Patrick Meyfroidt holds a PhD in geography (2009) and a degree in sociology from Université catholique de Louvain (UClouvain) in Belgium. His main research interests are land use and forest transitions, linkages between globalization and land use, theories of land system change, and social-ecological feedbacks. Since 2016 he is Research Associate at the F.R.S-FNRS (the Belgian Research Funds) and Professor at UCLouvain.
Themes
Telecoupling of land use systems, Land governance, Land change trade-offs for ecosystem services and biodiversity , Land management systems, Urban-rural interactions
A recent paper in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability highlights the diversity of ways in which theories, as assemblages of different elements that can serve a variety of purposes, can emerge within inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary processes.
A new paper in the Journal of Land Use Science addresses strategic land-use planning instruments in land-use planning in tropical, low-income regions, and further details the extent to which the instruments' characteristics support land governance.
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.
