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CONTEXT: Understanding the consequences of changes in land use and land cover is among the greatest challenges in sustainability science, yet key themes related to land cover change are often left out of sustainability assessment tools. Because sustainability teaching is expanding at a rapid rate, incorporation of interdisciplinary, rigorous, quantitative tools to distinguish sustainable and unsustainable landscape change are needed. OBJECTIVE: As a heuristic exercise, we contrast and synthesize two approaches to quantifying sustainability using a case study of palm oil and tropical deforestation in Borneo, Indonesia. METHODS: First, we use Markovian land cover change analysis (from 2000 to 2010) to estimate changes in forest cover, project these rates of change into the near future, and estimate changes in carbon stocks due to palm oil conversion. Second, we estimate greenhouse gas emissions from a typical Indonesian palm oil biodiesel plantation using a life cycle assessment approach (LCA). RESULTS: These two approaches show conflicting assessments for the carbon footprint of palm biodiesel: a sustainable endeavor when short-term global warming potential is evaluated yet highly unsustainable when rates of forest loss are measured. Furthermore, accounting for carbon that incorporated prior land cover dramatically altered sustainability assessments. CONCLUSIONS: Thus, integration of these two approaches reveals the importance of including both historic and future land cover changes into sustainability assessments. This synthesis demonstrates the importance of using a plurality of approaches from different disciplines when teaching sustainability, and highlights the unique role that landscape ecological approaches can play in sustainability assessments such as LCA.
