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Plenary Sessions

TBA visit the keynotes page for more information

Break / Networking

Research Session

Pandemics, armed conflicts, natural and anthropogenic disasters, and economic/financial collapses are types of systemic shocks that can manifest locally and then spread to region, to nation, to continent, to the inhabited planet. The recession that began in the United States in late 2007, manifested as a global recession in 2008 and 2009. is an example of an economic/financial shock. The COVID pandemic of 2020-21 is a more recent example of a shock to global systems. These shocks changed how households and institutions used financial resources, which then translated into impacts on financial flows and uses of funds, including land ownership, use, and management. Investigations of the incidence and subsequent impacts of shocks is important in an increasingly tele-entangled world. In this session we shall explore how shocks in one part of the planet can influence land use and land management decisions elsewhere. Topics include the lingering repercussions of the COVID-19 lockdown on agriculture and conservation, the push and pull of migration from Central America, how exogenous shocks influence land use, migration, remittances to rural communities in Kyrgyzstan and southern Romania, and how bilateral remittance dynamics reveal the diversity of international connections.

Research Session

Organizer(s): Heidi Hausermann, Katie Meehan, Laura Schneider Land is increasingly understood as relational and interdependent, raising questions of how best to understand changes wrought by climate change, policy shifts, markets, and environmental injustice. This session brings together emerging scholarship on the diverse and changing epistemologies of land, especially vis-à-vis fresh takes on mixed methodology. We are interested in papers that: 1) investigate the types of knowledge and data currently privileged in land management and policy, and the implications; 2) creatively use mixed methods to tell nuanced and/or more complete stories of land and socio-ecological change; 3) provide innovative frameworks for understanding multi-scalar relationships shaping land dynamics; 4) examine ethical and participatory considerations in research relations and knowledge production; 5) propose trajectories toward more livable land futures through collaboration and creative practice. While we particularly encourage research based in Mexico and that puts land matters in relation to forests, agriculture, conservation, water, cities, food, and/or infrastructure, we are open to papers from diverse settings.

Research Session

This session delves into the transformative impact of GeoAI and Big Data in land system science and remote sensing, aligning with the overarching theme of 'The State of the World'. It focuses on how these innovative technologies have revolutionized our understanding and monitoring of the Earth's surface. High-resolution satellite imagery and extensive data collection offer unprecedented insights into land cover changes, deforestation, and urban growth. By employing advanced GeoAI techniques, including machine and deep learning, we can efficiently process and interpret these vast data sets. This approach enables us to discern intricate patterns and trends in land systems, which were previously elusive with traditional analytical methods. Our session explores global research utilizing GeoAI and Big Data, particularly in sustainable land management and environmental conservation. We showcase how these technologies are redefining land system science and enhancing our understandings of land cover and use dynamics, the interplay between human activities and the environment, and the feedback mechanisms influencing decision-making and management strategies. This session not only invites papers focusing on the applications and challenges of GeoAI but also encourages contributions addressing data ethics and bias concerns within the realm of GeoAI and Big Data. We are particularly interested in discussions around how data requirements and AI approaches might inadvertently contribute to or mitigate the North-South divides, emphasizing the need for responsible and equitable advancements in this rapidly evolving field.

Research Session

Organizer(s): He Yin, Nicholas Magliocca, Lina Eklund, Jamon Van Den Hoek, Alexander Prischepov Extralegal activities, such as armed conflicts and illicit economies, are increasingly recognized as significant drivers of land system dynamics and represent some of the most urgent challenges for sustainable development and social justice in many parts of the world. In situations of armed conflict, laws, and social norms are often suspended, while illicit activities actively defy them. These two contexts can catalyze or reinforce one another, leaving substantial footprints on landscapes. This research session aims to advance both theoretical and practical understanding of how armed conflicts and illicit economies shape landscapes and affect land systems, as well as the vulnerability and resilience of these landscapes. The increase in spatially-explicit data, such as Earth observation imagery and social sensing, offers new opportunities to monitor changes in land systems due to extralegal activities.Our session will feature presentations utilizing remote sensing, modeling, spatial analysis, and/or grounded approaches, as well as their integration, to document and explain the observed changes associated with extralegal activities. Topics in this session include: real-time monitoring of damage and destruction of land systems during armed conflicts; the impacts of armed conflicts and other confounding factors, such as climate change and state policy, on land systems; and the short-term and long-term implications of armed conflicts and illicit economies on land system functioning and their varied impacts on associated communities.This session will be linked to the planned Special Issue on this topic in the Journal of Land Use Science.

Research Session

Organizers: Garik Gutman (NASA HQ), Krishna Vadrevu (NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama, USA) and Chris Justice (University of Maryland College Park, USA) The growing spatial footprint and role of conservation suggests conservation will be a central component of many land systems, with far-reaching but often weakly understood social-ecological implications. Similarly, conservation increasingly interacts and competes with other land uses, creating opportunities and challenges. In this session we explore the role of conservation in land systems and the opportunities of seeing conservation as a land use (e.g., as a strategy, as a policy, as an activity, as a land-use type) and addressing and studying it through concepts and methodologies of Land System Science. We also discuss the limitations of such a framing. We invite both conceptual or empirical contributions addressing these issues, including changes in the extent and intensity of area-based conservation, cross-scale interactions, feedbacks and trade-offs between conservation and other land uses, and the opportunities and risks of seeing conservation as a land use. As an example, the footprint of area-based conservation has grown rapidly over the last decades and is expected to keep expanding, given the ambitious conservation policy goals and targets formulated under the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework. The latter include targets to conserve 30% of terrestrial and inland water areas (i.e., “30x30”, Target 3) and to restore 30% of all degraded ecosystems (Target 2), but also to place all lands under biodiversity-inclusive spatial planning and land management (Target 1). What are the social-ecological impacts of implementing these ambitious goals? How could conservation be mainstreamed to be integral to land management and governance? How will area-based observation feed back on other land uses and the trade-offs among them? We suggest that cross-fertilizing between Land System Science and Conservation Science has considerable potential to better address and answer such questions.

Research Session

Organizer(s): Andrew Bell, Thomas Falk, Sarobidy Rakotonarivo, Wei Zhang, Hagar Eididi, Ruth Meinzen-Dick Under many names (behavioral and framed field experiments, behavioral games, etc.), games now have several decades of both research and learning use in human-environment problem contexts. Games allow researchers and practitioners to center key dilemmas or shocks in the mind of the game player, putting focus on situations that may be rarely or never (yet) experienced, and advancing understanding for facilitator and player alike of how people will (should) respond to uncertain future scenarios. Games span a range of complexities - from pencil and paper, balls in cups, board games and tokens, through to computer-based games connected across networks - with each modality shaping what is possible within the game and how players’ attention will be focused. The flexibility with which different human-environment dilemmas may be represented in games (and thus the variation in what parts of human decision-making they link most closely to) mean both that games can be helpful in addressing a multitude of goals, and that it can be challenging to validate or benchmark the signals we obtain from game sessions and experiments. In this session, we invite presentations from researchers that do any of i) presenting novel empirical results or games that represent human-environment problem contexts; ii) consider how games connect to underlying mental models, existing theories, or other known benchmarks; or iii) consider the overlapping but often conflicting goals of games interventions for research and games for learning and development.

Research Session

Organizer(s): Marius von Essen Governing natural resources sustainably while ensuring social equity and economic well-being is one of the great challenges of the twenty-first century. Natural resource governance takes place in complex systems and its success is influenced by a variety of contextual conditions, ranging from the biophysical to the socio-political. While several studies have investigated conditions for success of governance interventions in the tropics, the role of individuals, institutions, and their relationships are less prominently discussed in the land systems literature.Civil servants and their civil society partners often call upon informal networks and relationships to solve problems and implement programs. Through the daily acts of problem solving, these civil servants also build capacity and form key relationships that serve as resources that can be used to solve other pressing problems. Their collective actions and the resulting (power) relations influence how governance interventions are designed, perceived, implemented, and maintained.In this session, we want to expand the existing literature on state capacity and problem solving by further exploring how individuals, institutions, and relationships shape the design, adoption, and implementation of private and public governance for sustainable land systems. We will ask: what role do civil servants, civil society partners, and other local actors play in creating land system governance realities? How do power relations between local and external actors shape the design and implementation of sustainability commitment? To what degree does the international community account for the needs and challenges faced by local actors when designing and promoting governance interventions? By posing these questions, we aim to improve our understanding of the role of individual actors in land systems governance and thereby point to pathways for positive transformation and future research.

Research Session

Humanity faces the grand challenge of providing an affordable and nutritious food supply to a growing and more affluent population in a sustainable and resilient manner. Agri-food system actors - including policy makers, corporations, farmers, traders, and consumers - must meet this challenge while considering potentially conflicting priorities, such as environmental sustainability (including water, biodiversity and climate), economic viability, nutritional health, cultural acceptance, equity, and resilience to shocks. Understanding this growing complexity - which can involve global supply chains and difficult socio-environmental tradeoffs - will be essential for achieving sustainable and resilient agri-food systems. Given the extensive effects of food systems on people and the planet, identifying feasible solutions to transform current food system practices offers promise for realizing widespread socio-environmental benefits and for achieving multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals. In this session, we welcome research from all aspects (e.g., food supply chains, food environments, socio-cultural factors) and dimensions (e.g., rural livelihoods, human health and nutrition, trade, natural resource use, biodiversity loss & climate change) of sustainable food systems, with a focus on identifying and testing solutions to transform food systems. This scope includes studies employing quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches to assess a range of outcomes from agri-food system solutions across multiple spatial and temporal scales, and the trade-offs or synergies that may emerge between them.

Research Session

Organizer(s): Britaldo Soares-Filho Increasing demand for agricultural commodities is an important indirect and direct driver of deforestation in tropical countries. To this end, public and private interest has gradually emerged over the past two decades but has taken center stage only in the early 2020s. In particular, traceability has consolidated as a market requirement to eliminate deforestation from agricultural supply chains, and as such has become pivotal for regulating global trade. Growing pressure for deforestation-free agriculture products has led to agreements by large companies to exclude deforesters from their supply chains (e.g., cattle agreements, soy moratorium), commitments from China and the United States to ban imports linked to deforestation, and more importantly regulations recently adopted by the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU) to enforce the import of deforestation-free products. The EU regulations require that companies trace the commodities back to their origin of production, at the same time proposing a benchmarking system to assign a level of deforestation risk to each sourcing country. In response to these ambitious regulations, private and public initiatives are increasingly seeking to develop solutions to trace origins of agricultural outputs and to identify whether they are linked to deforestation. In our session we will assess the legal, political, governance, and technical readiness for implementing the regulation standards and agreements, including monitoring systems already in place or proposed in both importing and producing countries. Although technical innovation is key to achieving thorough traceability, challenges also include the identification of indirect suppliers, handling of sensitive data used to check legal compliance, sales, and exports, and the need for avoiding costly private certification schemes through the development of public and transparent systems that ensure credibility as well as legitimacy built upon cross-country partnerships.

Lunch

Research Session

Organizer(s): Heidi Hausermann, Katie Meehan, Laura Schneider Land is increasingly understood as relational and interdependent, raising questions of how best to understand changes wrought by climate change, policy shifts, markets, and environmental injustice. This session brings together emerging scholarship on the diverse and changing epistemologies of land, especially vis-à-vis fresh takes on mixed methodology. We are interested in papers that: 1) investigate the types of knowledge and data currently privileged in land management and policy, and the implications; 2) creatively use mixed methods to tell nuanced and/or more complete stories of land and socio-ecological change; 3) provide innovative frameworks for understanding multi-scalar relationships shaping land dynamics; 4) examine ethical and participatory considerations in research relations and knowledge production; 5) propose trajectories toward more livable land futures through collaboration and creative practice. While we particularly encourage research based in Mexico and that puts land matters in relation to forests, agriculture, conservation, water, cities, food, and/or infrastructure, we are open to papers from diverse settings.

Research Session

This session delves into the transformative impact of GeoAI and Big Data in land system science and remote sensing, aligning with the overarching theme of 'The State of the World'. It focuses on how these innovative technologies have revolutionized our understanding and monitoring of the Earth's surface. High-resolution satellite imagery and extensive data collection offer unprecedented insights into land cover changes, deforestation, and urban growth. By employing advanced GeoAI techniques, including machine and deep learning, we can efficiently process and interpret these vast data sets. This approach enables us to discern intricate patterns and trends in land systems, which were previously elusive with traditional analytical methods. Our session explores global research utilizing GeoAI and Big Data, particularly in sustainable land management and environmental conservation. We showcase how these technologies are redefining land system science and enhancing our understandings of land cover and use dynamics, the interplay between human activities and the environment, and the feedback mechanisms influencing decision-making and management strategies. This session not only invites papers focusing on the applications and challenges of GeoAI but also encourages contributions addressing data ethics and bias concerns within the realm of GeoAI and Big Data. We are particularly interested in discussions around how data requirements and AI approaches might inadvertently contribute to or mitigate the North-South divides, emphasizing the need for responsible and equitable advancements in this rapidly evolving field.

Research Session

Organizer(s): He Yin, Nicholas Magliocca, Lina Eklund, Jamon Van Den Hoek, Alexander Prischepov Extralegal activities, such as armed conflicts and illicit economies, are increasingly recognized as significant drivers of land system dynamics and represent some of the most urgent challenges for sustainable development and social justice in many parts of the world. In situations of armed conflict, laws, and social norms are often suspended, while illicit activities actively defy them. These two contexts can catalyze or reinforce one another, leaving substantial footprints on landscapes. This research session aims to advance both theoretical and practical understanding of how armed conflicts and illicit economies shape landscapes and affect land systems, as well as the vulnerability and resilience of these landscapes. The increase in spatially-explicit data, such as Earth observation imagery and social sensing, offers new opportunities to monitor changes in land systems due to extralegal activities.Our session will feature presentations utilizing remote sensing, modeling, spatial analysis, and/or grounded approaches, as well as their integration, to document and explain the observed changes associated with extralegal activities. Topics in this session include: real-time monitoring of damage and destruction of land systems during armed conflicts; the impacts of armed conflicts and other confounding factors, such as climate change and state policy, on land systems; and the short-term and long-term implications of armed conflicts and illicit economies on land system functioning and their varied impacts on associated communities.This session will be linked to the planned Special Issue on this topic in the Journal of Land Use Science.

Research Session

Organizer(s): James Millington, Calum Brown, Derek Robinson Advances in the behavioural sciences and simulation modelling have stimulated growth in the use of alternatives to econometric and equilibrium-based models for investigating and understanding sustainable land system futures. These behavioural land systems models provide rich representations of human behaviour and institutional processes that enable us to imagine and evaluate possible alternative futures in diverse ways. Such alternative approaches include agent-based modelling, system dynamics models and Bayesian belief networks (among others) and allow exploration of adaptations of actors, feedbacks between actors and their environments, and impacts of specific policy decisions. Thus, behavioural models enable us to explore the constraints that behavioural, socio-economic, cultural and political realities place on achieving desired land-use policies, such as carbon dioxide removal and net-zero targets for climate change mitigation or habitat restoration and conservation for biodiversity. This session will bring together land system scientists to share and compare recent applications of behavioural models of land systems, including experiences of stakeholder engagement in the modelling process. Discussion will allow participants to explore directions for future advances and ongoing challenges to using and developing these tools. This discussion may include considering approaches to represent drivers of human behaviour (e.g. motivations or incentives, whether from social, market or regulatory sources), the importance of land manager and other stakeholder beliefs about how drivers will play out in future (i.e. anticipatory behaviour), and the effects of varying visions for land systems between communities and generations (e.g. farm succession). The session is linked to the BeModeLS GLP working group but welcomes participants from across the GLP community to explore the diversity of ways in which human behaviour can and needs to be represented in simulation models of land systems to imagine alternative futures, evaluate which futures are most likely to become prominent, and identify pathways to realizing desired outcomes.

Research Session

Organizer(s): Christopher Wong Models and scenarios are a key tool for the science-policy interface and disseminating scientific understanding of transition pathways to the wider public. To be impactful at enabling the necessary transformative change, models and scenarios should be coherent and explicit about their values and justice preferences. This is essential as biodiversity and land system research and policy exist at a nexus of political, economic and social debates over land and resource use and the allocation of the derived benefits. Our understanding of what just and value coherent pathways towards sustainability goals might look like from global to local scales, and which interventions are most socially acceptable and just, remain limited. New biodiversity & land use-relevant scenarios are emerging, including adaptations of the SSP/RCP scenario framework and scenarios generated through the new Nature Futures Framework, that foster new collaborations between various scientific communities. An increasing number of modelling tools are developed and applied to quantitatively assess these scenarios and support policy development. However, we require a greater understanding of the equity and justice assumptions and implications of this research. This session aims to feature new and ongoing scenario and model work for land use and biodiversity in various contexts from local to global scales with a focus on:- value-explicit scenarios designed to address equity and justice aspects of land use transformations towards positive futures for nature, climate and people,- modelling applications at multiple scales, designed to assess such scenarios or to support policy processes,- reflections on the role of values and justice in exploring various equity aspects in pathways towards achieving sustainability targets.Our confirmed speakers will cover different aspects of how justice can be integrated into land use and biodiversity research including scenario design, Christopher Wong, IIASA, modelling and conservation planning, Camille Venier-Cambron, VU, and downscaling global targets, Larissa Nowak, SGN.

Research Session

Organizer(s): Robert Heilmayr Payments for ecosystem services (PES) can incentivize communities to manage their lands more sustainably. However, many existing payment programs have suffered from a lack of additionality, paying for practices that would have been undertaken even without payments. Such non-additionality can undermine the environmental impact of PES or inflate their cost, weakening public confidence in the policy. In this session, we will imagine a future in which PES programs in land systems (e.g. land use subsidies, carbon offsets) are re-designed to ensure additionality, encouraging more just and impactful payments. Presentations will propose, or document the impacts of, innovative policies that have the potential to increase the additionality of PES programs. These policy innovations could take a wide variety of forms including, for example, (a) new methods to more reliably measure counterfactuals; (b) techniques for targeting payments to overcome adverse selection; or (c) mechanism design to elicit baseline behavior.Note: I believe this is an incredibly active area of research. If there are a lot of submissions, I could imagine breaking this into two sessions, with the first presenting research that highlights the problem of additionality (State of the World theme), and the second proposing solutions (Imagining the Future theme).

Research Session

Organizer(s): Katharina Waha, Maria Backhouse This session is intended to provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to share insights on the role of smallholder agriculture in future land and agricultural systems. Smallholders today have a critical role in local and global land and food systems, for local livelihoods and agrobiodiversity, and for climate mitigation and adaptation. Nevertheless, they face multiple challenges such as land and water grabs, vulnerability to environmental and socioeconomic shocks, and low capacity to influence national and international policies. We encourage quantitative, qualitative, or integrated approaches and methods, case studies as well as larger-scale studies.We welcome contributions that:- Assess food sovereignty and food security in smallholder agriculture systems in different parts of the world, preferably so that we can compare across different locations.- Present best practices and evidence of inclusive and just transformations towards improved livelihoods, land and water access, and political participation.- Explore the significance of land rights and property regimes for just transformations.- Identify drivers of smallholder’s transformations and progress ideally where conclusions can potentially be upscaled and applied elsewhere.- Study changes in numbers of smallholders in a local, regional, or global context together with the associated challenges of data collection and analysis and terminology.- Investigate the impacts of market-based solutions to climate change (e.g. carbon trading) and biodiversity (e.g. payments for ecosystem services) on smallholders in different parts of the world.- Discuss the relevance of climate-land interactions specific to smallholder agriculture, for example, impacts of climate change and variability for smallholder agriculture and the role of smallholder agriculture in climate mitigation. - Focus on a political, economic, social, or biophysical element of smallholder agriculture that has changed in the past or is expected to change in the future with relevance to the way we imagine future land systems.

Research Session

Organizer(s): Carole Dalin, Kimberly Carlson, James Gerber Humanity faces the grand challenge of providing an affordable and nutritious food supply to a growing and more affluent population in a sustainable and resilient manner. Agri-food system actors - including policy makers, corporations, farmers, traders, and consumers - must meet this challenge while considering potentially conflicting priorities, such as environmental sustainability (including water, biodiversity and climate), economic viability, nutritional health, cultural acceptance, equity, and resilience to shocks. Understanding this growing complexity - which can involve global supply chains and difficult socio-environmental tradeoffs - will be essential for achieving sustainable and resilient agri-food systems. Given the extensive effects of food systems on people and the planet, identifying feasible solutions to transform current food system practices offers promise for realizing widespread socio-environmental benefits and for achieving multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals. In this session, we welcome research from all aspects (e.g., food supply chains, food environments, socio-cultural factors) and dimensions (e.g., rural livelihoods, human health and nutrition, trade, natural resource use, biodiversity loss & climate change) of sustainable food systems, with a focus on identifying and testing solutions to transform food systems. This scope includes studies employing quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches to assess a range of outcomes from agri-food system solutions across multiple spatial and temporal scales, and the trade-offs or synergies that may emerge between them.

Research Session

Organizer(s): Pamela Jagger, Rob Bailis Energy transitions are occurring throughout low and middle-income countries with varying degrees of speed and success. Some countries have made major progress with most of the population transitioning from biomass fuels to modern clean fuels, potentially relieving the pressure that demand for energy services places on forest and woodland ecosystems. In other contexts, energy transitions are slower and more nuanced, for example, population-level transitions from fuelwood to charcoal, which has different implications for land use change. Still others are stagnant, remaining heavily reliant on biomass fuels in the face of rapidly growing and urbanizing populations and missing or stagnant markets for clean fuels and technologies. The impact of energy transitions on patterns of land use change are poorly understood. While there is some evidence of localized effects on land use land cover change (LULCC) in conditions where biomass reliance is high and persistent, the effect of successful or partial energy transitions on LULCC is poorly understood. We hope to gain insights as to whether major energy transitions relieve pressure on deforestation and forest degradation and on the impact of partial energy transitions such as population-level shifts from fuelwood to charcoal as is occurring in several low-income countries. This session will feature analyses that combine sociodemographic data on energy transitions and high-quality spatial data on LULCC over time. The aim of the session is to provide insights into the coupled nature of energy transitions and the health of forest and woodland ecosystems. Confirming the hypothesis that energy transitions support healthy landscapes can provide additional support for investment in energy services, and understanding the role of more nuanced and slower paced energy transitions is important to informing policies surrounding land use and conservation.

Break / Networking

Innovative and Immersive Session

The tropics are experiencing dramatic changes as a result of climate and land-use change. Tropical forests will respond with shifts in carbon flux dynamics, water cycling, and species composition, resulting in feedbacks with globally important consequences for the people who depend upon them. However, the generalizability of different tropical forest responses remains highly uncertain. In addition, community engagement in tropical forest research is critical for positioning communities from the tropics to inform, participate in, and benefit from research about the region. Community engagement also has the potential to support the training of the next generation of scientists from the tropics. Ensuring that community engagement is equitable demands thoughtful research practices. We invite you to participate in an interactive session to learn about a recent effort to scope one of two possible options for NASA's next Terrestrial Field Ecology Campaign and discuss community engagement best practices. This session will include two sections. First, the co-organizers will report on a white paper that outlines a multidisciplinary effort to address knowledge gaps in tropical forest regions’ responses to climate change that centers capacity building and equitable engagement with international collaborators. Second, we will facilitate space for the GLP community to express their needs and interests related to tropical forest research and develop action items based on these needs-with an emphasis on community members and researchers from the tropics. The first section will include a series of short talks on community-engaged research in the tropics, an overview of PANGEA and the process of scoping a NASA decadal campaign, and PANGEA's approach to community engagement. Following the short talks, a structured roundtable discussion and breakout groups will address: 1) Similarities and differences across tropical regions in forest structure, function, biodiversity, biogeochemical cycling, social-ecological systems, and disturbance processes; 2) Understanding of the vulnerability and resilience of tropical forest ecosystems to global change; 3) The scientific and regionally specific basis for informed decision-making to guide societal responses to climate change mitigation and adaptation and biodiversity conservation; and 4) Practices for fair and just community engagement and equitable collaborations, and existing barriers.

Research Session

Organizer(s): Sophie Avila Social and nature interactions in landscapes are constantly changing on time and space, shaping complex systems in different territories. Therefore, this session is looking to address theoretical and methodological approaches to study social ecological interaction and their changes on time and space. Showing these systems trajectories allows to understand the way different drivers of change determine the resilience of systems and to visualize different scenarios of change and actions needed to face them. Researchers and practitioners are invited to expose different drivers of change and the effects on the social-ecological interactions creating future scenarios. Modelling approaches or other participatory methods are some of the tools presented in this session.

Research Session

This session focuses on methods for quantifying the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions stemming from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). REDD projects aim to reduce GHG emissions by preserving forest ecosystem services via prevention of future deforestation and forest degradation. The REDD framework allows carbon emitters to compensate for (offset) their own GHG emissions by funding forest conservation projects. The success and credibility of REDD projects depends upon their implementation and the accounting system, which can take a variety of forms. Remote Sensing and GIS-based predictive simulation models are important tools to help estimate the amount of deforestation, and the ensuing GHG emissions, that would occur in the absence of the project - the project’s baseline or business-as-usual scenario - and, thereby, determine the number of carbon credits that the REDD project can claim to achieve. This session will shed light on various issues of the REDD paradigm, especially concerning the establishment of baselines land change mapping, and modeling.

Innovative and Immersive Session

This session invites participants to play a mini-scenathon to explore the complex challenges surrounding food and land systems. A Scenathon (“scenario marathon”) is a multi-country, multi objectives, participatory experiment developed by the FABLE Consortium. Using the FABLE Calculator - an Excel-based model with a flexible scenario design interface, participants will embark on an immersive journey to reconcile countries’ priorities with global sustainability.Groups of 3 to 4 participants will be formed to play a country. Participants will step into the shoes of representatives from the Ministries of Agriculture, Environment and Health. After an introduction including a quiz to get familiar with the FABLE Calculator, participants will review the national targets of their country and the global sustainability goals that all countries need to achieve collectively at the horizon 2030 and 2050. Then, they will test the different levers of the tool, design their own scenarios, and try to identify the best combination of levers to achieve both national targets and global sustainability and limit trade-offs. Groups will reconvene to collectively observe progress toward global sustainability targets once the new national pathways are aggregated to the global level. The contribution of each country to meet the global climate mitigation target will be compared to what would be fair using different concepts of fairness. Participants will be invited to share reflections on how to bridge the gap with the global sustainability targets based on the results of the fairness assessment and their country’s constraints. Can they increase their effort on represented levers of change? Can they rely on technologies not yet represented in the tool? Which other shifts — economic, institutional, behavioral—are required?This hands-on session will offer participants new perspectives on potential solutions and difficulties to act collectively to meet the global sustainability targets related to food and land systems.

Research Session

The expansion of agricultural commodity production possesses a severe threat to global ecosystem, driving deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and biodiversity loss. Private companies involved in the production and trade of agricultural commodities play a key role in addressing the challenges associated with them. Consequently, there is an urgent need to exert pressure on these stakeholders to develop policies and initiatives that can achieve structural and behavioural changes towards sustainable land use practices. While these companies in recent years have responded with range of supply chain policies and initiatives, their impacts on achieving the behavioural and structural changes needed to transform the agriculture sector remains limited due to inadequate consideration of equity in the design and implementation of the initiatives, particularly in commodities involving smallholder production. With a growing global attention on the role of the private sector in producing transformations at scale, this session seeks to examine the design and implementation pathways of private sector initiatives within forest-risk commodity sectors . By delving into issues of equity, supply chain arrangements, and public sector involvement, we will examine: Under what conditions do private sector initiatives improve conservation and livelihood outcomes? What pathways (political, policy, institutional, etc) are necessary for achieving structural and behavioural transformative changes in the land use sector and what role can the private sector play in that, if any? The discussion will also explore the role of local communities, government, and distant consumers in reshaping the agriculture landscape. Through interdisciplinary perspectives, the session aims to provide insights into the challenges and opportunities associated with private initiatives, from their design through implementation, fostering a deeper understanding of how they can contribute to a sustainable and equitable future in land use practices

Innovative and Immersive Session

This session will explore the intersection of Human Rights and Environmental Health, from a legal and scientific standpoint, in light of the UN General Assembly's resolution recognising the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment in July 2022. We aim to bring together lawyers and scientists to improve our capacity to map, monitor and act on human environmental rights violations across the world. We will begin our session with experts from both environmental law and science. We will ask lawyers what are the major gaps that scientists need to fill to support existing law and policy, and, the scientists, what are the major gaps they see in the existing law and policy environment in acting on scientific knowledge. We will then work with attendees to discuss the ways that action on environmental injustices across different scales - global, regional, local, can be supported by the land system science community. We welcome input from experts on food security, water security, biodiversity, clean air, non-toxic environments, and safe climate to exchange views on the importance, kinds, and real-world uses of science for the realization of these rights. We will look at the practical and strategic applications for legal investigations, environmental justice advocacy, identifying gaps in present approaches, reviewing future technology, and brainstorming ideas for moving the field forward. We expect participants to actively engage, provide fresh perspectives, and collaborate on novel pathways to merging law and science. Our objective is to develop a list of improvements in mapping and monitoring approaches and techniques, and potential research directions, where the role of the land system science community will be emphasized. These outcomes are expected to enhance our understanding of environmental human rights violations and their interaction with social dimensions, contributing to a more informed approach to these issues in line with the conference's theme of transformative changes. We welcome one and all! Invited presenters include: Prof David R. Boyd, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment Prof Joyeeta Gupta, University of Amsterdam Dr Laura Catrejon-Violante, University of British Columbia Naia Ormaza-Zulueta, University of Colorado, Boulder

Innovative and Immersive Session

The relationships and connections of indigenous peoples with their territory and nature are materialized through different means: governance, economic activities, medicine, spirituality, construction materials, ancestral art and, of course, food. Without romanticizing indigenous food systems, which are currently threatened by the loss of biodiversity, territorial dispossession, excessive extractivism and loss of identity, we seek to explore their meanings in order to better understand the impacts, changes and conservation measures. They are understood as a key piece to understand the livelihoods of the peoples, the changes they have gone through, the relationships they maintain through food with their nature, ancestry and with the other people who inhabit their territories. We also aim to explore whether food sovereignty is one of the main objectives to achieve the Amazonian 'full life' or whether it has a complementary role. In this session, led by indigenous representatives of the Peruvian Amazon and accompanied by research and conservation organizations, we propose that through groups and the participatory methodology of World Café we explore the role of food systems based on four moments/spaces: 1) Transformation in food systems; 2) Impacts of transformations; 3) Compatibility with current processes; and 4) Progress towards indigenous food sovereignty. We maintain that the proposed session can provide interesting guidelines to unravel vital elements of the socio-ecological system of an indigenous people through information about their food, its availability or scarcity, as well as the causes and impacts that it generates. This dynamic may be replicable in other territorial contexts. With this, the transformations can be better understood, involving historical and current changes of identity processes of indigenous peoples, addressing more effectively the challenge of a sustainable and fair development.

Innovative and Immersive Session

Organizer(s): Elisabeth Huber-Sannwald, Natalia Martínez Tagüeña, Víctor Manuel Reyes Gómez, Simone Lucatello, Juana Claudia Leyva Aguilera, Georges Seingier, Salvador Narváez Torres, Sergio Armando Campos Villavicencio & Oscar Alberto Jimenez Orocio Efforts to combat desertification and restore drylands social-ecological systems need novel learning environments that engage multistakeholder participation. Emerging partnerships are essential to accomplish the Sustainable Development Agenda of the United Nations. In 2017, a multisectoral group committed to drylands stewardship founded the ‘International Network for Drylands Sustainability (Spanish acronym ‘RISZA’) to foster novel transformative learning environments and co-generate useful knowledge with local transdisciplinary partnerships including academics, government representatives, civil society members, NGOs, and indigenous groups, for integrated drylands assessments, social-ecological conservation, restoration, and development projects, and for guiding adaptive management and policy development. RISZA’s operational framework was co-designed with Transdisciplinarity, Social-ecological System (SES), Interculturality, and Governance as main pillars. A long-term initiative that emanated from this framework is the ‘Social-ecological Participatory Observatories (SEPO)’ project. It generates novel spaces to collectively produce, compile, and exchange knowledge, bringing together interested stakeholders of a particular SES to jointly understand how to put resilience, adaptation, and transformative learning into practice in project co-design and co-development, and in participatory policy making to achieve dryland sustainability.The objective of this session is to share the experiences of different stakeholders linked to SEPO representative of diverse Mexican dryland contexts, and to motivate the implementation of similar transformative learning environments in other drylands worldwide. We will highlight how social innovations can generate enabling environments guiding fundamental change at the local scale.

Innovative and Immersive Session

Organizer(s): Nicholas Magliocca, Emily Burchfield The Anthropocene’s triple challenge of preventing biodiversity loss, mitigating the effects of climate change, and sustainably and equitably providing resources for a growing human population will make significant agricultural transformation both necessary and inevitable. Across the globe, agricultural stakeholders are turning these significant challenges into opportunities to engage in transformative adaptation towards more sustainable, just, and resilient agricultural futures. However, pathways for transformation in agricultural land systems remain broadly conceptualized and tangible examples of successful, co-produced efforts toward transformation are sparse. Although transformation is understood to be situated and contingent on local socio-cultural, political, psychological, and/or economic conditions, there are likely to be bright spots - or successful efforts to engage in transformative action - from which more generalizable insights, best practices, and inspiration can be drawn.In this interactive panel session, we welcome submissions from groups working with stakeholders to (1) understand, elevate, and amplify bright spots; 2) identify the most effective leverage points to move agricultural systems towards more desirable futures; and (3) co-produce pathways towards these futures. We are particularly interested in work that pioneers new methods to integrate “big” data with “deep” qualitative data to understand agricultural system transformation across multiple scales. Also of interest are examples of normative backcasting, futures thinking, participatory action research, or exploratory modeling approaches to deepen understanding of and/or implement transformative pathways in agricultural systems.

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