de Bremond’s Global Land Programme moves from Switzerland to Maryland
Rice terraces follow the contours of northwest Vietnam's dramatic terrain. The GLP, an international research program that focuses on land use for agriculture and other purposes amid environmental change, moved headquarters to the University of Maryland. Photo: Doan Tuan/Unsplash
Editor’s note: this content is based on an original story by Maryland Today.
The Global Land Programme (GLP) has shifted from the University of Bern in Switzerland to the University of Maryland (UMD) Department of Geographical Sciences, thanks to a $2.3 million National Science Foundation grant awarded to Switzer Fellow, UMD Associate Research Professor and GLP Executive Director Ariane de Bremond and collaborators.
GLP is an interdisciplinary community of science and practice fostering the study of land systems and the co-design of solutions for global sustainability. They are an open community where all scientists, practitioners and policy makers interested and involved in land system change can participate and contribute.
Moving headquarters to Maryland after seven years in Bern will facilitate new GLP collaborations with partners of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, including NASA and its Land-Cover and Land-Use Change Program, the Department of the Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The GLP, part of the Future Earth Global Research Network, will also collaborate with the International Center for Geospatial Innovation in Geographical Sciences.
“Through these collaborations, we will expand our engagement with interested parties and decision makers to understand their knowledge needs, identify priority research and information gaps to address the challenges of global change, and generate actionable knowledge in support of sustainability transformations in land systems,” de Bremond said.
Global collaborations like those enabled by the GLP are increasingly sought after as world leaders search for solutions to combat climate change without compromising food security, cultural preservation and sustainability.
