PLUS Change brings together 23 institutions from across Europe including 5 Universities, 5 research institutes, 3 stakeholder network organisations, 1 performing arts collective, and 9 practice partners representing regional planning and land management authorities and organisations. The project aims to create land use strategies and decision-making processes that meet climate, biodiversity and human well-being objectives of sustainability, and to develop interventions that leverage political, economic, societal, material and cultural contexts to achieve these strategies, by involving actors at multiple decision-making levels (individual, land management, planning, policy). Activities include land use modelling (including historical and future trajectories of change), systems mapping, causal loop diagrams, performing arts approaches, randomized controlled trials of behaviour change, sociological surveys, and policy and governance reviews. The work is embedded in 12 in-depth practice cases, and 1 broad scale multiplier cluster as sites of multi-actor knowledge co-creation dissemination and impact. They cover key land use challenges at a range of scales across Europe including urban, rural and peri-urban areas. All activities brought together in an integrated research design that draws on their different contributions to a systems-thinking approach to understand multi-scale land use systems across a diversity of socioeconomic and biogeographical contexts, and create usable tools for land managers, users, planners and policy makers. Outputs include recommendations of co-designed and tested interventions to unlock behavioural, structural and procedural changes to achieve identified land use strategies; and a toolkit to support land use planners in enacting these interventions, including knowledge training, a planning dashboard and simulation tools, and methods for engaging citizens and land managers in behaviour change. In this way, PLUS Change contributes to meeting a range of policy goals for biodiversity, climate and society (including those of the European Green Deal, 2021 Adaptation Strategy, Nature Restoration Law, etc.).
