Linking landscape, land system and design approaches to achieve sustainability

Sustainability science is a use-inspired and place-based transdisciplinary enterprise that integrates natural and social sciences, engineering/design sciences, and humanities to produce actionable knowledge for improving human wellbeing while maintaining long-term environmental integrity. Regional landscapes represent a pivotal scale domain for studying and practicing sustainability because they integrate human-environment interactions, link local processes below and global patterns above, and provide a common platform for scientists, land designers/planners, policymakers, and stakeholders to collaborate on sustainability issues that resonate with all. An interdisciplinary confluence of ecological, geographical, and design/planning sciences is underway, but how this confluence can effectively contribute to the science and practice of sustainability is yet to be explored. Here I review landscape and land system-based approaches, including land change science, land system science, land system architecture, landscape ecology, landscape sustainability science, and geodesign, and discuss why and how they can be linked for achieving the common goal of sustainability.