Humanity’s use of land for agriculture, energy,  mining, and other extractive activities puts great pressure on the planet’s biodiversity, carbon sequestration potential, nutrient cycles, and soil and water health. At the same time, global environmental challenges such as climate change are already creating negative impacts on current agri-food production systems and may create heightened challenges for future food security and access. These challenges are even greater for the large number of small-scale producers and miners who frequently live below the poverty line. Local and indigenous communities – frequently best-placed to maintain ecosystem integrity over time – furthermore struggle in protecting their land from the incursion by external actors.

With a growing global population and increasing adoption of middle-class consumption patterns, how can agri-food systems become more sustainable in their impact on the planet’s resources while meeting human needs? Can we find and scale up win-wins of agri-food systems that improve our climate mitigation and adaptation potential? And how can other land use activities – including the mining of minerals critical for the renewable energy transition – be conducted in ways that avoid negative impacts on local communities and ecosystems? 

In this focus area, researchers investigate both the impacts of global change on current land use activities as well as potential solutions to environmental and social sustainability problems. Such solutions may range from new agricultural practices and optimized resource allocation to novel approaches to the public and private governance of agri-food and mineral value chains and production systems. Research questions include: What are impacts of global change on land use at different regional scales? How should agri-food production and other land use practices change in order to preserve natural resources as well as our carbon budget? What approaches can help to distribute income along value chains and empower marginalized smallholder farmers and workers? What types of rule-making and enforcement mechanisms exist that govern these processes, and how effective are they in creating change?