This book emphasizes the centrality of cities in China's ongoing transformation. Based on fieldwork in twenty-four Chinese cities between 1996 and 2007, the author forwards an analysis of the ...relations between the city, the state, and society through two novel concepts: urbanization of the local state and civic territoriality. Urbanization of the local state is a process of state power restructuring entailing an accumulation regime based on the commodification of state-owned land, the consolidation of territorial authority through construction projects, and a policy discourse dominated by notions of urban modernity. Civic territoriality encompasses the politics of distribution engendered by urban expansionism, and social actors' territorial strategies toward self-protection. Findings are based on observations in three types of places. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized; their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined.
Model‐based global projections of future land‐use and land‐cover (LULC) change are frequently used in environmental assessments to study the impact of LULC change on environmental services and to ...provide decision support for policy. These projections are characterized by a high uncertainty in terms of quantity and allocation of projected changes, which can severely impact the results of environmental assessments. In this study, we identify hotspots of uncertainty, based on 43 simulations from 11 global‐scale LULC change models representing a wide range of assumptions of future biophysical and socioeconomic conditions. We attribute components of uncertainty to input data, model structure, scenario storyline and a residual term, based on a regression analysis and analysis of variance. From this diverse set of models and scenarios, we find that the uncertainty varies, depending on the region and the LULC type under consideration. Hotspots of uncertainty appear mainly at the edges of globally important biomes (e.g., boreal and tropical forests). Our results indicate that an important source of uncertainty in forest and pasture areas originates from different input data applied in the models. Cropland, in contrast, is more consistent among the starting conditions, while variation in the projections gradually increases over time due to diverse scenario assumptions and different modeling approaches. Comparisons at the grid cell level indicate that disagreement is mainly related to LULC type definitions and the individual model allocation schemes. We conclude that improving the quality and consistency of observational data utilized in the modeling process and improving the allocation mechanisms of LULC change models remain important challenges. Current LULC representation in environmental assessments might miss the uncertainty arising from the diversity of LULC change modeling approaches, and many studies ignore the uncertainty in LULC projections in assessments of LULC change impacts on climate, water resources or biodiversity.
Land Fictions Ghertner, D. Asher; Lake, Robert W
2021, 2021-03-15
eBook
Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the ...dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs. This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri- urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development. Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular. Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside
The fall of the Soviet Union was a transformative event for the national political economies of Eastern Europe, leading not only to new regimes of ownership and development but to dramatic changes in ...the natural world itself. This painstakingly researched volume focuses on the emblematic case of postsocialist Romania, in which the transition from collectivization to privatization profoundly reshaped the nation's forests, farmlands, and rivers. From bureaucrats abetting illegal deforestation to peasants opposing government agricultural policies, it reveals the social and political mechanisms by which neoliberalism was introduced into the Romanian landscape.
•Globally, 271Mha, or 2.06% of ice-free land surface, can be characterized as urban in 2000.•In 2040, these numbers increase to 621 Mha, or 4.71% of global ice-free land.•Urban land is predominantly ...located in areas that are suitable afor crop production.•65 Mton of crop production will be displaced by urbanization between 2000 and 2040.•Impacts of urbanization on cropland differ widely between world regions.
Urban growth has received little attention in large-scale land change assessments, because the area of built-up land is relatively small on a global scale. However, this area is increasing rapidly, due to population growth, rural-to-urban migration, and wealth increases in many parts of the world. Moreover, the impacts of urban growth on other land uses further amplified by associated land uses, such as recreation and urban green. In this study we analyze urban land take in cropland areas for the years 2000 and 2040, using a land systems approach. As of the year 2000, 213Mha can be classified as urban land, which is 2.06% of the earth’s surface. However, this urban land is more than proportionally located on land that is suitable and available for crop production. In the year 2040, these figures increase to 621Mha, or 4.72% of all the earth’s surface. The increase in urban land between 2000 and 2040 is also more than proportionally located on land that is suitable and available for crop production, thus further limiting our food production capacity. The share of urban land take in cropland areas is highest in Europe, the Middle-East and Northern Africa, and China, while it is relatively low in Oceania and Sub-Saharan Africa. Between 2000 and 2040, urban growth caused the displacement of almost 65Mton of crop production, which could yield an expansion of up to 35Mha of new cropland. Land-use planning can influence both the location and the form of urbanization, and thus appears as an important measure to minimize further losses in crop production.
Changes in agricultural land use have important implications for environmental services. Previous studies of agricultural land-use futures have been published indicating large uncertainty due to ...different model assumptions and methodologies. In this article we present a first comprehensive comparison of global agro-economic models that have harmonized drivers of population, GDP, and biophysical yields. The comparison allows us to ask two research questions: (1) How much cropland will be used under different socioeconomic and climate change scenarios? (2) How can differences in model results be explained? The comparison includes four partial and six general equilibrium models that differ in how they model land supply and amount of potentially available land.We analyze results of two different socioeconomic scenarios and three climate scenarios (one with constant climate). Most models (7 out of 10) project an increase of cropland of 10–25% by 2050 compared to 2005 (under constant climate), but one model projects a decrease. Pasture land expands in some models, which increase the treat on natural vegetation further. Across all models most of the cropland expansion takes place in South America and sub-Saharan Africa. In general, the strongest differences in model results are related to differences in the costs of land expansion, the endogenous productivity responses, and the assumptions about potential cropland.
Soils are subject to varying degrees of direct or indirect human disturbance, constituting a major global change driver. Factoring out natural from direct and indirect human influence is not always ...straightforward, but some human activities have clear impacts. These include land‐use change, land management and land degradation (erosion, compaction, sealing and salinization). The intensity of land use also exerts a great impact on soils, and soils are also subject to indirect impacts arising from human activity, such as acid deposition (sulphur and nitrogen) and heavy metal pollution. In this critical review, we report the state‐of‐the‐art understanding of these global change pressures on soils, identify knowledge gaps and research challenges and highlight actions and policies to minimize adverse environmental impacts arising from these global change drivers. Soils are central to considerations of what constitutes sustainable intensification. Therefore, ensuring that vulnerable and high environmental value soils are considered when protecting important habitats and ecosystems, will help to reduce the pressure on land from global change drivers. To ensure that soils are protected as part of wider environmental efforts, a global soil resilience programme should be considered, to monitor, recover or sustain soil fertility and function, and to enhance the ecosystem services provided by soils. Soils cannot, and should not, be considered in isolation of the ecosystems that they underpin and vice versa. The role of soils in supporting ecosystems and natural capital needs greater recognition. The lasting legacy of the International Year of Soils in 2015 should be to put soils at the centre of policy supporting environmental protection and sustainable development.
•A theoretical model of regional land use transitions.•Mechanism of mutual feedback between land use transition and land management.•A three-fold analysis framework of natural system-economic ...system-managerial system.•Land use transitions are affected by land management via economic measures.•Land use transitions contribute to land management via socio-ecological feedback.
This paper develops a theoretical model of regional land use transitions based on expanding and deepening the concept and connotations of land use transition. With the socio-economic development, transformations between different land use types during a certain period of time cause the change of the conflicts resulted from regional land use morphology pattern from strong to weak. These transformations will lead to a new balance of regional land use morphology pattern consists of different land use types corresponding to related economic departments, respectively, and will finally realize the qualitative transformation of urban-rural land use system. Then, the mechanism of mutual feedback between land use transition and land management was probed based on a three-fold framework of natural system-economic system-managerial system. Generally, land use transitions are affected by land management via economic measures, land engineering, policy and institution. Land use transitions can also contribute to the adjustment of land management measures via socio-ecological feedback. The authors argue that the formulation of land management policies and institutions needs to take into account the land use transition phase of targeted region, not only current land use transition phase but also its subsequent phase corresponding to regional socio-economic development transformation.
It is increasingly being recognized that land use and land cover changes driven by anthropogenic pressures are impacting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and their services, human society, and ...human livelihoods and well-being. This Special Issue contains 12 original papers covering various issues related to land use and land use changes in various parts of the world (see references), with the purpose of providing a forum to exchange ideas and progress in related areas. Research topics include land use targets, dynamic modelling and mapping using satellite images, pressures from energy production, deforestation, impacts on ecosystem services, aboveground biomass evaluation, and investigations on libraries of legends and classification systems.
Climate change is increasingly altering the composition of ecological communities, in combination with other environmental pressures such as high‐intensity land use. Pressures are expected to ...interact in their effects, but the extent to which intensive human land use constrains community responses to climate change is currently unclear. A generic indicator of climate change impact, the community temperature index (CTI), has previously been used to suggest that both bird and butterflies are successfully ‘tracking’ climate change. Here, we assessed community changes at over 600 English bird or butterfly monitoring sites over three decades and tested how the surrounding land has influenced these changes. We partitioned community changes into warm‐ and cold‐associated assemblages and found that English bird communities have not reorganized successfully in response to climate change. CTI increases for birds are primarily attributable to the loss of cold‐associated species, whilst for butterflies, warm‐associated species have tended to increase. Importantly, the area of intensively managed land use around monitoring sites appears to influence these community changes, with large extents of intensively managed land limiting ‘adaptive’ community reorganization in response to climate change. Specifically, high‐intensity land use appears to exacerbate declines in cold‐adapted bird and butterfly species, and prevent increases in warm‐associated birds. This has broad implications for managing landscapes to promote climate change adaptation.
This study investigates how bird and butterfly communities have changed during three decades of climate warming. We present the first evidence to show that community changes appear to be constrained by high‐intensity land use. This has broad implications for managing landscapes to promote climate change adaptation.
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