Analysis of food system drivers of deforestation highlights foreign direct investments and urbanization as threats to tropical forests.

Approximately 90% of global forest cover changes between 2000 and 2018 were attributable to agricultural expansion, making food production the leading direct driver of deforestation. While previous studies have focused on the interaction between human and environmental systems, limited research has explored deforestation from a food system perspective. This study analyzes the drivers of deforestation in 40 tropical and subtropical countries (2004-2021) through the lenses of consumption/demand, production/supply and trade/distribution using Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models.

More than one quarter of Africa's tree cover is found outside areas previously classified as forest.

The consistent monitoring of trees both inside and outside of forests is key to sustainable land management. Current monitoring systems either ignore trees outside forests or are too expensive to be applied consistently across countries on a repeated basis. Here we use the PlanetScope nanosatellite constellation, which delivers global very high-resolution daily imagery, to map both forest and non-forest tree cover for continental Africa using images from a single year.

Nation-wide mapping of tree-level aboveground carbon stocks in Rwanda.

Trees sustain livelihoods and mitigate climate change but a predominance of trees outside forests and limited resources make it difficult for many tropical countries to conduct automated nation-wide inventories. Here, we propose an approach to map the carbon stock of each individual overstory tree at the national scale of Rwanda using aerial imagery from 2008 and deep learning. We show that 72% of the mapped trees are located in farmlands and savannas and 17% in plantations, accounting for 48.

Resilience of breadfruit agro-ecosystems in Hawai'i during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic is interrupting domestic and global food supply chains resulting in reduced access to healthy diverse diets. Hawai'i has been described as a model social-ecological system and it has been suggested that indigenous agro-ecosystems have the potential to be highly productive and resilient under changing land-use and climate change disturbance. However, little research has yet been conducted exploring the disruption and resilience of agro-ecosystems in Hawai'i caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Large Differences in Livelihood Responses and Outcomes to Increased Conservation Enforcement in a Protected Area.

Unlabelled: Despite the popularity of integrated conservation and development approaches to protected area management, adjacent communities increasingly face livelihood dilemmas. Yet understanding of how market processes and conservation enforcement interact to influence livelihood responses remains limited. Targeting eight villages in Nam Et-Phou Louey (NEPL) National Park in northern Lao PDR, we draw on survey data with 255 households, 93 semi-structured interviews, and meso-level data on village conditions to examine how residents navigate associated livelihood dilemmas.

Unravelling the link between global rubber price and tropical deforestation in Cambodia.

Tropical forests continue to undergo a rapid transformation. The expansion of rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) plantations has been reported as a major driver of forest loss, linked to a boom in market demand. Distant commodity markets have spurred a surge of large-scale economic land concessions granted throughout tropical Southeast Asia.

"Reduction of tree cover in West African woodlands and promotion in semi-arid farmlands".

Woody vegetation in farmland acts as a carbon sink and provides ecosystem services for local people, but no macro-scale assessments of the impact of management and climate on woody cover exists for drylands. Here we make use of very high spatial resolution satellite imagery to derive wall-to-wall woody cover patterns in tropical West African drylands. Our study reveals a consistently high woody cover in farmlands along all semi-arid and sub-humid rainfall zones (16%), on average only 6% lower than in savannas.

A global view of shifting cultivation: Recent, current, and future extent.

Mosaic landscapes under shifting cultivation, with their dynamic mix of managed and natural land covers, often fall through the cracks in remote sensing-based land cover and land use classifications, as these are unable to adequately capture such landscapes' dynamic nature and complex spectral and spatial signatures. But information about such landscapes is urgently needed to improve the outcomes of global earth system modelling and large-scale carbon and greenhouse gas accounting. This study combines existing global Landsat-based deforestation data covering the years 2000 to 2014 with very high-resolution satellite imagery to visually detect the specific spatio-temporal pattern of shifting cultivation at a one-degree cell resolution worldwide.

Human population growth offsets climate-driven increase in woody vegetation in sub-Saharan Africa.

The rapidly growing human population in sub-Saharan Africa generates increasing demand for agricultural land and forest products, which presumably leads to deforestation. Conversely, a greening of African drylands has been reported, but this has been difficult to associate with changes in woody vegetation. There is thus an incomplete understanding of how woody vegetation responds to socio-economic and environmental change.

The impact of swidden decline on livelihoods and ecosystem services in Southeast Asia: A review of the evidence from 1990 to 2015.

Global economic change and policy interventions are driving transitions from long-fallow swidden (LFS) systems to alternative land uses in Southeast Asia's uplands. This study presents a systematic review of how these transitions impact upon livelihoods and ecosystem services in the region. Over 17 000 studies published between 1950 and 2015 were narrowed, based on relevance and quality, to 93 studies for further analysis.

From food to pest: Conversion factors determine switches between ecosystem services and disservices.

Ecosystem research focuses on goods and services, thereby ascribing beneficial values to the ecosystems. Depending on the context, however, outputs from ecosystems can be both positive and negative. We examined how provisioning services of wild animals and plants can switch between being services and disservices.

Meta-studies in land use science: Current coverage and prospects.

Land use science has traditionally used case-study approaches for in-depth investigation of land use change processes and impacts. Meta-studies synthesize findings across case-study evidence to identify general patterns. In this paper, we provide a review of meta-studies in land use science.

Synthesis in land change science: methodological patterns, challenges, and guidelines.

Global and regional economic and environmental changes are increasingly influencing local land-use, livelihoods, and ecosystems. At the same time, cumulative local land changes are driving global and regional changes in biodiversity and the environment. To understand the causes and consequences of these changes, land change science (LCS) draws on a wide array synthetic and meta-study techniques to generate global and regional knowledge from local case studies of land change.

Vietnam's forest transition in retrospect: demonstrating weaknesses in business-as-usual scenarios for REDD.

One of the prerequisites of the REDD+ mechanism is to effectively predict business-as-usual (BAU) scenarios for change in forest cover. This would enable estimation of how much carbon emission a project could potentially prevent and thus how much carbon credit should be rewarded. However, different factors like forest degradation and the lack of linearity in forest cover transitions challenge the accuracy of such scenarios.

Land System Science: between global challenges and local realities.

This issue of provides an overview of recent advances in Land System Science while at the same time setting the research agenda for the Land System Science community. Land System Science is not just representing land system changes as either a driver or a consequence of global environmental change. Land systems also offer solutions to global change through adaptation and mitigation and can play a key role in achieving a sustainable future earth.

Land system change and food security: towards multi-scale land system solutions.

Land system changes are central to the food security challenge. Land system science can contribute to sustainable solutions by an integrated analysis of land availability and the assessment of the tradeoffs associated with agricultural expansion and land use intensification. A land system perspective requires local studies of production systems to be contextualised in a regional and global context, while global assessments should be confronted with local realities.

Carbon outcomes of major land-cover transitions in SE Asia: great uncertainties and REDD+ policy implications.

Policy makers across the tropics propose that carbon finance could provide incentives for forest frontier communities to transition away from swidden agriculture (slash-and-burn or shifting cultivation) to other systems that potentially reduce emissions and/or increase carbon sequestration. However, there is little certainty regarding the carbon outcomes of many key land-use transitions at the center of current policy debates. Our meta-analysis of over 250 studies reporting above- and below-ground carbon estimates for different land-use types indicates great uncertainty in the net total ecosystem carbon changes that can be expected from many transitions, including the replacement of various types of swidden agriculture with oil palm, rubber, or some other types of agroforestry systems.

Climate variability and environmental stress in the Sudan-Sahel zone of West Africa.

Environmental change in the Sudan-Sahel region of West Africa (SSWA) has been much debated since the droughts of the 1970s. In this article we assess climate variability and environmental stress in the region. Households in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Nigeria were asked about climatic changes and their perceptions were compared across north-south and west-east rainfall gradients.

Researching Pacific island livelihoods: mobility, natural resource management and nissology.

Small island literature is vast in focus and aim, and is rooted in many different disciplines. The challenge is to find common grounds for researching small islands conceptually and theoretically. The aim of this article is to comment on how to research small islands, including a discussion on contemporary theories of nissology and conceptual analytical frameworks for island research.

Adaptation to climate change in developing countries.

Adaptation to climate change is given increasing international attention as the confidence in climate change projections is getting higher. Developing countries have specific needs for adaptation due to high vulnerabilities, and they will in this way carry a great part of the global costs of climate change although the rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are mainly the responsibility of industrialized countries. This article provides a status of climate change adaptation in developing countries.

Farmers' perceptions of climate change and agricultural adaptation strategies in rural Sahel.

Farmers in the Sahel have always been facing climatic variability at intra- and inter-annual and decadal time scales. While coping and adaptation strategies have traditionally included crop diversification, mobility, livelihood diversification, and migration, singling out climate as a direct driver of changes is not so simple. Using focus group interviews and a household survey, this study analyzes the perceptions of climate change and the strategies for coping and adaptation by sedentary farmers in the savanna zone of central Senegal.