Dear colleagues,

It’s time for the second GLP Telecoupling Working Group newsletter! We hope you enjoyed the first edition, and we are excited that in the last three months some more telecoupling papers have been published.

This week will end with a nice event: Our next webinar on “Modelling Telecoupled Land Use Changes” takes place this Friday, 4 September, 2:30-3:30 Central European Time (UTC +1). If you have not registered yet please do so here. For the continuation of these webinar series we rely on you. Please let us know as soon as possible if you would like to share your research with other telecoupling scholars, and we will organise a webinar.

We are also excited to present the first post “Linking local-global nature conservation: a telecoupling perspective” on our new working group blog. The blog summarises the insights from our second webinar featuring Sébastien Boillat and COUPLED PhD students Joel Persson and Siyu Qin, and discusses the importance of looking at conservation through a telecoupling lens.

We would like to repeat our invitation to you all to contribute to the working group blog with insights from your work on telecoupling related issues. This could include stories from the field, the lab, experiences with the application of tools and methods, policy / practice interactions, emerging/topical themes (e.g. corona-related impacts on land-use change) and outstanding research questions, and a lot more.

If you would like to contribute to a webinar or write a blog post, please contact us any time: Julie (julie.zaehringer@unibe.ch) and Cecilie (cefr@ign.ku.dk). Please also send news, jobs, events, and open calls for collaboration for this quarterly e-newsletter directly to Lauren Hertel (lhertel@glp.earth) and us. 

Your WG Coordinators,
Cecilie Friis & Julie Zähringer

THIS FRIDAY! September 4, 14:30-15:30 Central European Time (UTC +1)

The GLP Telecoupling Working Group will hold its third webinar to discuss the progress and challenges of modelling telecoupled systems, by presenting two different modelling attempts of simulating land use changes in Brazil and China through the flow of international soybean trade.

The webinar will include two short presentations from Yue Dou (Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) introducing the agent-based model TeleABM developed to connect  farmers’ land use behaviors from the soybean importing and exporting countries and James Millington (King’s College London) presenting  the large-scale agent-based modelling framework CRAFTY used to investigate different drivers of Brazilian agricultural change in the telecoupled system. 

In addition, we are happy to have Birgit Müller (Department of Ecological Modelling, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ) as a discussant.

Registrants will receive a link to join the Zoom call.

Illustration (above): Yue Dou

From the COUPLED project:

• Johanna Coenen, Simon L. Bager, Patrick Meyfroidt, Jens Newig and Edward Challies published a paper in Environmental Policy and Governance titled “Environmental Governance of China's Belt and Road Initiative”. The paper examines how China is actively and rapidly developing an institutional architecture for its envisioned “green Belt and Road (BRI),” finding that the effectiveness of the environmental governance of the BRI not only hinges on China's priorities and commitments, but also on the political willingness and capacity of BRI partner countries to maintain, implement, and enforce stringent environmental laws and regulations.
• Tiago Reis, Patrick Meyfroidt, Toby Gardner, Simon Bager, Javier Godar, et al. have published a new paper in OneEarth “Understanding the Stickiness of Commodity Supply Chains Is Key to Improving Their Sustainability”. Here, the authors propose a concept and methodological approach to analyze the geographic stickiness of commodity supply chains, which is the maintenance of supply network configurations over time and across perturbations. They showcase policy-relevant metrics for all Brazilian soy exports between 2003 and 2017, using high-resolution supply chain data from trase.earth.
• A new paper by Simon L. Bager and Eric F. Lambin, “Sustainability strategies by companies in the global coffee sector”, analyses how the coffee sector approaches sustainability by examining the sustainability efforts of a random sample of more than 500 companies across the sector. The paper observes a market differentiation through sustainability with progressive companies adopting sustainability strategies that align with their stakeholders, depending on value chain characteristics. The paper is published open access in Business Strategy and the Environment.

Two new papers and a storymap from the Managing Telecoupled Landscapes project:

• Onintsoa Ravaka Andriamihaja with co-authors Florence Metz, Julie G. Zaehringer, Manuel Fischer and Peter Messerli published a paper in Land Use Policy titled “Identifying agents of change for sustainable land governance”. They empirically analysed the likelihood of actors becoming agents of change based on their aims, resources, and relational profiles in the land governance network. Combined analysis of their agency and social networks enabled them to identify potential agents of change as well as options for transformation actions that would enable specific actors to become operational agents of change.
• Drawing on a comprehensive national dataset on land concessions in Laos, and 2005 and 2015 village level poverty rates, Vong Nanthavong, together with Julie G. Zaehringer and others, published a paper in Applied Geography, titled “Poverty trends in villages affected by land-based investments in rural Laos".
• Based on research results from north-eastern Madagascar, Julie G. Zaehringer co-published this storymap, titled “Global interests collide in Madagascar”, which also features a short film on “Cash crops: opportunity or challenge. Voices from Maroantsetra region, Madagascar”.

Xiaobo Hua and colleagues published a paper in Land Use Policy, titled "Land rental in a multi-ethnic society: Insights from Southwest China". This paper explores interethnic land rental and concomitant uneven development by considering the dimension of ethnicity, which contributes to the literature on intimate exclusion and pericoupling.

Yingjie Li and co-authors have a new publication in Nature Sustainability titled “Impacts of international trade on global sustainable development” in which they apply the metacoupling (including telecoupling) framework to analyse international trade patterns between countries, and show how distant trade positively affected global progress towards achieving nine environment-related SDG targets. See also the “Behind the Paper” post in Springer Nature Sustainability Community.

In a new paper on “The Soybean Trap: Challenges and Risks for Brazilian Producers” in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, Ramon Felipe Bicudo da Silva, Mateus Batistella, Emilio Moran, Otávio Lemos De Melo Celidonio and James Milllington, examine the decision pathways Brazilian soybean producers take that can lead them into indebtedness and supply chain dependency, tying them to “agricultural treadmills” and forcing them to continue in the business. The authors emphasise what producers can do within the scope of their own decision-making, given their limited control over broader international political economy factors.