Addressing Issues for Land Change Science: Workshop on Vulnerability and Resilience of Land Systems in Asia; Beijing, China, 15–17 June 2009

There is a growing international community of scholars who work within the interdisciplinary field of land change science, a scientific domain that seeks to understand the dynamics of the land system as a coupled human-environment system. A coupled human-environment system is one in which the social and biophysical subsystems are intertwined so that the system's condition and responses to external forcing are based on the synergy of the two subsystems. Research on land system vulnerability, defined as a function of exposure and sensitivity to natural and anthropogenic perturbations, such as climate variability and sudden changes in macroeconomic conditions and the ability to cope with the impacts of those perturbations, is a fundamental component of land change science. To address issues related to land system vulnerability, the Global Land Project (GLP; http://www.glp-beijing.org.cn/index.php and http://www.glp.hokudai.ac.jp) brought together an interdisciplinary group of researchers with backgrounds ranging from environmental to social sciences. Participants came from both developed and developing countries. The workshop sought to (1) improve knowledge of the causal processes that affect a system's vulnerability and capacity to cope with different perturbations and (2) identify factors that hinder the integration of vulnerability assessment into policies and decision making.