Why conceptualizing sustainable land use locally may be counterproductive - New PNAS paper from DGG

Facing a situation with accelerating population growth and urbanization at the global level, it is increasingly important to apply land use policies that are sustainable. However, current approaches to sustainability tend to focus primarily on local impacts of policies, thus not providing the full picture of implications in faraway places that are affected by these policies.

Therefore, it is crucial to develop novel ways of thinking about sustainability to avoid implementing seemingly sustainable policies that may have negative impacts in a global perspective. This may for instance be the case when eating locally is promoted, not taking into account that this “might undermine the livelihoods of distant farmers who may be using less energy-intensive methods to produce food than local growers”, as Karen Seto explains.

Karen Seto from Yale University and Anette Reenberg from DGG are leading authors of a paper about 'Urban land teleconnections and sustainability' published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in early May. The paper proposes to rethink notions of sustainability and get away from thinking of urban sustainability, or land use sustainability, as a localized issue.

The concept of teleconnections is borrowed from climate science to help elaborating a conceptual framework for examining land change by explicitly linking it to underlying urban processes.

The paper is the outcome of an explorative workshop, jointly organized by the Global Land Project, that was hosted by the University of Copenhagen in 2006-2011, and the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC) project hosted at Arizona State University.

You can access the paper here.