Darla Munroe, associate professor, geography, is co-author of a new study suggesting that local land-use and urban sustainability are explicitly linked to global urbanization. The paper, Urban Land Teleconnections and Sustainability, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/04/30/1117622109.full.pdf+html

Urban sustainability and land-use change are integrally connected, but often studied as if they were spatially disconnected. Munroe and her team of researchers suggest that the magnitude and accelerating rate of contemporary urbanization are reshaping land use locally and globally in ways that require a reexamination of land change and urban sustainability.

The reseachers propose urban land teleconnections as a process-based framework to understand how flows of capital, people, materials, energy, and waste connect multiple urban and non-urban systems, highlighting potential intervention points for sustainability. As a result, new and surprising diverse urban forms and processes, such as periurbanization, could be better understood and foreseen.

Institutions partnering with Munroe in research are Yale University, the University of Copenhagen, Arizona State University, Humboldt University and Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Science, Hunter College, the European Environmental Agency and Technical University of Zvolen, and University of London.