Land use is essential to our well-being and therefore central to many of the largest sustainability challenges in the 21st Century, including global food security, climate change mitigation, access to clean water and air, and biodiversity conservation. However, finding pathways for sustainable land use is difficult because of the complex processes of globalization that tie distant places together. Scholars in the field of land system science have started analysing such global connections between different places through the concept of ‘telecoupling’ – which is the focus of a new book just published with Palgrave McMillan by Dr. Cecilie Friis and Prof. Jonas Ø. Nielsen, both researchers at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU). The book is titled Telecoupling. Exploring land-use change in a globalised world.

"We are talking about telecoupling as networks of long-distance flows", the authors explain. "These flows can consist of raw materials, energy, and products, but also of people, information, policies, technology, and capital." For example, the production of pork in Lower-Saxony, Germany, is only possible because of imports of soy for feed from Brazil, imports that are in turn influenced by, and influence other ‘flows’ including trade-relationship, technological transfers and information flows. "In our everyday lives, we often don’t consider how the products we consume are directly and indirectly connected to far away land-use changes such as deforestation of the tropical and dry forests. A process that facilitates the production of soy used to feed livestock like pigs in Lower-Saxony", the researchers say. With their book, they want to contribute to a better understanding of this spatial decoupling of production and consumption of land based products. "Land resources are limited on Earth, and we must decide wisely how to use them. Understanding what drives particular land-use changes is crucial in this respect."

Friis und Nielsen, both based at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) and the Geography Department, have been working on land-use changes, their causes and consequences for a long time. For their book, they invited a large group of world-class scholars including several HU colleagues to contribute. Together they examine the conditions that define telecoupling, the outcomes produced by them, the governance tools available to steer telecoupled systems onto desired pathways, as well as methods to capture flows across distances.

“The idea of the book came about because we wanted to consolidate our knowledge of telecoupled land-use change as well as invite prominent scholars to reflect upon this concept and how it might help us capture the global connections that define land-use change in particular places”, the two geographers say. “It was important for us to make a book. Land system science is a field defined by journal articles but books do something different, namely reflect in a collective and organized matter on an important topic such as how to make our world more sustainable. We hope our book contributes to this agenda as well as to science”, Friis and Nielsen conclude.

The book contributes to the Global Land Programme (glp.earth) where Prof. Nielsen is on the Scientific Steering Committee and Dr. Friis leads a Working Group on telecoupling. Telecoupling is also the central topic in the European Union Horizon 2020 funded Innovative Training Network (ITN) COUPLED. Operationalising telecouplings for solving sustainability challenges related to land use that Prof. Nielsen coordinates (coupled-itn.eu).

Publication

Friis, C. & J.Ø. Nielsen, ed. (2019): Telecoupling. Exploring Land-Use Change in a Globalised World. Palgrave McMillan.

Link to Publication

Contacts

Dr. Cecilie Friis

Phone: +49 (030) 2093-66349
cecilie.friis@hu-berlin.de

Prof. Jonas Østergaard Nielsen

Phone: +49 (030) 2093-66341
jonas.ostergaard.nielsen@hu-berlin.de