The KLI team engaged in the Horizon Europe project PLUS Change – Marina Knickel, Guido Caniglia and Nora Hein – have developed an Ethics Handbook that provides guidance on dealing with ethical issues of equity and justice in land use research and practice. The main goal of the Handbook is to support actors in land use decision-making to prevent the exacerbation of social and environmental injustices that arise from uneven access to resources and decision-making power.

This Ethics Handbook builds on various activities within the PLUS Change project and is meant to guide individual researchers (e.g., working on land use) and practitioners (e.g., land use managers and planners, policymakers, citizen groups, NGOs) as well as teams of researchers and practitioners (e.g., collaborative teams) working in land use. The Handbook is equipped with visual aids, examples and exercises that will help actors across diverse contexts to identify, analyse, and address issues of justice and equity in their work using such tools as a Justice Lens, while working towards the joint goals related to climate change, biodiversity, and human well-being.

The executive summary of the Ethics Handbook is available here

You can download the Handbook here

About the PLUS Change project

PLUS Change (Planning Land Use Strategies: Meeting biodiversity, climate and social objectives in a changing world) is an EU-funded Horizon project focused on developing strategies and decision-making processes for land use, with specific emphasis on climate change, biodiversity, and human well-being in Europe. Decisions on land use involves multiple stakeholders including citizens, planners and policy makers, all of whom having different levels of decision-making power.

See more on what the project is about and follow its updates here