and in close collaboration with Oxfam.

Understanding the cultural values and social rules of stakeholders is critical to engage them successfully in a co-production process. Failing to do so, can not only threaten the project but also harm vulnerable stakeholders. This blog post by Catherine Pfeifer and Joanne Morris, members of the GLP Working Group Co-production of Sustainable Land Systems tells the story of how putting the do-no-harm principle and the interest of vulnerable stakeholders above scientific interest has allowed us to have impact on the ground in Burkina Faso.

In this blog post, the authors introduce two new models, the TeleABM and the FLUTE, that are designed to study telecoupled land-use change but using different modelling approaches. Both models use soybean, one of the most traded commodities in the world, as an exemplary case to illustrate the ways in which they tackle the challenges of cross-scalar dynamics. The post reports on a joint webinar hosted by the GLP Working Group on Telecoupling Research held in September 2020 and featuring presentations by the three first authors.

The GLP Working Group on Social-Ecological Land Systems of Latin America (LASELS) held its first webinar in December 2020, featuring the concept of Socio-Ecological Land Systems (SELS) for South America presented by Dr. Sebastien Boillat, and a novel spatial characterization of SELS for South America by Ms. Lucía Zarbá. The webinar concluded with a presentation of the LASELS working group and the upcoming agenda by Dr. María Piquer-Rodríguez. You can view the webinar recording and download the presentations.

The origin, supply chain, and deforestation risk of Brazil’s beef exports
A new article in PNAS by Erasmus K. H. J. zu Ermgassen, Javier Godar, Michael J. Lathuillière, Pernilla Löfgren, Toby Gardner, André Vasconcelos, and Patrick Meyfroidt brings together detailed data on trade, agriculture, and logistics to produce a subnational map of the origin of Brazil’s exports of beef, offal, and live cattle. The work gives an unprecedented insight into the origin of food and impacts embedded in global supply chains. Read more

Operationalising place for land system science
Addressing the need for advancing knowledge of land systems towards more practicable solutions, this paper in Sustainability Science examines how to operationalise place for land system science. Based on an overview of place studies, place and place-making are presented as a conceptual model, which allows for expansion and substantiation when deployed to relevant land system research tasks. The authors close with a number of recommendations to be made for land system science when aiming at supporting sustainable transformation. Read more

Two new articles on Improving Governance of Tenure in Policy and Practice published
Two new papers published in Sustainability explore the topics of analyzing multi-stakeholder partnerships for multi-stakeholder transformative governance, and monitoring in a space for multiple views. Find links to all three articles on Louisa Jansen's profile.