COUPLED made progress beyond the state of the art by:
• Providing a major push towards a more holistic, yet also more concrete theoretical foundation of telecoupling research
• Identifying actors and causal relations in telecouplings
• Creating a strong and rich empirical base of case studies rooted in the telecoupling framework for addressing sustainability challenges
• Integrating concepts and tools of place-based and flow/network-based methods and research to address sustainability challenges related to land use
• Analysing various types of distances, including social, institutional, economic, and geographic distance to identify telecoupled land systems
• Assessing a wide variety of flows and connectedness, including information, capital, biomass, energy, but also immaterial flows
• Analysing potential spill-over systems and displacement to allow for a more holistic understanding of the impact of land-use policies
• Proposing solutions to address governance mismatches for governing the environmental and social problems generated in telecoupled systems
The expected socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project are:
• As the EU’s overarching environmental framework, the Green Deal covers several areas and informs numerous policies and strategies. Viewing these areas through the lens of telecoupling will allow policymakers to understand how capital, commodities, energy, information, people, and waste currently move in these areas and how they change with the introduction of ‘greener’ policy interventions
• The results help policymakers to identify the environmental and social impacts of European trade so that they can reduce the unintended consequences of trade flows and consumption.
• By identifying the displacement of environmental degradation, the COUPLED results in telecoupling research are able to add value to global conservation discussions and reduce the unintended consequences of protection efforts and policies.
• Apply telecoupling frameworks to assess commodities linked to high-impact environmental degradation. Palm oil, soy, beef, and timber are implicated in deforestation worldwide. Applying a telecoupling lens to these commodities, allows the EU to gain a better understanding of how its consumption contributes to deforestation and, consequently, increased carbon emissions.
• Ensure traceability and transparency of trade flows through appropriate monitoring. At home, the EU already includes greenhouse gas emissions and removals from land use, land use change, and forestry in its carbon emissions accounting. Including such data in trade data, allows policymakers to view the EU’s consumption footprint holistically.
• Recognise the displaced environmental impacts of trade in trade agreements. Include mandatory regulatory action in trade agreements with partners outside of the EU in areas of environmental concern, or at high risk of carbon “leakage” and displaced environmental impacts.
• Ensure multi-stakeholder engagement and transdisciplinary research to find solutions to telecoupled impacts. Global supply chains involve numerous actors, from governments to individual consumers. From COUPLED’s extensive work, researchers have found that solutions to global sustainability problems require multi-stakeholder engagement and transdisciplinary research. The EU should include such engagement in its trade agreements and policies. Also, the EU should actively foster research at the interface of science, business, and policy, as this is where solutions are most likely to be found.
