Conference: Landscape 2018 - Food Security, Climate Change, Sustainability

Press Release

From 12 to 16 March 2018, the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in cooperation with international partners will be organising the “Landscape 2018” conference for the first time in the Berlin Adlershof Science and Technology Park. With the leading topic of “Frontiers of agricultural landscape research”, the week-long event provides a platform for leading international scientists and scholars from a wide range of disciplines and facilitates interdisciplinary exchange with multipliers from politics and society. Three parallel specialist sessions, more than 75 lectures and 70 posters address the current state of research on the central challenges of globalised agriculture: climate change, food security and sustainability. Three technical excursions, a workshop day and a campus tour at ZALF round off the conference programme.

The agricultural landscape is a highly topical issue, as the majority of the United Nations' sustainability goals that were adopted in 2015 – such as the reduction of climate-damaging greenhouse gases, poverty reduction or food security – depend directly or indirectly upon the use of agricultural land.

“Current studies predict population growth to 9-10 billion people by 2050. In order to be able to feed them, we would have to produce around 70 percent more foodstuffs on roughly the same area as today against the background of current production technologies and land use concepts,” explains Prof. Frank Ewert, Scientific Director of ZALF and one of the patrons of the conference. “Climate change is likely to exacerbate this trend. Adding to this are the changes in consumption and dietary habits, especially in the industrialized countries, if we think of organic products and organic farming. We need to intensify production, i.e. produce more on less land and also make it more sustainable, especially in view of the effects of climate change. All of these challenges show that the topic of agricultural landscapes today is more important than ever before. With Landscape 2018, we are offering a platform to science, practice and politics to work jointly on cross-disciplinary solutions”.

The management of land use in terms of sustainability goals requires more interdisciplinary knowledge about the interactions between natural and social processes and factors related to landscape use. Sustainable measures and concepts for their implementation can only be developed by closely interlinking the most recent basic and application-oriented findings from disciplinary and interdisciplinary landscape research and through an intensive exchange with social stakeholders. ZALF wants to establish “Landscape 2018” as a platform for this.

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Further information, the conference programme and registration can be found at:

www.land2018.eu

Press invitation:

Press representatives are cordially invited to attend the conference free of charge. For accreditation, please send an email to : public.relations@zalf.de.