Table 2.

Grand challenges in global change and sustainability and guiding questions to help uncover urban land teleconnections

Issue	Guiding question
Strategic directions in the geographical sciences
5b. How do changing consumption patterns, regulations, and costs in one place affect farming systems, land use, and food security in other places?	What processes (e.g., flows, decisions, or actions) occur along a continuum of land systems?
7a. How does virtual interaction reflect and alter the organization and movement of people, goods, and ideas in geographical space?	How and where do these processes lead to specific pathways (e.g., capital, information, people, goods, materials, energy, and services) that link urban areas to distal places?
8c. How are poverty, wealth, and consumption interrelated across space and at multiple geographical scales?	What are the pathways by which rural land change influences an urban area? Conversely, what are the pathways by which an urban area influences land decisions in distal places?
Grand challenges in global sustainability
4.3. What changes in behavior or lifestyle, if adopted by multiple societies, would contribute most to improving global sustainability, in the context of global environmental change, and how could they be achieved?	How are land transitions across multiple rural places connected through urbanization?
5.2b. How can competing demands for scarce land and water be met over the next half century while dramatically reducing land-use greenhouse gas emissions, protecting biodiversity, and maintaining or enhancing other ecosystem services?	How is the continuum of production, consumption, and disposal linked through land and urban processes?