We are very pleased to announce the selection of our new EU Research project PLUSChange – Planning Land Use Strategies: Meeting Biodiversity, Climate and Social Objectives in a changing world! PLUSChange brings together 23 institutions from across Europe. The objectives directly address the call with an aim to create land use strategies and decision-making processes that meet climate, biodiversity and human well-being objectives of sustainability and to develop interventions that leverage political, economic, societal, material and cultural contexts to achieve these strategies, by involving actors at multiple decision-making levels (individual, land management, planning, policy). Activities include land use modelling (including historical and future trajectories of change), systems mapping, causal loop diagrams, performing arts approaches, randomized controlled trials of behaviour change, sociological surveys, and policy and governance reviews. All activities are brought together in an integrated research design that draws on their different contributions to a holistic approach to understanding multi-scale land use systems across diverse socioeconomic and biogeographical contexts, and creating usable tools for land managers, users, planners and policymakers.

The project is anchored in and integrated through 11 location-based cases for co-creation and in a high-level multiplier cluster to identify challenges and impacts at EU and Global levels. Outputs include recommendations of co-designed and tested interventions to unlock behavioural, structural and procedural changes to achieve identified land-use strategies; and a toolkit to support land-use planners in enacting these interventions, including knowledge training, a planning dashboard and simulation tools, and methods for engaging citizens and land managers in behaviour change.