Advancing Sustainability Through Land-Related Approaches: Insights from NRC (1999) and a Bold Call to Action

Abstract

This paper investigates the critical role of land in advancing sustainability, drawing insights from the landmark report by the U.S. National Research Council, Our Common Journey: A Transition Toward Sustainability (hereafter referred to as NRC (1999)), and aligning them with the leverage points perspective on sustainability. Four key problem entries—land as a resource, land use and ecosystem services, land systems, and landscapes or regional scales—are identified as pivotal framings for addressing sustainability challenges, and are further elaborated with practical examples. Regretfully, despite decades of multidisciplinary research progress, land-related approaches remain fragmented. This paper contributes to the existing research by illustrating, for the first of time, how these multidisciplinary research traditions can be integrated cohesively using the four nested realms of sustainability leverage points—rebuilding capital stocks, redirecting interaction flows, reforming governance architectures, and re-/co-piloting sustainability transitions—to achieve nested transformations across varying timeframes. We hope that this hierarchical perspective fosters top-down and bottom-up collaborations among researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to take transformative actions. To leave a legacy of sustainability for future generations, we must act collectively, boldly, and without delay to harness the transformative potential of all land-related approaches.

1. Introduction

Sustainability—meeting the fundamental needs of humanity more equitably without threatening Earth’s life support systems [1]—has been increasingly recognized as the theme of our time [2]. Yet, with the severely off-track progress we have achieved [3], bolder efforts are urgently needed to navigate our “World-Earth Spaceship” [4] onto more sustainable tracks, more than ever. To a certain degree, finding the effective approaches to advancing sustainability has become the holy grail of the science community of the 21st century [5]. Therefore, arguably one of the most critical research missions is to advance sustainability through land-related approaches—given the pivotal role of land as the spatial interface of the World and Earth subsystems.

As a matter of fact, scholarly efforts to advance sustainability through land-related approaches date back to the late 1980s (e.g., [6,7,8,9]), about same time that the Brundtland Report popularized the idea of sustainable development in 1987 [1]. That said, global political recognition of the land’s critical roles in addressing sustainability can trace far earlier, to the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm [10]. After several decades of multidisciplinary efforts involving agriculture, forestry, geography, landscape architecture, landscape ecology, and many other related fields, fruitful studies have been conducted (e.g., [11,12,13]), creating two main fields of research which seem to begin converging: land system science originated from geography [14,15] versus the more niche and contested landscape sustainability science emerging from landscape ecology [16,17].

Notwithstanding the encouraging research progresses, land-based practices to address sustainability are rather piecemeal and unsatisfying, likely due to the complex nature of land and the multidisciplinary tradition of research. Lacking the big picture of land-related approaches to advancing sustainability hinders policymakers and practitioners from taking systematic and integrated land-based actions. In this context, in the present paper (along with the other papers in this Special Issue), we attempt to map out the big picture by drawing on insights from the landmark publication that played a historic role in catalyzing a burgeoning science of sustainable development—Our Common Journey: A Transition Toward Sustainability (hereafter NRC (1999) for short) [18]—and further, try proposing a more holistic and action-oriented agenda by integrating the leverage points perspective, in a hope of stimulating the much needed real-world transformations.

2. Insights from NRC (1999): The Four Problem Entries of Land When Addressing Sustainability

To draw on the insights from NRC (1999) [18], we searched the main text of the report (i.e., from the Executive Summary to Chapter 6, excluding references and bibliography) for the word “land”, and identified a total of 146 sentences containing “land” and/or “landscape” (excluding words like Brundtland and Thailand), with four pairs of duplicated sentences (in the Executive Summary). The first author then conducted a content analysis and a grounded coding of these sentences [19] (like [20]). A 100% consistency was reached while coding the four pairs of duplicated sentences, hinting at a reliable internal validity of coding (see Supplementary Table S1 for details). Afterwards, we elaborate on the four problem entries that emerged from the land-related text corpus in NRC (1999) [18] (

Table 1. The four problem entries of land when addressing sustainability based on NRC (1999) [18].

Problem Entry	Code Example
Land resource per se or ecosystem	Example 1: Meeting even the most basic needs of a stabilizing population at least half as large as today’s implies greater production and consumption of goods and services, increased demand for land, energy, and materials, and intensified pressures on the environment and living resources (page 1).
	Example 2: Productivity must be increased in robust areas and restored to degraded lands, while the damage to fragile land areas must be reduced (page 13).
Land use and ecosystem services	Example 1: In fact, most new housing in the cities in developing countries has been built on illegally occupied or subdivided land (page 35).
	Example 2: For example, the Forest Principles set forth at the 1992 World Conference on Environment and Development do not set quantitative targets for forest protection; but they establish in Article 2b that “forest resources and forest lands should be sustainably managed to meet the social, economic, ecological, cultural and spiritual needs of present and future generations” for forest products and services (page 45).
Land system or social-ecological system	Example 1: Moreover, sustainable communities have not been realized across the U.S. landscape (page 14).
	Example 2: Coastal ecosystems are often affected by activities that occur far inland, through changes in the delivery of water, nutrients, and chemical contaminants from rivers and atmospheric deposition (page 88).
Landscape or regional scale	Example 1: Greater understanding is needed of how biological systems work, how to stem the continued loss of habitats, and how ecosystems can be restored and managed at the landscape or regional scale (page 13).
	Example 2: It is therefore necessary to work at the scale of whole landscapes, with explicit attention both to the preservation of critical ecosystems and to the interactions between human activities and the managed and unmanaged ecosystems among them (page 99).

), with examples from relevant publications or real-world practices. As the start point of our discussion, a problem entry here means how land is framed into a sustainability context (i.e., the way by which land relates to a sustainability problem).

2.1. Problem Entry 1: As Land Resource per se or Ecosystem

The most frequent sustainability problem entry regarding land in NRC (1999) [18] is the narrow framing that conceptualizes land as land per se, as a development resource, or as an ecosystem type of development potential (e.g., wetland, forest land), with a frequency of 51.37% (i.e., a total of 75 counts). This “stock” framing of land is the original sustainability problem entry, with societal concerns either on the loss of productive ecosystems and land degradation following a development perspective, or regarding ecosystem conservation and restoration in case of future development impacts following an environmental perspective, or both, emphasizing balancing the two sides of environment–development from an integrated perspective on sustainability. NRC (1999) [18] devoted a standalone sub-subsection in Chapter 5 on “Conserving Productive Landscapes” (page 254 therein). Studies with such a problem entry were popular in the past (e.g., [7,21]), yet they would be hard to get published now (but see [22,23,24]). That said, land-related approaches following this problem entry are perhaps the most actionable in practice.

As corroboration, China has established vast areas of ecological conservation areas nationwide in various forms (e.g., national parks of particular importance or fragility, theme parks of specific ecosystems, ecological protection areas in biodiversity hotspots). Such efforts safeguard the bottom-line of China’s ecological sustainability, which is perhaps why it is better known as China’s “Ecological Redline Policy” [25,26]. Moreover, China routinely implements restoration/construction programs for productive landscapes like wetlands, forests, and high-quality farmlands, with dedicated government agencies and specialized government funding. Perhaps even more fundamental than ensuring no net loss of natural habitats, a recent policy known as biodiversity offsets has gained significant popularity worldwide over the past decade, as it aims to achieve no net loss of biodiversity from development activities through various measures [27,28]. In addition, to reduce farmland loss and contain the sprawl of construction land, China has implemented a comprehensive set of policies such as “Farmland Redline Policy,” “Farmland Dynamic Balance Policy” (i.e., zero net loss of farmland), “Urban-Rural Construction Land Balance Policy” (i.e., zero net increase in urban–rural construction land) [29].

2.2. Problem Entry 2: As Land Use and Ecosystem Services

The second frequent problem entry of land in sustainability in NRC (1999) [18] is a somewhat broadened framing of land as land use, with the real interests lying in the land’s functions or ecosystem services (41.40%, 60 counts). With this “flow” framing of land, the societal concerns would be directed onto land transformations and the associated impacts of specific land use changes to meet human needs. The NRC (1999) [18] highlights in its standalone subsection on “Land” in Chapter 2 (page 93 therein) three long-term global trends in land use change, i.e., the increasing intensification of agriculture, clearing of tropical forests, and regrowing of temperate zone forests—all with high agro- and ecological stakes. Studies with such a problem entry are still popular nowadays. For example, Hu et al. [30], in this Special Issue, attempt to optimize the cropland utilization patterns to increase cropland use efficiency and, thus, enhance sustainability in general sense. Similarly, the study by Jin et al. [31] in this Special Issue attempts to understand the determinants of the accessibility of urban green spaces, so as to improve their patterns and thus reduce the disparities in their multifaceted services.

This flow-thinking land-related approaches to addressing sustainability can be applied to two action domains in practice. The upstream domain is to control land conversions (e.g., urban encroachment of farmland), whereas the downstream domain is to come up with ways of regulating the land-related processes causing a sustainability concern (e.g., food security, carbon emission, economic output). Apparently, the former is way easier than the latter in real-world actions, as the latter gets decoupled from land per se to varying degrees. For example, China has developed a relatively mature land resource management system, featured by subsystems like spatial planning, top-down built-up land quota allocation, land conversion regulation, territorial spatial use inventory, as well as the supervision and enforcement of illegal land use [32,33]. However, the downstream governance is beyond the political scope of the land management department, causing the need for coordination and collaboration across multiple departments and even agents of the market and society. As is often the case, it is when emergencies of wide societal concern happen that such non-institutionalized, collaborative governance arrangements would occur, due to high transaction costs. In this sense, the downstream land-related sustainability governance would most likely be reactive, occasional, and focusing on either one or few ecosystem services. For instances, the “Economical and Intensive Construction Land Use Policy” has long been implemented in China to improve the economic efficiency of construction land [29], and a regime known as “Payment for Ecosystem Services” has been practiced in many jurisdictions to provide financial incentives to landowners, communities, or resource managers to sustainably manage ecosystems to provide targeted ecosystem services [34].

2.3. Problem Entry 3: As Land System or Social-Ecological System

A further broadened framing of land in the NRC (1999) [18], as relevant to sustainability, is the problem entry of land as land systems, either as places of cultural landscapes in the general sense, or as archetypes of social-ecological systems. This problem entry can be referred to as a social-ecological land system perspective, or a land system perspective for short. With an occurrence frequency of 2.74% (four counts) in the NRC (1999) [18], it appears to be the least applied sustainability entry regarding land, while, in fact, there is extensive content on degradation syndromes therein that can be interpreted as unsustainability archetypes of social-ecological systems, each with characteristic land uses (see the list of syndromes on page 287). Overall, most such studies adopt the general land system framing, treating a socio-ecological system by focusing on its dominant land use, e.g., urban land system [35] and agri-food system [36]. Contrastingly, archetypal land system studies have received little interest since the original work by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) [37] in 1997, but seem to be gaining popularity in the recent ten years [38,39,40].

In practice, the general land system problem entry requires systematic thinking, and often also an integrated perspective on sustainability that explicitly accounts for the multidimensional tradeoffs and synergies of land-dependent ecosystem services. A case study of Australia shows that the land-sector alone is insufficient for achieving all SDGs, and must focus on priorities like food, energy, water, and biodiversity by actively collaborating with other sectors such as clean energy, food systems, and water resource management [41]. In this case, the operational challenges would be daunting, as the general land system approaches to sustainability necessitate institutionalizing a place-based, adaptive, collaborative land-related/spatial governance. Alternatively, archetypal land system approaches seem more promising in practice, as the epistemic complexity of land systems is reduced in one aspect or another with archetypes. In this regard, China has established several kinds of thematic pilot or demonstration zones (e.g., National Pilot Zone for Ecological Civilization [42] and Demonstration Zone for the Transformation and Upgrading of Resource-Based Cities [43]). These initiatives aim to provide the testing ground for new governance approaches and policy frameworks, with practical successes reported. Yet, regretfully, the efforts in researching generalizable insights from these zones that could inform broader land-related sustainability governance are lacking (c.f., Ostrom’s design principles for governing the commons [44]). As the ultimate end of sustainability is sustaining and improving inclusive human wellbeing (with sustaining and improving the life-support system as the means) [45], the land system framing to address sustainability, be it general or archetypal, ultimately directs sustainability actions toward deep systemwide changes in the administrative, political, and legal structures.

2.4. Problem Entry 4: As Landscape Scale or Interacting Land Systems

The broadest framing of land as relevant to sustainability in NRC (1999) [18] is the problem entry of land as a landscape or a regional scale, which essentially means an interacting mosaic of heterogeneous social-ecological land systems. This problem entry, though not the least occurring (4.79%, seven counts), has not been systematically elaborated on in NRC (1999) [18] regarding how to operationalize it. It is likely due to the fact that with such a framing, land/landscape has only a nominal relevance to sustainability. Though this framing is mostly used by landscape ecologists [46,47,48], it actually involves many fields that may seem lacking substantial relevance to land, such as international relations, geopolitics, international trade, supply chain management, new economic geography, and political economy. As of today, the science and practice of upscaling from local (un)sustainability to regional (un)sustainability and to global sustainability remains arguably the most challenging. Studies with such a problem entry are either highly conceptual [49,50,51] or necessitate an epistemic simplicity by focusing on spatial tradeoffs and synergies of relatively limited social-ecological dimensions [52,53,54].

This upscaling framing of land into real-world sustainability contexts can spell out an increasing concern among the global community on the spatial displacement of land use and illegal land occupation in a telecoupled world, calling for better governance of coupled archetypal land systems (e.g., [55,56]). Alternatively, with implicit relation to land, such a framing can also translate into an issue of spatial collective action [57] or governing spatially coupled infrastructure [4], such as transboundary governance [58] and polycentric governance [59]. For example, China has achieved widespread success with its Accountability-to-Chief system that designates government officials as the person-in-charge for managing and protecting specific ecosystems like rivers, lakes, and forests within their jurisdictions (e.g., [60]). China has also shown success in using relational or polycentric governance approaches to coupling spatially unconnected social-ecological systems for paired assistance [61] or pan-regional cooperation [62]. Nonetheless, these practical approaches often fail to explicitly account for the social-cultural plurality critical when attempting to achieve the collective sustainability of inclusive human wellbeing. After all, one man’s food can be another man’s poison; similarly, societies in different cultural landscapes can have strikingly divergent sustainability visions and preferences.

3. An Extended Leverage Points Perspective on Land-Related Approaches to Advancing Sustainability

Drawing upon the insights from the foundational report of NRC (1999) [18], this paper has uncovered the four major problem entries of land when addressing sustainability, each with its own historical, theoretical, and practical nuances. Although these problem entries have produced a wide range of land-related sustainability efforts as noted above, such efforts are notably fragmented due to disciplinary silos and conceptual plurality. Here, we argue that the leverage points perspective on sustainability [5,63] holds substantially underappreciated promise for integrating the conceptual plurality of various land-related sustainability framings—by which a more holistic and actionable agenda to harness the full potential of land-related approaches can be catalyzed (Figure 1).

The original leverage points perspective on sustainability, drawing on an analogy to the principles of levers in physics, highlights that the points of sustainability interventions can be conceptualized as a continuum of four realms of levers along a leverage system, with the realm of levers positioned at the furthest end of the lever arm, exerting a stronger transformative influence when external pressure is applied, due to the extended leverage [5,63]. In increasing the order of transformative potential, the four realms of sustainability levers are system parameters, system feedbacks, system structures, and system intents (Box 2 in [63]), corresponding, respectively, to sustainability interventions involving altering materials, changing processes, designing institutions, and shaping values, goals, and worldviews (Figure 1 in [5]). In this regard, the four increasingly broadened problem entries of land in addressing sustainability align well with the four realms of leverage points for taking sustainability actions: from rebuilding social-ecological capital stocks (e.g., land itself or ecosystem), to redirecting social-ecological interaction flows (e.g., land use and ecosystem services), to reforming social-ecological system architectures (e.g., land system governance institutions), and to re-/co-piloting the common journey toward sustainability of intercoupled social-ecological systems—including those pericoupled and telecoupled (e.g., sustainability upscaling of spatially coupled land systems).

Notably, in the fourth realm we have extended the original focus on cultural and ideological efforts like changing worldviews, mindsets, and paradigms (e.g., via sustainability education) within a single system to include making such efforts to also influence its coupled systems, so as to re-/co-pilot the community of coupled destiny toward shared future blueprints. With this extension, the four realms of sustainability action are not only not mutually exclusive, but also complementary and indispensable to one another, leveraging different depths of social transformation across the varying timeframes of sustainability transitions. To some extent, our extended leverage points perspective complements the original, as we conceptualize the leverage points as a progression and scaling process from individual land patches (i.e., sustainability of land or the Earth subsystem) to land-related processes (i.e., sustainability of land functions or ecosystem services), then to social-ecological harmony of a single system (i.e., sustainability of human wellbeing at the local scale), and ultimately to the interactions among multiple systems (i.e., sustainability of human wellbeing at the regional and higher scales). As the road to global sustainability needs a hierarchical approach that balances weak and strong sustainability at different scales [64], only by deliberately integrating these four nested realms of (land-related) sustainability efforts can our generation hope to achieve systemic transformations in time.

Inspiringly, land and landscape scholars have shown growing ambitions in contributing to sustainability, applying increasingly broadening problem entries of land [11]. In this Special Issue particularly, Wang et al. [65] explicitly take a land system perspective on unpacking the social-ecological mechanisms underlying the rise and fall of rural specialty agriculture, where the roles of land have long been simplified as trivial. With a comparative review on smart growth and smart shrinkage, Yang et al. [66] contend that urban growth and shrinkage are spatially coupled, so that sustainable urbanization efforts necessitate the extension from considering a single city to the simultaneous treatment of both growing and shrinking areas. In a review on urbanization-associated farmland research in China, Yang, et al. [67] find the sustainability focus to gradually evolve from the protection of farmland loss and mitigating farmland degradation, to sustaining the farmland’s food production potential, to improving the integrated sustainability of agri-farmland systems, and to governing the sustainability dynamics of coupled urban-rural systems. A similar tendency is observed in the review of urban fringe research in China, with the review authors arguing further for situating urban fringe as a land system type of its own kind for co-piloting the coupled urban-urban fringe-rural system toward sustainability [68]. Even more hearteningly, more scholars like Wang, et al. [69] start to appreciate the underrecognized value of the leverage points perspective on advancing sustainability. Looking ahead, integrating the four realms of land-related levers to advance sustainability will become increasingly recognized and practiced—to this end, a transdisciplinary rather than technocratic culture must first be cultivated [70].

4. Conclusions—Call to Action

Advancing sustainability through land-related approaches necessitates a paradigm shift: from fragmented, discipline-specific efforts to integrated, systems-level transformations. Such a shift is urgently needed to serve the contemporary global sustainability movement, and is achievable once society grasps “the big picture.” Our paper contributes by illustrating this big picture through first identifying the four analytical entries of land into sustainability problems and then illuminating how the four entries align with the four nested leverage realms for taking holistic sustainability actions. In essence, our study provides a hierarchical roadmap for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to act collectively and boldly. Researchers must transcend disciplinary silos and embrace transdisciplinary approaches to deepen insights into these leverage points and their interactions, while policymakers should adopt inclusive governance mechanisms that account for long-term transformations. Practitioners, meanwhile, must translate these insights into adaptive, collaborative solutions, scaling successful models and fostering innovation. Particularly for the upscaling of sustainability, top-down actions alone are insufficient; it is crucial to give due attention to the local variations when integrating multi-level land-related approaches.

The stakes are immense, but so are the opportunities. Land is not just a resource—it is the foundation for the World-Earth system’s sustainability and a vital arena for taking transformative actions. For our generation to leave a legacy of sustainability for the future generations, we must harness the full potential of land-related approaches without delay. The time to transform our research, policy, and practice is not tomorrow, but today.