Land-based Sustainability Research at Bangor

The Sir William Roberts Centre links colleagues across the university working on various aspects of land use and land-based sustainability by facilitating interaction and thinking around a number of themes that cut across sustainability issues.



  • Resilience and adaptation – the response of land-based social, ecological and economic systems to disturbance
  • Productivity and efficiency – meeting material and cultural needs in the context of intense competition between land uses and tensions between high productivity and environmental protection
  • Justice, equity and wellbeing – the consequences of established and future land uses and practices for current and future human populations and other species
  • Innovation, technology and transition – achieving the transition to sustainable land use systems through technological, social and economic change

These themes interact and overlap in numerous ways. For example, land management for resilience can have implications for productivity and substantive impacts on other species. It can also frame innovation – affecting which sustainability transition pathways are possible. Similarly, giving significant attention to issues of social and environmental justice may constrain or enable different forms of productivity. Research at Bangor seeks to describe and understand these interactions, and their likely future trajectories.