GLP in March: Young Speakers Series launching, invitations to join WG webinars, published research of note, and more

Dear colleague,

Wow! GLP is rapidly closing in on 2,000 members (from just under 500 in 2016) and a large part of this growth is made up of Global South and early-career researchers. As we begin our second pandemic-year supporting a global network of land system scientists, we at the IPO are setting our sights on further facilitating and supporting quality community interaction. Whether via our working groups (see below about our Young Speakers Series, which is launching tomorrow), nodal office regional events (stay tuned for Fall 2021), and other new formats, we are committed to deepening our community's capacity to work together on the land system science questions and challenges of our time. We hope you'll welcome our newest members (listed below) and encourage your colleagues to join us.

Take good care all,
Ariane de Bremond
International Programme Office, GLP

Please welcome the following new GLP Members, all of whom joined since our February newsletter:

Abdelhak Maghchiche, Elena Garazha, Laxmikant Sharma, Judith Rakowski, Abbas Shehu, Marieke Sassen, Abhishek Chaudhary, Eva Ludi, Sara Rzayeva, Madeline Lisaius, Sergio Morell-Monzó, Petra Greslova, Kashimana Ivo, Maxim Gorgan, Stefan Vukovic, Mariatu Turay, Andreas Rehn, Francisco Ehrenberg, Janelle Sylvester, Qi Zhang, Lorenza Fontana, Damien "Nakoa" Farrant, Bernard Lutalo, Yuba Raj Subedi, Bin Chen, Giles Sioen, Lisa Murken, Wijnand Langeraar, Samuel Tumwesigye, Subhash Babu, Jeronimo Rodriguez-Escobar, René Poccard-Chapuis, Gaby Langendijk, Ayman Abdel-Hamid, Neus Escobar, John E. K. Akubia, Daniel Pinillos, and Ana Buchadas

To learn more about them or any of our other members, please visit our Find a Scientist directory.

THIS WEEK! Young Speakers Series launching

Thursday, 25 March
14:00 Central European Time
Online

The GLP Working Group ‘Integration of Rural and Urban Land Systems’ is pleased to invite you to the first webinar of their new Young Speakers Series. The GLP Young Speakers Series will be held monthly and is a platform particularly for young researchers to present their work and to connect to each other as well as to more senior researchers.

In this first event of the Young Speakers Series, Dr. Niels Debonne will introduce you to his work about agency shifts in agricultural land governance. You will also hear about PhD student Samuel Tumwesigye’s research on understanding rural out-migration in Uganda and of Dr. Dominik Kaim’s research on wildlife-urban interfaces and conflicts.

You can also register now for the second event in the series on 15 April. Speakers will be announced on our website soon.

Contributing Projects call

GLP invites members to submit those research projects which are of special relevance to the land science community and address the GLP research challenges outlined in the GLP Science Plan as ‘contributing projects’.

Learn more

Do you have a high-impact paper coming out?

If you are interested in offering a webinar with GLP support to coordinate with the release of your high-impact LSS paper, please send us the pre-print paper for consideration.

Email us

From our Working Groups

Webinar: Assessing trade flows through a telecoupling lens - Globally sharing land and its ecosystem functions through international trade

Friday, 9 April
12:00 Central European Time
Online

The webinar will include two presentations from working group members: Abdullah Shaikh (School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Deakin University, Australia) who will talk about “National-level consumption-based and production-based utilisation of the land-system change planetary boundary” and Nicolas Roux (COUPLED & University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria) who will talk about "From embodied area to embodied HANPP: quantifying the pressure on ecosystem functions embodied in international trade of ecosystem risk commodities."

Blog: Governing telecouplings - Discussing evidence on company policies for reducing commodity-driven forest loss

In this blog post, Dr. Janina Grabs and PhD candidate Sam Levy share some first insights from their work on the effectiveness of zero deforestation commitments (ZDCs) in the Brazilian Amazon’s cattle sector and the Indonesian palm oil sector. The blog post summarises their work as presented in a webinar (access the recording) hosted by the GLP Telecoupling Research Working Group in December 2020.

Blog: Let us burn! Fire politics and recalibrating burdens of blame

In a recent paper in Geoforum, Wolfram Dressler and authors have shown how, in Southeast Asia, the presence of cleared and burned forests has long evoked deep emotions, symbolism and representations that powerfully inform the governance of forests and upland peoples. This new blog post from the GLP Shifting Cultivation Working Group examines their field research in more depth to provide additional perspectives on the paper.

#featuredscientist: Verena Seufert

Assistant Professor, Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam, Netherlands

Probably every scientist thinks that their research area is highly relevant, but I do really strongly believe that land systems science is one of the most promising research fields to help us find solutions to many of our pressing environmental and societal challenges. Through its systems perspectives and its focus on land, which by definition is highly multidimensional aka multidisciplinary, land systems science sets the stage for the type of research we need – research that is solutions-focused, that views people and nature as deeply interconnected across spatial and temporal scales and that does not shy away from acknowledging complexity, uncertainty and our constraints in managing the wickedness of the problems we are dealing with. In my work I try to use a land systems perspective to help find answers to the question of how we can do food better - How can we create a world where everyone has access to sufficient and nutritious food they enjoy eating? How can we produce our food without destroying the very natural resources that food production depends on? How can we create a food system that is more just and more sustainable?

Learn more

Publications

Featured Publications

Practical applications of ecosystem services in spatial planning: Lessons learned from a systematic literature review
The integration of ecosystem service (ES) knowledge into decision-making processes is increasingly endorsed by various policies and initiatives, with spatial planning targeted as one of the most relevant fields. This paper in Environmental Science & Policy aims to gather and critically analyse how ES science contributes to spatial planning practices. Read more

Eighty-six EU policy options for reducing imported deforestation
A new paper in One Earth identifies 86 policies the EU could implement to address tropical deforestation, and shows that policy options that are politically feasible policies tend to have a weaker theory of change—the causal chain through which the policies address deforestation—setting up a trade-off between feasibility and impact (though there are exceptions, such as mandatory due diligence). Read more

Other Publications

Have food supply chain policies improved forest conservation and rural livelihoods? A systematic review

Restoring the Unrestored: Strategies for Restoring Global Land during the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (UN-DER)

Analysis of forest-related policies for supporting ecosystem services-based forest management in Bangladesh

Calls

Calls for papers

Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity of Peri-Urban Landscapes

Governance Mixes for Sustainable Peri-Urbanization

Addressing challenges of hazards, risks, and disaster management in mountain regions

11th INPUT conference on Innovation in Urban and Regional Planning

Novel Approaches in Tropical Forests Mapping and Monitoring

Women in Land Science

Others

MIASA Fellowships at the University of Ghana in 2022

Nature Research Awards for Driving Global Impact

The Land Portal launches third annual land data stories contest

COVID-19 Science Fund

2021 Call for applications for an IPCC Scholarship Award

The Elinor Ostrom Award on Collective Governance of the Commons 2021

ERC kicks off Horizon Europe

Events

20-22 April - From Plans to Land Change: Dynamics of Urban Regions

30 March and 6 April - Introduction to Population Grids and their Integration with Remote Sensing Data for Sustainable Development and Disaster Management

7-10 June - 3rd ESP Europe Conference 2021

7-9 July - 3rd World Conference of Society for Urban Ecology SURE conference

Jobs

Assistant Professor in Governance of Global Biodiversity, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Deadline: 15 April

Postdoctoral researcher in geography, University of Luxembourg, Deadline: 31 March

PhD student in sustainable sourcing policies for biodiversity protection, climate mitigation, and improved livelihoods in the cocoa sector, ETH Zürich, Deadline: 15 April

Be sure to check our Twitter feed @GlobalLandP for additional opportunities!

We welcome news, events and job postings from the GLP community. The deadline for content to appear in our next issue is 12 April 2021. Please submit items for consideration to Communications Manager Lauren Hertel.

If you received this email from a colleague and would like to receive your own copy in the future, become a member of the Global Land Programme today. Membership is free and open to land system scientists, policymakers, members of the public and journalists.

In accordance with our Science Plan and Implementation Strategy, papers highlighted in the Featured Research section mention, as part of the acknowledgments, that the publication contributes to GLP or 'contributes to the GLP science plan'.

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