Recent studies assessing agricultural policies, including the EU’s Agri-Environment Scheme, have shown that these have been successful in attaining some environmental goals. In Finland, however, the economic situation of farms has dramatically fallen and hence, the actions do not result in social acceptability. Sustainable intensification is a means to combine the three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, economic and social. Here we introduce a novel land use optimization and planning tool for the sustainable intensification of high-latitude agricultural systems.

Managing forests sustainably for multiple objectives requires multi-faceted socio-technical knowledge. This study explores the challenges of using knowledge within social and technical knowledge systems in decision-making about and the management of privately-owned forests in Finland. We define the technical knowledge system as the collection of standardized forms of knowledge and the IT systems supporting their storage and distribution. The social knowledge system consists of people who use and generate knowledge, as well as the societal norms that regulate their actions.

Despite its ostensible future orientation, research on land use planning has given relatively little consideration to temporality, either empirically or conceptually. The need for analytical advances becomes clear when considering the treatment of ‘end-of-life’ issues for renewable energy facilities like onshore wind. Expanding renewables is central to sustainable energy futures yet land use regulation often treats consents as ‘temporary’, raising questions about how the trajectories of energy transition are maintained into the future.