landscape2013 Transitions in Landscape and Land Use

The Summer School takes place in the context of complex land use transitions expected for the near and mid-term future.

The land system is central to understanding the relationship between people and their environment. The sustainable provision of goods and services depends critically on managing land resources without damaging the natural resource base. To assess possible future impacts it becomes important to understand how land use change affects the environment and how this, in turn, feeds back into human livelihood strategies or influences the vulnerability of people and places.  

Significant progress has been made in deepening understanding of the land system over the last few decades promoted by ‘The Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystem’ and ‘Land Use Land Cover Change’ communities under the IGBP and IHDP programmes. LUCC demonstrated the pivotal role of land change in the Earth system and helped the international research community to greatly increase its understanding of the natural dynamics of land use change and its consequences. The Global Land Project has continued the work of LUCC, and in doing so identified two major challenges in studying the links between human transformations of land systems and the changing role of land systems in Earth System functioning: (a) up-scaling of local and regional process understanding to achieve global process understanding, and (b) integrating the societal and environmental dimensions of the land system problem.

Links between decision-making, ecosystem services and global environmental change define important feedback pathways for human activities at the local and regional scale, and to and from the global scale. However, land system research has to cope with the substantial challenge of multi- and interdisciplinarity to bridge the nature-society divide. We are in a position to understand some of the multidisciplinary issues affecting land system science including: the behaviour of people and society (agents and structure), the multi-level character of both decision makers and land units, the ways in which people and land units are connected to the broader world within which they exist and, the aspect of time, both past and future.

The VOLANTE summer school addresses these issues, and stimulates scientific debate about the possibilities to cope with the challenges of land use management in the future.