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Day 1: State of the Planet • Theme: Governing Across Scales

Telecoupling and land change in emerging economies: Trade and the rise of eco-consumerism

Eric Lambin, School of Earth Sciences & Woods Inst., Stanford Univ., and Earth & Life Inst., Univ. of Louvain, USA and Belgium; Anette Reenberg, Department of Geography and Geology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark; Juliette Caulkins, UTZ Certified Head Office, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Tobias Langanke, GLP International Project Office, Department of Geography and Geology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Session content: In our highly globalized world, land-change is increasingly influenced by socio-economic activities in remote places. These include consumption and production patterns, international trade, migrations, financial flows, and new forms of global governance emerging from international institutions and civil society. These distant linkages of both human and natural systems have been termed "telecoupling". They mostly affect commodities that are produced in emerging economies, for which there are global, expanding markets and for which demand is elastic (e.g., soybean, palm oil, coffee, meat, cocoa, timber). They create considerable challenges to understand drivers of land change and to design local to national policies to control the impact of globalization on natural ecosystems. These long-range connections often lead to unexpected and far-reaching impacts that cascade through the Earth system. Recent work has focused on consumption and production of biomass (Haberl et al., 2009) and mechanisms through which globalization impacts land change (Lambin and Meyfroidt, 2011). The rise of eco-consumerism and various demand-driven international instruments such as certification systems, roundtables, moratoria, payments for ecosystem services, and NGO campaigns offer promising ways to harness the forces of globalization. These approaches reconnect land use decisions by producers in developing countries to consumer preference at the other end of the supply chain.

This session attempts, firstly, to take stock on recent understanding of the mechanisms and implications of telecoupling for land change; and secondly to evaluate emerging trends to address these mechanisms, mostly through demand-based instruments that harness global economic forces.