This week Deliverable 5.3 Europe-LAND’s Telecoupling Framework was submitted, a major milestone advancing the project’s work on sustainable land-use strategies amid climate change and biodiversity challenges. This deliverable brings together conceptual, methodological, and empirical insights to support a deeper understanding of what drives land-use decisions across Europe.
The research work, led by an interdisciplinary team at the Slovak Institute of Agriculture in Nitra (Slovakia) presents a comprehensive framework including detailed datasets, drawing from Europe-LAND’s eight local case studies.
The central contribution of Deliverable 5.3 is a novel telecoupling framework positioned to integrate natural and social sciences in order to better explain how people, institutions, and ecological processes interact across distances. The framework responds to existing gaps in land-use research by combining quantitative indicators with qualitative perspectives. This combined approach strengthens the project’s ability to analyze how land-use change emerges from deeply interconnected systems.
The methodological foundations of the Europe-LAND framework emphasize the importance of interdisciplinarity and collaboration. The research draws on a wide range of approaches used in telecoupling studies, from document analysis and interviews to ecological mapping, participatory methods, and social network analysis. These approaches help capture both direct land-use pressures and underlying drivers while strengthening the ability to identify how different actors influence land-use outcomes.
The Europe-LAND framework also incorporates insights on coupled human and natural systems and emerging concepts such as metacoupling, emphasizing that local, adjacent, and distant interactions must all be considered when analyzing land-use trajectories. This expanded perspective allows Europe-LAND to better understand regional differences, feedback loops, and the interconnectedness of various socio-environmental factors influencing land-use
Further, Deliverable 5.3 also outlines steps for conducting stakeholder and actor analysis. These steps help identify key land-use actors, assess their levels of influence and dependency, and map relationships among them. Understanding these dynamics is essential for developing more effective and inclusive land-use strategies that consider power relations, institutional arrangements, and the distribution of benefits and risks.
In summary, the Europe-LAND telecoupling framework is designed with flexibility in mind, as well as an understanding of how crucial it is to combine qualitative and quantitative data to understand the full spectrum of interactions shaping land-use change across the EU. As Europe-LAND moves forward, the framework will guide research on land-use transitions and support the development of more resilient, evidence-based policy approaches within the frame of the ongoing project and beyond.