On November 5-7, 2024 the Global Land Programme (GLP) will hold their 5th Open Science Meeting (OSM) in Oaxaca, Mexico. The GLP is a global interdisciplinary network of science and practice working to foster understanding of land systems and the generation of science-based solutions to challenges at local to global scales.

Land is where we live, grow our food, and derive resources and where a majority of the world’s people derived their livelihoods. The land systems the GLP community works in and studies around the world are complex, dynamic and interdependent social-ecological systems, that blend activities of people with the rest of nature. While land use generates many sustainability challenges, it is also clear that land systems are also key to overcoming existential challenges that humanity is facing and to achieving sustainable development.

On behalf of the Scientific and Organizing Committees of the OSM, and the Scientific Steering Committee of GLP, we are thrilled to invite you, scientists and practitioners from across the Americas and the world and from diverse disciplines and experiences, to join us for this gathering in Oaxaca, where we will seek to generate and reinvigorate conversations grounded in the strength of our collective and diverse knowledge.

In reflecting on the purpose of the 5th OSM since we gathered last for the GLP Open Science Meeting (OSM) in 2019, we see that humanity has navigated through a period marked by unparalleled challenges and transformations - a global pandemic, growing international conflicts and regional disputes reshaping geopolitical boundaries and narratives, and some of the hottest years in recorded history, all of which have tested the resilience of societies worldwide.

With their local repercussions, these global phenomena have cast a spotlight on the interconnectedness of our disparate realities, making us more aware of how vulnerable societies have become to sudden shocks, and how such events disproportionately impact marginalized and excluded individuals, further deepening existing inequities. Yet, amidst these challenges from across different parts of the world, there are efforts driven by individuals, social movements, organizations, and governments to halt the tide of catastrophic events, to build resilience, and to foster a renewed sense of connectedness both towards one another and towards our shared home.

This context provides an urgency for the type of research that the land system science community does: to better understand how the ongoing global and regional transformations affect people and nature in various locales, how local responses have global implications, and how to harness knowledge to envisage diverse futures and potential pathways of change, catalyzing knowledge for communities, civil society, and governments in support of collective efforts to realize these imagined futures.

The 2024 5th OSM will be an opportunity to gather and to reinvigorate conversations grounded in the strength of our collective knowledge. The conference will be hosted in collaboration with several local partners in Oaxaca, Mexico, a region enriched by centuries of cultural diversity and transformation; and a place that promises to inspire new ways of looking at our research practice.

Paralleling GLP’s 2024-2028 Science Plan, three themes inspire these conversations:

The state of the world: Advances in Earth observations and social sensing, expanding data transparency and availability, and increasingly ambitious and coordinated fieldwork efforts have produced a wealth of high resolution spatial and temporal data describing land system states and changes. This data richness has been harnessed by similar advances in land system applications of artificial intelligence, spatially disaggregated supply chain modeling, integrating human activity into Earth system models, and various qualitative-quantitative synthesis methods to better understand changes in land cover, land use, and land system couplings, including dangerous land system thresholds and their distal drivers and impacts. Key questions for this theme include:

What are the current states and trajectories of land systems?
What are the causes and impacts of these land system changes?
What new frameworks, methodologies and techniques are being used to understand land systems from the local to the global?
What are the insights that we gain from looking at what is happening in the planet's landscapes and their peoples?
How much do we know about land management and other more invisible processes and their underlying drivers?
What are the implications of increasingly high spatial and temporally resolved data for understanding land system feedbacks?

Imagining the future(s): With the enhanced capabilities for observation and data processing and thanks to growing insights across cases, countries, and continents, we have developed the ability to imagine, map, and model different sustainable land futures. We can explore scenarios of conversion for large tracts of forests into savannas, the expansion of cities in the developing world, the effects of forest fires, and flash floods on the patterns of human occupation and agricultural expansion. Key questions for this theme include: What land system futures are opening in front of our eyes? What are the forces creating those futures, and which futures are likely to become more prominent? What impacts would specific policy decisions have in shaping the face of our planet and society? How do visions for land systems vary across different communities and across actors?

Enabling transformative changes: Aware of the limitations of our current economic and political system to produce transformations at the scale needed, we embark on a rigorous exercise of interrogating our options, exploring levers, and anticipating their effects. With this, we will open a dialogue on the type, scale, and commitment that are needed to change the course of our relationship with the natural world and build the capabilities to face the challenges of a planetary shift in the conditions that have supported human life. Key questions for this theme include: What structural social, economic, political, institutional, and behavioral shifts could occur in our societies, and what are their potential impacts on the future of humanity? Is it possible to reconcile existing tradeoffs and address land system wickedness? What are the levers that can transform land systems to (un)desirable futures?

New insights are gained from the exploration of our present that feed into our understanding of future trajectories. Future scenarios help us identify key turning points that can change the rules of the game. Levers interrogate the present with new questions and new ways of understanding the causes of our current state and the spaces where change is already happening. Thus, these three themes reinforce each other and will all deepen our understanding of land systems, their links to global change and to pathways towards sustainable and just land systems.