Pr. Thomas W. HERTEL

The UN Sustainable Development Goals have been widely adopted for purposes of framing long run, global sustainability challenges. Of the 17 goals, eight are closely tied to essential food, land, water, climate, and biodiversity outcomes that are already under intense pressure. Can the future demands for food, fuel, clean water, biodiversity, climate change mitigation and poverty reduction be reconciled?
Ensuring the long-term sustainability of land and water resources, even as we seek to meet the world economy’s growing demands, requires informed management of the complex networks of policies, infrastructure and technologies that connect the food and resource nexus. In addressing this challenge, local, meso-, and global scale perspectives are required. The local scale refers to the socio-economic and environmental conditions in the neighborhood of individual landowners with their surrounding environment. The meso-scale can be thought of as regional scale, with regions varying from small watersheds to entire river basins.
At the other end of the spectrum from local scale, the global scale encompasses the entire world. Processes interact across these local, meso-, and global scales. For example, local decisions of individual agents can affect food, land, water and biodiversity at larger meso-scales, and the
aggregation of local decisions affects conditions all the way up to the global scale. Local conditions are in turn shaped by meso-scale and global-scale environmental processes such as climate change, as well as economic conditions as reflected in prices determined by global
markets.
One cannot understand the ramifications of climate change or shocks to global markets, such as tariff changes, without understanding the collection of local decisions, and one cannot formulate local decisions without understanding how local conditions are driven by larger meso-scale and global-scale forces. Informed decision-making requires multi-scale information that integrates from local to global scales.
This DISTINGUISHED Project GLASS will lay the foundation in the Institute for Advanced Studies for Global-Local-Global analysis of land and water sustainability challenges in Luxembourg, the EU and globally. It thus provides new insights and establishes and another way to bridge scale between to the (mostly) global focus of the Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems (LCSES) as well as the research in the labs of Prof Koff and Prof D’ Ambrosio which focus on local and regional studies in the Global South.