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Raising awareness of ethics, equity and justice in land use change processes

As part of Work Package 1 dedicated to supporting transdisciplinary integration, Guido Caniglia and Marina Knickel of the KLI team are now guiding the project partners to reflect and learn whether and how issues of ethics, equity and justice are considered in land use change processes.

Central to this exercise will be a series of interactive webinars with the PLUS Change partners from academia, policy and practice. The webinars focus on the “social objectives” of the project through the lens of discourses and practices related to (social-environmental) justice in processes of land use change and in relation to biodiversity and climate change. The first three webinars in PLUS Change are taking place online between February and April 2024.

The first interactive webinar happened on 16th February, centring on raising awareness and understanding of (in)justice and (in)equity in land use change across climate change and biodiversity. Its main aim was to develop a shared understanding and language in relation to justice issues. To this end, participants learned about different discourses and frameworks used to deal with justice in sustainability contexts (e.g., environmental justice, just transitions, just sustainabilities), difference dimensions of justice (distributive, recognitional, procedural) and diversity of justice-related issues in land use change (e.g. through the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice).

Guido and Marina leading the webinar from the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) in Klosterneuburg, Austria.

In the webinar, theoretical parts were alternated with various interactive activities. This enabled safe space and sparked first important conversations in the project about ethics and justice in the context of land use change. Stay tuned for upcoming work on ethics and justice in PLUS Change!

The original version of this article was written for the KLI website and can be found here.