1 Introduction
Land use provides societies with indispensable resources such as food, feed, fibre and energy. Food security, climate change mitigation and adaptation, access to clean water and air, biodiversity conservation and a more just global society, all depend upon how we use land. In March 2018, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES ) published the first global assessment report that takes stock of the state of the world’s land resources (IPBES 2018). The report paints a gloomy picture of extensive and continuing land degradation throughout the world, estimating that land degradation is currently ‘negatively impacting the well-being of at least 3.2 billion people’ (IPBES 2018, 10). With projections putting the global population around 9.8 billion people by 2050 (UN 2017), finding solutions to secure our common ‘life on land’ as specified in the 15th Sustainable Development Goal (UN 2015) is high on the global political and research agenda.
Yet, identifying and fostering more sustainable modes of land use—that can simultaneously deliver on food production and food access goals while conserving essential ecosystem services and securing life for the non-human part of the world in a just and equitable manner—constitute a substantial, almost overwhelming challenge. A major reason for this is that land-use change is increasingly characterised by a spatial disconnect between the main environmental, socioeconomic and political drivers of land change and the main impacts and outcomes of those changes. The surging levels of global trade in biomass (see Chap. 8), for example, illustrate how the production and consumption of land-based resources are increasingly separated in space, making the full environmental and social impacts of consumption patterns largely invisible to consumers, policy-makers and researchers due to the distance separating them from producers and suppliers (see also Chaps. 5 and 6). The increasing number of transnational land acquisitions by private companies and investment firms (Messerli et al. 2014), as well as the push for biodiversity conservation led by international organisations (Adger et al. 2005; Fairhead et al. 2012), similarly demonstrates how land-use decisions are increasingly made in places other than where land-use changes occur.
To address the challenges posed by these spatial disconnections, the concept and framework of telecoupling have been proposed in the human-environment systems literature (Liu et al. 2013; Eakin et al. 2014; Friis et al. 2016; see also Chaps. 2 and 3). Telecoupling is conceptualised as combined socioeconomic and environmental interactions or flows between two or more human-environment systems that are separated in space (Liu et al. 2013). The telecoupling framework draws specifically on systemic thinking when dealing with human-environment interactions such as land-use change, while also emphasising the need to understand the networked relations of actors that mediate cross-scalar flows and feedbacks between systems. This requires attention to the place-based, as well as the flow-based human-environment processes shaping land use in specific places. For instance, understanding the shift in land use from rice to banana in northern Laos, local, regional and global processes, as well as their connectedness via various material and immaterial flows, needs to be grasped and integrated in the same analysis (Friis and Nielsen 2017). The telecoupling framework proposes a set of analytical components, including ‘sending’, ‘receiving’ and ‘spillover systems’, ‘flows’, ‘feedbacks’ and ‘agents’ to do this (Liu et al. 2013, 3). These components are used to determine and trace the origin and recipient of a particular flow, as well as the places and people that are affecting or affected by them directly or indirectly. In other words, telecoupling presents land system scientists with a systematic approach for studying the globalisation of land use, an approach that allows for breaking up the complexity of global interconnectivity into identifiable and manageable units of analysis, thereby addressing the problem of spatial disconnection of drivers and outcomes of land-use change (see Chaps. 2, 3 and 4).
The diversity of the processes that the telecoupling framework seeks to address leads to a need to engage many different methodological approaches and analytical perspectives. As such, the emergence of the telecoupling framework resonates with the increasing push for inter- and transdisciplinary research and exchange in the wider field of sustainability science (e.g. Jerneck et al. 2011; Fischer et al. 2015; Moran and Lopez 2016; Pulver et al. 2018). The pressing need to build a deeper understanding of unsustainable land systems, as emphasised by the IPBES report and the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, necessitates engagement across the natural and social sciences. In addition, the increasing recognition that science needs to make a stronger contribution to the identification of leverage points for transformation towards more sustainable land-use practices and to the design of better interventions into unsustainable and unjust ones (GLP 2016; Abson et al. 2017; van der Hel 2018), has led to calls for engagement of non-academic partners in the (co-) production of knowledge. Telecoupling research has the potential to make a substantial contribution to both these agendas. First, it offers a systemic, yet open approach to human-environment interactions that invites and enables interdisciplinary exchange; indeed, answering many questions related to telecoupling can only be done by engaging multiple disciplinary perspectives. Second, by explicitly focusing on understanding cross-scalar interactions, their potential implications on land use in specific places and the role of actors with or without power to influence these, telecoupling research opens up an opportunity for identifying relevant processes and stakeholders that are essential to include in solution-oriented sustainability research. Accordingly, the topic of this book is the scientific diversity and insights as well as the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary breadth, scope and potential of telecoupling research.
2 Aims and Scopes of the Book
This book brings together leading scholars on land-use change, sustainability and telecoupling to take stock of the emerging field of telecoupling research. Assembled here is the first coherent and comprehensive consideration of how telecoupling challenges the study of global land-use change and sustainability, and in turn, how adopting a telecoupling lens can lead to new insights on and collaborations around those challenges. The chapter authors have highly diverse disciplinary backgrounds spanning from conservation biology, ecology and geo...