Sustainable Land Management

In November 2010, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) launched the collaborative research programme Sustainable Land Management.

Using transdisciplinary research approaches, the programme aims to improve our understanding of interacting ecological and socio-economic systems and help designing better land management policies. With its diverse regional projects, this programme is currently one of the largest transdisciplinary research activities on land use management worldwide.

Key Features

Sustainable Land Management aims to produce new knowledge for effective decision-making in the area of land and natural resource management. The programme integrates science and practice in order to develop new strategies, technologies and system solutions for sustainable land management and mitigation of climate change based on exemplary solutions from selected regional case studies. Sustainable Land Management focuses on two core activities and research approaches, Module A (Interactions between land management, climate change and ecosystem) and Module B (Innovative system solutions for sustainable land management)

Within the research programme, various regions severely affected by climate and structural-demographic changes were selected as representative case studies. In close cooperation with their local partners in science and practice, researchers seek suitable solutions to the regional and local issues that could be consecutively implemented as general policies and transferred to comparable regions.

Module A – Interactions between land management, climate change and ecosystem

Module A includes a wide range of regional projects with specific, but interlinked research activities:

Carbiocial – Carbon sequestration, biodiversity and social structures in Southern Amazonia: models and implementation of carbon-optimized land management strategies
CC-LandStraD – Interdependencies between land-use and climate change – Strategies for a sustainable land-use management in Germany
COMTESS – Sustainable coastal land management: Trade-offs in ecosystem services
INNOVATE – Interplay between the multiple uses of water reservoirs via innovative coupling of substance cycles in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems
KULUNDA – How to prevent the next »Global Dust Bowl«? Ecological and economic strategies for sustainable land management in the Russian steppes: A potential solution to climate change
LEGATO – Land-use intensity and ecological engineering – Assessment tools for risks and opportunities in irrigated rice based production systems
LUCCi – Land-use and climate change interactions in the Vu Gia Thu Bon River Basin, Central Vietnam
SASCHA – Sustainable land management and adaptation strategies to climate change for the Western Siberian corn-belt
SuLaMa – Participatory research to support sustainable land management on the Mahafaly Plateau in South-western Madagascar
SuMaRiO – Sustainable management of river oases along the Tarim River / China
SURUMER – Sustainable rubber cultivation in the Mekong Region – Development of an integrative land-use concept in Yunnan Province / China
The Future Okavango – Scientific support for sustainable land and resource management in the Okavango basin

Module B – Innovative system solutions for sustainable land management

To learn more about the Module B regional projects please take a look at the module B section on our website.

Scientific Coordination

The Module A regional projects are scientifically coordinated and synthesized by a cross cutting project GLUES (Global Assessment of Land Use Dynamics, Greenhouse Gas Emmissions and Ecosystem Services).

GLUES Led by

• Prof. Dr. Ralf Seppelt (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ (Germany) Department of Computational Landscape Ecology)
• Andreas Werntze, MSc. (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ (Germany) Department of Computational Landscape Ecology)