Public Lecture: Scaling up Solutions for Sustainability: The Example of Tropical Deforestation

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Humanity is on a dangerous trajectory. A sustainability transition leveraging the efforts of private companies, governments, and civil society actors is required. Many solutions for a sustainability transition are already known, adopted, and tested by some pioneer actors, or are in advanced stages of development. But only a small fraction of market players have voluntarily adopted sustainability solutions. The upscaling of these successful solutions is therefore a key challenge. Using the case of tropical deforestation, Eric Lambin identifies pathways to achieve sustainability transitions at scale.

Key insights are, first, that upscaling almost always involves collaboration among public, private, and civil society actors. Second, the alignment of incentives and motivations of all relevant actors is critical to success. Third, actors’ roles and stakeholder interactions evolve as the sustainability issues change.

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About Eric Lambin

Eric Lambin, a geographer and environmental scientist, divides his time between University of Louvain and Stanford University, where he occupies the Ishiyama Provostial Professorship at the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and the Woods Institute for the Environment. His research tries to better understand the causes and impacts of land use changes in different parts of the world. He was Chair of the international scientific project Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC) from 1999 to 2005. He was awarded the 2014 Volvo Environment Prize and the 2019 Blue Planet Prize. His current research focusses on how globalization affects land use and how private and public policies can reduce or even reverse tropical deforestation. He published several broad audience books, including “An Ecology of Happiness” (University of Chicago Press, 2012).