Dear colleague,

Welcome to our mid-2023 E-news! There have been lots of exciting evolutions for GLP over the first half of 2023. 

The IPO is gradually settling into its new home at the University of Maryland, and we were pleased to welcome GLP’s Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) for their annual meeting June 5-9 on Maryland’s Tilghman Island (photo above) as a kick-off to GLP's time in the USA. 

The June meeting also marked the passing of the torch for leadership of our SSC. After having hosted the IPO at the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) and being SSC co-chair for 8 years, Peter Messerli handed over this responsibility to Rachael Garrett (welcome, Rachael!), who will work together with standing co-chair Navin Ramankutty on behalf of GLP. We are deeply indebted to Pete for his unfailing leadership, vision, and commitment to the IPO and to all of GLP. See below for a lovely retrospective by CDE’s Gaby Allheilig on GLP’s years in Bern. 

The reinvigorated SSC rolled-up their sleeves and got to work on a host of new activities, including: planning the GLP OSM 2024; drafting GLPs 2024-28 Science Plan, and charting the next strategic GLP contributions to inform critical conversations on land use at the science-policy-society interface. 

Last but not least, the IPO is hiring!! See below for more info on our two open positions: Program Coordinator and Land System Science Lead – Assistant Research Professor.

Enjoy!
Ariane and the IPO team

We seek a highly organized and motivated individual to join our International Programme Office (GLP-IPO) as Land System Science Lead at the Assistant Research Professor/Postdoctoral Associate level depending on experience. We are hosted by the University of Maryland, College Park. This is a 12-month, 50% effort part-time position. Deadline: 14 August 2023

We are also seeking a highly organized and motivated individual to join the International Programme Office (GLP-IPO) as Program Coordinator Faculty Specialist position. Deadline: 14 August 2023

The Future Earth General Assembly met online and in Panama 29-30 June, and the GLP presented in the opening plenary on highlights from the Future Earth community. The recommendations from the Assembly will be developed into a report together with the interim chair and co-chairs and presented to the Governing Council.

Future Earth is inviting contributions to UNEP's "Perspectives" publication 2023-24. Issues of "Perspectives" are usually 8-10 pages long, including pictures and graphs, and are written in a style that is plain and easy to understand. They are widely distributed by UNEP via the website, social media, and emails.

It was a busy seven years in Bern for the GLP, and our previous host, the University of Bern's Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) has written a lovely retrospective of our time there. They interviewed Peter Messerli, former Co-chair of GLP, and asked: What were the highlights? What challenges went unsolved? And what opportunities are opened up thanks to the new GLP headquarters?

A new opinion piece by Eric Lambin and Paul Furumo in Knowable Magazine acknowledges zero-deforestation supply-chain commitments aren’t protecting tropical forests as much as hoped. But they might, write the authors, if the same standards were applied to domestic and export markets.

The GLP Archetype Analysis iin Sustainability and Land Governance Research Working Group is pleased to announce that the Focus Issue on Archetypes of Sustainable Land Use and Governance in Environmental Research Letters is now completed and available open access. The Focus Issue presents a collection of recent advances in archetype analyses within land system science.

The editorial 'Archetypes in support of tailoring land-use policies' provides an overview of the key insights presented in the articles in the Focus Issue. It then describes three methodological advancements made by contributions to this Focus Issue. Finally, it explores how archetype analysis can support tailoring of land-use policies to land system properties, and it concludes with an examination of emerging frontiers, challenges and future research needs of archetype analysis in land system science.

On 19 April, the European Parliament approved the new EU legislation to ensure “deforestation-free” imports and exports of seven “forest-risk” commodities (wood, palm oil, rubber, cocoa, coffee, cattle and soy, as well as their derived products).

On 22 May, the GLP Telecoupling Research Toward Sustainable Transformation of Land Systems Working Group started a discussion on how telecoupling research can be used to advance our understanding of this new EU regulation. The webinar recording and presenters' slides are now available.

On 28 June the GLP Socio-Ecological Land Systems in Latin America Working Group and the GLP Nodal Office for Latin America presented the newly-created Network of Andean Social-Ecological Observatories (funded by the ESA-Future Earth Joint Program), that integrates the social-ecological monitoring efforts of the region. The webinar recording and presenters' slides are now available.

Geographic similarity analysis for Land System Science: opportunities and tools to facilitate knowledge integration and transfer
A new article in Journal of Land Use Science provides approaches for facilitating researchers to get an enhanced understanding of multi-scale land change processes, as well as supporting land governance in scaling up the knowledge and solutions generated by LSS research. Read more

Connected Conservation: Rethinking conservation for a telecoupled world
A new paper in Biological Conservation offers a dual-branched conservation model that commands novel actions to tackle distant wealth-related drivers of biodiversity decline, while enhancing site-level conservation to empower biodiversity stewards. Read more

Also published recently:

Abandoning land transforms biodiversity (Science)

Economics of Ecosystem Restoration (Annual Review of Resource Economics)

Mountain Research and Development Vol 43, No 1

Integrated Spatial Simulation of Population and Urban Land Use: a Pan-European Model Validation (Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy)