Focus on: Research and training on land systems and related discipline (Climate Change, Biodiversity, and landscape ecology) at the national and regional levels, on behalf of the GLP and Future Earth.
A new paper in Ecology and Society proposes and discusses how strategic spatial planning could play a role in governing land-use frontiers and support the socially, economically, and ecologically sustainable future of rural communities, whilst addressing broader land-use challenges in frontier contexts.
In a new paper in Ambio, the authors use firm- and actor-level interview and spatial data from transnational agriculture and forestry investments in Southern and Eastern Africa to distinguish four types of locations preferred by investors with varied skillsets and market reach (i.e., track record), across gradients of resource frontiers and agglomeration economies. They find that investors with extensive track records are more likely to expand the land use frontier, but likely to better survive the high transaction costs of the pre-commercial frontier, and point to the risks of promoting overly simplistic narratives.
A new study in Nature Food sheds light on a complex interaction of armed conflict, cropland abandonment and implications to food security in South Sudan.