This week, we will read about land use change, including why land use change is an important planetary boundary. More recent assessments of the planetary bounders suggest that we may have already transgressed the boundary for global land use change. This week, we will spend time thinking about the drivers of land use change in relation to population, consumption, food, energy, and water. Additionally, we will examine the explosion of large scale land acquisitions in many developing countries (also called "land grabbing"). 

Consider these questions as you go through the material for this week:

• Why is land use change increasingly seen as one of the most problematic planetary boundaries?
• How do population growth and consumption impact land use change?
• What is the relative importance of food, energy, and water for land use change?
• For all of these relationships, think about who benefits and who bears the environmental burden and how these are different in different places.

Lesson 11 Checklist

Note: Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates.

Land use change: refers to the process of human modification and transformation the natural landscape, usually emphasizing the functional role of land for economic activities.

Land use change as a Planetary Boundary:

In Lesson 1 of this course, we read about the Planetary Boundaries. Rockstrom et al. (2009) list "Change in land use" as one of the boundaries and propose the boundary to be "No more than 15%–20% of global ice free land surface converted to cropland". They noted that we were close to their proposed boundary, at 11.7% in 2009. Before this first assessment of planetary boundaries was written in 2009, land use was generally considered a local environmental issue, but since then it is becoming a force of global importance. This is importance is largely due to the relationship that land use has with other planetary boundaries. For example, changes in land use exert the most significant effect on biodiversity loss, and land-use changes in the Amazon could influence water resources as far away as Tibet (Rockstrom et al. 2009). Since Rockstrom et al. (2009) was first published, our understanding of the importance of land-use change for other earth systems has expanded greatly. An updated effort to assess Planetary Boundaries was published by Steffen et al. in 2015. They proposed that the land use change boundary should be measured as the "percent of original forest cover remaining from pre-industrial levels," and proposed that we should not exceed less than 54-75% (using a weighted average of the boundaries for tropical, temperate, and boreal forests). They noted that with only 62% of pre-industrial levels of forest cover left on earth, we may already have exceeded this boundary. Their analyses places land use change as a global environmental problem as pressing as climate change.

The Planetary Boundaries according to Steffen et al. 2015

Source: Planetary Boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet [1], Science: Vol.347, No 6223.

The problem of land use change is not evenly distributed around the world. In fact, in 2018, Song et al. published a paper showing that global tree cover had in fact increased by 7.1% in the 35 years between 1982–2016. The problem is that increases in forest area in the global north cannot compensate for loss of forests in the tropics, as tropical forests had a much larger impact on other earth systems (such as climate change) (Steffen et al. 2015).

If you are interested, you can check out this Animated Map of Global Forest Loss [2].

Drivers of land use change:

Croplands and pastures now occupy 40% of land surface, rivaling forest cover in extent of the land surface (Foley et al. 2005). This makes agricultural production the planet’s single most extensive form of land use (Campbell et al. 2017). Land has become one of the world's most important resources, so much so that there has been a global rush to acquire large amounts of land in lower and middle income countries, often called "Land grabbing". This week, you will read about Proximate and Underlying Drivers of land use change (Geist & Lambin 2002) and Land grabbing (Edelman et al. 2013). This should remind you of your Lesson 5 reading of Campbell et al. (2017) which proposed that 80% of historical deforestation globally to date has caused by agriculture.

In 2018, an important new paper "Classifying drivers of global forest loss" sought to build on ideas purposed by Geist & Lambin (2002) by differentiating permanent land use conversion (i.e., deforestation) from temporary loss from forestry or wildfire (Curtis et al. 2018). What they found was that large-scale farming and ranching, the only permanent form of land use change accounted for 27% total forest loss (while forestry, small-scale farming, and wildfire accounted for the rest, but were not permanent).

To understand the breakdown of land use on earth, please take the time to read through ESRI's The Living Land Story Map [3]. As you read, note how much of the land on earth is urban areas and human habitation, and think back to our section on overpopulation. Then think about how much of earth is used to produce goods that humans consume, and our discussion of consumption in Lesson 1. Finally, think about the Food-Energy-Water nexus. You should be starting to think about these in terms of each of the planetary boundaries, so take the time to think about how they relate to land use change.

Think back to the trade-offs we have already read about in terms of land-use and energy: including biofuels (Baka 2016, course website on oil palm) and hydro electricity production (Lesson 8). Geographers have also written about the fact that land use is an under-considered trade-off for solar production (Yenneti & Golubchikov 2016, Calvert & Mabee 2015). There may even be trade-offs with wind production. As you think about these, think about scale. For example, here in Pennsylvania, fracking and shale-gas development has not lead to significant deforestation, but has significantly changed the structure of our landscapes through forest fragmentation (Roig-Silva et al. 2016).

Finally, think about how these pressures on land are a driving the commodification of land and the accumulation of large amounts of land by foreigners in many developing countries (land grabbing). One final important paper by Rulli et al (2013) showed that land grabbing occurs almost entirely in places where land acquisition also ensure water acquisition. They find that many of the countries doing the most "grabbing" are those with the greatest water stress and that land grabbing is associated with a virtual grabbing of a substantial amount of freshwater resources, including both water supplied by rainfall and irrigation. In some cases land grabbing leads to a loss of access to water resources needed to ensure food security for local populations (Rulli et al. 2013).

For all of these relationships, think about who benefits and who bears the environmental burden and how these are different in different places.

References cited:

Calvert, K., & Mabee, W. (2015). More solar farms or more bioenergy crops? Mapping and assessing potential land-use conflicts among renewable energy technologies in eastern Ontario, Canada. Applied Geography, 56, 209-221.

Curtis, P. G., Slay, C. M., Harris, N. L., Tyukavina, A., & Hansen, M. C. (2018). Classifying drivers of global forest loss. Science, 361(6407), 1108-1111.

Foley, J. A., DeFries, R., Asner, G. P., Barford, C., Bonan, G., Carpenter, S. R., ... & Helkowski, J. H. (2005). Global consequences of land use. science, 309(5734), 570-574.

Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin Iii, F. S., Lambin, E. F., . . . Foley, J. A. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461, 472. doi:10.1038/461472a.

Roig-Silva, C. M., Slonecker, E. T., Milheim, L. E., Ballew, J. R., & Winters, S. G. (2016). Forest cover changes due to hydrocarbon extraction disturbance in central Pennsylvania (2004–2010). Journal of Maps, 12(sup1), 131-138.

Rulli, M. C., A. Saviori and P. D’Odorico (2013). "Global land and water grabbing." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110(3): 892-897.

Song, X.-P., Hansen, M.C., Stehman, S.V., Potapov, P.V., Tyukavina, A., Vermote, E.F., Townshend, J.R., 2018. Global land change from 1982 to 2016. Nature 560(7720), 639-643

Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S. E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E. M., ... & Folke, C. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223), 1259855.

Yenneti, K., Day, R., & Golubchikov, O. (2016). Spatial justice and the land politics of renewables: Dispossessing vulnerable communities through solar energy mega-projects. Geoforum, 76, 90-99.

Required Reading:

Geist, H. J., & Lambin, E. F. (2002). Proximate Causes and Underlying Driving Forces of Tropical Deforestation. BioScience, 52(2), 143-150.

For many years, the conservation and agriculture communities presented facts and figures about the drivers of land use change that included only the immediate (or proximate) causes. Small-scale subsistence farmers all over the developing world (especially those practicing shifting cultivation) were vilified for chopping down the world's precious tropical rain forests. This narrative allowed Western consumers to carry on with their consumption patterns guilt free, allowed large agricultural companies to avoid significant scrutiny, and led to the "fortress" conservation approach to managing protected areas you read about last week. This paper and other work by these geographers was hugely influential as a first major effort to clearly demonstrate the factors that push poor farmers in developing counties to the forest frontiers, and the broader systems that support deforestation. The paper clearly demonstrates that tropical deforestation is driven by synergies between multiple causal factors; including both proximate causes and underlying forces.

Proximate causes: human activities and actions at the  immediate or local scale, originate from intended land use and directly impact forest cover.

Underlying driving forces: fundamental social processes (e.g., population dynamics or agricultural policies), that underpin the proximate causes. Can be local, national, or global scale.

Edelman, M., Oya, C., Borras, S.M., 2013. Global Land Grabs: historical processes, theoretical and methodological implications and current trajectories. Third World Quarterly 34(9), 1517-1531.

Since the financial crisis of 2008/ 2009, investor interest in land has climbed sharply. This paper examines what is often called Land Grabbing (large scale acquisition of land, often by foreign entities or non-local people). It advocates for a more nuanced look at the issue, including attention to financialisation and enclosure of land, and the fact that there are many other ways local farmers have been dispossessed of their land. The paper highlights the five themes covered by papers in the special issue of the journal: the long history of land grabbing, the theoretical implications of the contemporary land rush for agrarian political economy and for social theory more broadly, the plurality of legal institutions implicated or potentially implicated in today’s land deals, the differentiated outcomes of grabs and the political reactions of those affected, and the methods most appropriate for carrying out rigorous, relevant research.

The period between 2007 and 2012 is what we can call the ‘making sense period’: media, NGOs, policy experts and academics were grappling with basic questions: what is happening, where and when, who is involved, how much land is involved, and how many people are being expelled from their land? How do we define land grab? What do we count? How do we count? How do we interpret our sources?

... agreement remains firm and widespread that a renewed land rush is indeed happening worldwide, albeit unevenly. ... a growing number of researchers agrees that the initial set of basic questions has served its purpose and its era has ended. A newer set of questions began to emerge towards the end of the initial period of land grab research [which are the focus of the paper and special issue].

NOTE: Links to the readings are located in the Week 11 module in Canvas.