About this Research Topic
• People: ending poverty and hunger and ensuring that all human beings can lead fulfilling lives in a healthy and dignified environment.
• Planet: protecting the environment while ensuring sustainable use and management of natural resources.
• Prosperity: ensuring environmentally sustainable economic growth, mutual prosperity, and decent work for all.
• Peace: building societies that are peaceful, just and inclusive, and in which human rights and gender equality are respected.
• Partnership: strengthening global solidarity to address inequalities within and between countries, by focusing on the needs of the most vulnerable.
This Research Topic addresses the fifteenth Sustainable Development Goal, which is to “protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.” Progress toward this goal is measured by a number of individual targets and indicators.
The UN’s most recent SDG progress report highlights the far-reaching consequences of deforestation, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem degradation for human well-being and survival. It also notes the stark wake-up call concerning the consequences of biodiversity loss given by the coronavirus pandemic.
Between 2000 and 2020, the report observes a net loss of almost 100 million hectares of the world’s forests, with forest growth in Asia, Europe and Northern America being outweighed by significant decreases in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Progress on safeguarding key biodiversity areas, meanwhile, has stalled in the last few years, and the risk of species extinction has increased by 10 percent globally in the last three decades.
This Research Topic will address the fifteenth Sustainable Development Goal from a communication-specific perspective. It will not only enquire into its global promulgation and into individual local, national and international communication programs in support of it, but will also consider the framing and elaboration of the goal, its adaptation to particular geographical contexts, stakeholder involvement in it, and media reporting on it. The topic embraces communication theory and practice germane to both the technical and human dimensions of SDG 15 – “Life on Land” – from communicating relevant science to incorporating indigenous knowledge to enacting participatory governance to working through complex conflicts. Furthermore, work on this topic can feature SDG-related communication on various scales, from ministerial to local. In doing so, authors may address vertical and/or horizontal dimensions, interactions, and integration.
Keywords: SDG 15, Life on Land, Ecosystems, Biodiversity, Forests, Science Communication
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.