Co-producing Knowledge for Sustainable Development in Telecoupled Land Systems

Land is at the core of our planet’s sustainable development challenges. Different actors have contesting claims on ecosystem services provided by local land systems. Land-use changes therefore always entail trade-offs in terms of ecosystem service provision. The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development offers a normative frame for land system science to produce relevant knowledge for transformation. Such knowledge should include an understanding of social-ecological systems from a systemic as well as a power perspective. Telecoupled interactions between distant systems present an additional challenge to knowledge production requiring methodological innovation. To co-produce evidence for navigating trade-offs inherent to land-use changes, we need to embrace the three knowledge dimensions of systems, target, and transformation knowledge and make use of inter- and transdisciplinary research approaches