What are the incentives for these outside actors to participate?
The world is getting increasingly complex and there is a broad desire out there to work across traditional sectoral boundaries. Societal actors also demand new partnerships. This conference provides an opportunity to build trust and common understandings.
Everyone is affected by land system issues: from food production to spatial planning, raw material extraction, nature conservation, protection against natural hazards, etc. In view of this complexity and associated trade-offs, is it even possible to design a coherent scientific programme in response?
We can develop a scientific programme or agenda that improves understanding of how we, as human societies, can design more sustainable land system architectures. Land system science is gradually transitioning from research about human–environmental systems to research for sustainable development of such systems. Land systems are the loci for sustainability transformations. Use of other, overlapping systems perspectives can help us identify levers for change, such as looking at value chains, for example related to palm oil. In addition, territorial or flow-based land systems perspectives can reveal how different actors shape policies based on their own specific interests.
GLP is one of four research projects of Future Earth, one of the largest research networks in the world. In addition to GLP, the Mountain Research Initiative (MRI), the Past Global Changes (PAGES), and the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA) are also located at the University of Bern. What makes the University of Bern so attractive for the international research community on these topics?
The University of Bern has shown a longstanding commitment to nurturing centres of excellence on pressing issues of global environmental change, such as the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) and the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR). And the city of Bern hosts key members of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences – especially the Swiss National Academies of Science, which has supported research on global environmental change for many years. So, Bern has become a hub of scientific excellence and has provided key platforms in support of such research. And CDE is a natural home for GLP, as their transformative missions largely mirror one another.
This interview was also published in the CDE magazine Spotlight.
Read more about the Open Science Meeting 2019 on the Global Land Programme website