New global study offers roadmap for sustainable and just land policies 

 

 

 

“Land systems sit at the heart of today’s biggest global challenges—from food security to biodiversity conservation,” said Ariane de Bremond, Executive Officer of the Global Land Programme, which convened the authors. “Designing policies that are both sustainable and just is difficult, but land system science now offers more powerful insights to guide better governance.” 

The research, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, stems from a Royal Society Theo Murphy International Scientific Meeting awarded to the Global Land Programme to support innovative, cross-disciplinary science-policy dialogues. The Cambridge meeting brought together 22 scientists and communicators from 11 countries to identify principles for more just and sustainable land policies. The authors distilled eight guiding principles that follow the stages of a typical policy cycle and tested how real-world policies align with them through two examples: land-based mitigation and biodiversity-friendly agriculture. The goal is to help ensure that land policies can better reflect and address complex realities of land systems and lead to fairer and more sustainable outcomes. 

“This work builds on a previous study articulating ten general facts about land use and land systems that have implications for sustainability efforts,” added Patrick Meyfroidt, co-author of this study, lead author of the Global Land Programme’s study on 10 facts about land systems, and professor at UCLouvain in Belgium. “Here we built on the concrete expertise from participants to pull the thread further from empirical statements towards actual guidance for policy design and implementation.” 

Policymaking often unfolds in cycles, from identifying problems and designing solutions to implementing and evaluating them. In practice, these stages overlap, as new policies build on lessons learned from previous ones. The study outlines eight interconnected principles to guide more just and sustainable land systems. These include recognizing diverse rights and knowledge systems, being politically strategic, balancing multiple goals, tackling systemic drivers of inequality, designing across scales and sectors, co-developing solutions with affected groups, setting clear and trackable targets, and building feedback systems that allow policies to adapt and improve over time. 

The paper illustrates how these principles play out in practice using two global examples: land-use mitigation strategies and farming practices that support biodiversity. In both cases, early agenda-setting—deciding which problems to tackle and how—proved crucial. When policies are designed from the top down without involving affected groups, they often pursue narrow goals and reinforce existing power imbalances that are difficult to fix later. 

“For the most part, global challenges are still met with policies reinforcing singular ‘silver bullet’ solutions that don’t fully reflect the complex and diverse features of land systems,“ said Rachael Garrett, lead author of the study, Co-Chair of the Global Land Programme, and Professor at Cambridge University. “With our proposed checklist of essential guiding principles for sustainable land policies, we hope to encourage policymakers to lean on land systems science understandings and to move towards new pathways for sustainability and social justice.” 

“These principles might sound familiar to land researchers, but they’re still not widely used in real policy,” said Lindsay Barbieri, co-author of the study and Science-Policy lead for the Global Land Programme. “By putting them together in one clear framework, we hope to help shape policies that are fairer and more effective on the ground.” 

Global Land Programme, a global research network of Future Earth, is an interdisciplinary community of science and practice advancing understanding of how people use and shape land. Together, they work to co-design solutions for sustainable and just land systems.

 

Reference: Garrett, R.D., de Bremond, A., Barbieri, L.F., Meyfroidt, P., et al. (2025). Policy Principles for Sustainable and Just Lan