CEH is pleased to announce that "The Global Land Squeeze: An Interdisciplinary Symposium" will take place October 28–31, 2025, at Aarhus University!

This Symposium is part of the AUFF-funded project “Infrastructural Cascades: A New Approach to Anthropocene Landscape Change", co-organized by project postdoc Zachary Caple and CEH Director Heather Swanson.

Over the past century, demand for land-based resources has intensified dramatically, driving widespread landscape conversion and placing new pressures on long-established ecosystems. Land system scientists and sustainable land-use advocates have described this process as the global land squeeze (GLS). This symposium explores the GLS as a defining force of the Anthropocene, one that transforms landscapes, livelihoods, and multispecies futures. We aim to interrogate two interlinked processes:

1. The social, historical, and metabolic drivers of land conversion;

2. The squeeze dynamics acting on legacy ecosystems and the species they support.

While GLS research relies on global analyses of biomass flows, land-use change, and economic growth, this symposium explores landscape transformation through concrete case studies and conceptual engagement with other key frameworks, such as planetary urbanism, Plantationocene, and social metabolism. It brings together scholars in anthropology, land system science, ecology, environmental history, agrarian studies, STS, and urban studies to examine changing patterns of life and land in this time of accelerating squeeze.

The events of the Symposium are free and open to AU staff and students as well as the general public. Please see the programme and sign up here.