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Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, general, empirical support. These facts help to explain the challenges of achieving sustainability in land use and thus also point toward solutions. The 10 facts are as follows: 1) Meanings and values of land are socially constructed and contested; 2) land systems exhibit complex behaviors with abrupt, hard-to-predict changes; 3) irreversible changes and path dependence are common features of land systems; 4) some land uses have a small footprint but very large impacts; 5) drivers and impacts of land-use change are globally interconnected and spill over to distant locations; 6) humanity lives on a used planet where all land provides benefits to societies; 7) land-use change usually entails trade-offs between different benefits—"win–wins" are thus rare; 8) land tenure and land-use claims are often unclear, overlapping, and contested; 9) the benefits and burdens from land are unequally distributed; and 10) land users have multiple, sometimes conflicting, ideas of what social and environmental justice entails. The facts have implications for governance, but do not provide fixed answers. Instead they constitute a set of core principles which can guide scientists, policy makers, and practitioners toward meeting sustainability challenges in land use.

Theory suggests that economic instruments, such as pollution taxes or tradable permits, can provide more efficient technology adoption incentives than conventional regulatory standards. We explore this issue for an important industry undergoing dramatic decreases in allowed pollution -the U.S. petroleum industry's phasedown of lead in gasoline. Using a duration model applied to a panel of refineries from 1971-1995, we find that the pattern of technology adoption is consistent with an economic response to market incentives, plant characteristics, and alternative policies. Importantly, evidence suggests that the tradable permit system used during the phasedown provided incentives for more efficient technology adoption decisions.

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Theory suggests that economic instruments, such as pollution taxes or tradable permits, can provide more efficient technology adoption incentives than conventional regulatory standards. We explore this issue for an important industry undergoing dramatic decreases in allowed pollution -the U.S. petroleum industry's phasedown of lead in gasoline. Using a duration model applied to a panel of refineries from 1971-1995, we find that the pattern of technology adoption is consistent with an economic response to market incentives, plant characteristics, and alternative policies. Importantly, evidence suggests that the tradable permit system used during the phasedown provided incentives for more efficient technology adoption decisions.

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We review claims linking both payments for carbon and poverty to deforestation. We examine these effects empirically for Costa Rica during the late 20th century using an econometric approach that addresses the irreversibilities in deforestation. We find significant effects of the relative returns to forest on deforestation rates. Thus, carbon payments would induce conservation and also carbon sequestration, and if land users were poor could conserve forest while addressing rural poverty. We note that the poor appear to be marginalized in the sense of living where land profitability is lower. Those areas also have more forest. We find that poorer areas may have a higher supply response to payments, but even without this effect poor areas might be included and benefit more due to higher (per capita) forest area. They might be included less due to transactions costs, though. Unless the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol is modified in its implementation to allow credits from avoided deforestation, such benefits are likely to be limited. r

The project from which this paper arises involves, in addition to the authors, Arturo Sanchez who provides GIS expertise, Boone Kauffman who provides ecological fieldwork expertise, Vicente Watson and Joseph Tosi who provide local ecological and geographic knowledge and experience with the Life Zone system of ecosystem classification, and David Schimel. Any remaining errors and omissions are the authors' responsibility. We are grateful to the Tinker Foundation, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, the National Science Foundation and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation for funding parts of this project.