LandShift is a groundbreaking initiative aimed at addressing the urgent challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and unsustainable land management practices. With a focus on the EU's land-use sector, LandShift seeks to develop innovative solutions that not only mitigate biogenic emissions but also enhance ecosystem resilience and promote sustainable resource management. LandShift aims to support the EU's ambitious climate goals by maximizing net removals from LULUCF, while minimizing biogenic emissions from agriculture. By strategically utilizing Living Earths, integrating FAO LCCS with optimized EO data, and Data Cubes as centralized data hubs, the project aims to implement tailored strategies for local and regional contexts, fostering stakeholder engagement and collaboration. Central to LandShift's approach is the integration of NBS aligned with the principles of the New European Bauhaus. These solutions leverage natural processes and ecosystems to enhance carbon sequestration, improve biodiversity, and strengthen ecosystem services. By harnessing the power of NBS, LandShift aims to create synergies between climate mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable land management. Furthermore, LandShift recognizes the importance of data-driven decision-making and monitoring to track progress and inform policy development. The project will establish robust MRV systems to ensure the effectiveness of implemented strategies and measure their impact on biogenic emissions, biodiversity, and ecosystem health. In addition to technical solutions, LandShift places a strong emphasis on policy influence and capacity building. Through targeted outreach and engagement activities, the project aims to raise awareness, build capacity, and foster collaboration among stakeholders at all levels. By empowering policymakers, land managers, and local communities, LandShift seeks to create an enabling environment for sustainable land use sector and management practices.

PLUS Change brings together 23 institutions from across Europe including 5 Universities, 5 research institutes, 3 stakeholder network organisations, 1 performing arts collective, and 9 practice partners representing regional planning and land management authorities and organisations. The objectives directly address the call with an aim to create land use strategies and decision-making processes that meet climate, biodiversity and human well-being objectives of sustainability, and to develop interventions that leverage political, economic, societal, material and cultural contexts to achieve these strategies, by involving actors at multiple decision-making levels (individual, land management, planning, policy). Activities include land use modelling (including historical and future trajectories of change), systems mapping, causal loop diagrams, performing arts approaches, randomized controlled trials of behaviour change, sociological surveys, and policy and governance reviews. All activities brought together in an integrated research design that draws on their different contributions to a holistic approach to understand multi-scale land use systems across a diversity of socioeconomic and biogeographical contexts, and create usable tools for land managers, users, planners and policy makers. The project is anchored in, and integrated through, 11 location-based cases for co-creation, and in a high-level multiplier cluster to identify challenges and impacts at EU and Global levels. Outputs include recommendations of co-designed and tested interventions to unlock behavioural, structural and procedural changes to achieve identified land use strategies; and a toolkit to support land use planners in enacting these interventions, including knowledge training, a planning dashboard and simulation tools, and methods for engaging citizens and land managers in behaviour change.