Climate change is reshaping the interactions among land use, ecosystems, human activities, and spatial development, creating interconnected risks that extend across administrative and geographic boundaries. At the same time, land systems provide a critical arena for climate mitigation, adaptation, ecosystem restoration, and sustainable development. Strengthening climate resilience therefore requires moving beyond sectoral and place-based interventions towards integrated approaches that connect land-system dynamics with spatial planning and governance across scales.
This session explores how land systems can be understood, managed, and transformed to strengthen climate resilience and sustainability. We particularly welcome research examining the interactions between land-use and land-cover change, climate risks, ecosystem services, human well-being, and spatial development, as well as studies investigating how planning and governance can mediate trade-offs, enhance synergies, and support resilient development pathways.
Contributions may address urban, peri-urban, rural, regional, and coupled human–environment systems and employ empirical, modelling, remote-sensing, spatial analytical, participatory, or comparative approaches. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• land-system responses and vulnerability to climate change and extreme events;
• land-use and spatial planning for climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience;
• interactions and trade-offs among climate resilience, ecosystem services, biodiversity, and socio-economic development;
• nature-based solutions, ecosystem restoration, and multifunctional land management;
• cross-boundary, multi-level, and regional governance of climate and land-system risks;
• spatial inequalities, environmental justice, and differentiated adaptive capacities;
• Earth observation, spatial modelling, GeoAI, and decision-support tools for climate-resilient land governance;
• pathways for translating land-system science into planning, policy, and implementation.
By bringing together geoscientists, land-system scientists, planners, social scientists, practitioners, and policymakers, the session aims to strengthen dialogue across disciplines and scales and advance place-sensitive, evidence-based approaches to climate-resilient spatial governance.