Guido Caniglia and Marina Knickel in the KLI team are excited to continue their work in the recently launched EU Horizon project PLUS Change. This project will develop strategies and decision-making processes to transform land use by prioritizing societal well-being, climate goals, and biodiversity conservation.

As part of the Work Package dedicated to supporting transdisciplinary integration, Guido and Marina 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 will 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 16^th 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).

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!