Cross-scale and distant interactions among drivers of land change: Local to international land use displacement with expanding commodity crops

Background/Question/Methods

To address the objective of the symposium – i.e. to investigate how global data and insights can inform local studies and management, and the opposite –, this presentation will discuss three aspects of the feedback loop between local and global drivers of land change, i.e. global influences on local land uses, feedbacks from local processes to global forces of land use changes, and how to combine global and local studies of land change.

First, through a comparative analysis of case studies of pathways of expansion and sources of land for commodity crops, the presentation will show how global forces translate into local patterns of land use depending on several contextual factors. Case studies will include the Central Highlands of Vietnam, Mato Grosso, the Peruvian Amazon, and West Kalimantan.

Second, the presentation will discuss how local issues, through multiple processes occurring in different locations, feedback on global drivers of land change, taking as an example the emergence of multi-scalar governance and planning of land use, involving transnational and  global institutions, as a product of changes in land use dynamics in developing and emerging countries. 

Third, the presentation will show how to complement global and local analyses of international displacement of land uses by coupling, on the one hand, analyses of cross-border displacement using aggregate data, which provide information on the amount of land use displaced and on the underlying drivers of land use demand including population, affluence, policies and food systems, with local-scale analyses of expansion and contraction of commodity crops on the other hand, which provide information on how an aggregate demand for land translates into pathways of land changes, and produce environmental and social impacts. This will be illustrated with case studies in Vietnam and Bhutan.

Results/Conclusions

This presentation will show (i) that cross-scale and distant interactions between global and local drivers of land change interact in feedback loops to produce the patterns of land change that can be observed at any given scale, (ii) that combining global and local analyses is necessary to obtain a coherent understanding of underlying and proximate drivers, and social and environmental impacts of land change, and (iii) how methods from economic simulation models, case studies, industrial ecology and political ecology can be used to undertake this combination of global to local studies.