Balancing the role of land in climate mitigation with other services that land provides
will be a major challenge over the coming decades. This session will look at scientific approaches to develop sound future scenarios that will allow us to prepare for change and plan for future uncertainties. This requires fostering innovation to examine the range of plausible future scenarios and combine social and environmental systems, human choice and complexity. Observations alone are not enough. There are many unknown future states of systems, many with non-linear behaviour. As such, we need to test hypotheses to elucidate these non-linear behaviours. Hence, we argue for more experimentation on ecosystems combined with the integration of observation, analysis and modelling, in order to build realistic future scenarios. We will solicit contributions which examine the nexus between land, food, fibre, energy, water, biodiversity and climate change mitigation and adaptation. We will look at the need for experimentation and the integrations of observation, models and scenario development that will help us better understand and respond to the future. We will also explore issues raised in the IPCC WGII and WGIII Fifth Assessment Report chapters on Food Security, AFOLU mitigation and bioenergy.