Commentary: Policy challenges for global land use

Some environmental and development policies of the 1980s and 1990s were based on simplistic views on the causes and dynamics of land-use changes (Lambin et al., 2001). For example, the assumption that tropical deforestation was mainly linked to local population growth, poverty, and shifting cultivation led to a failure to address commodity-driven deforestation, which later became a dominant cause of forest conversion. The assumptions that rangelands have a fixed carrying capacity and that pastoralists overstock their rangelands, causing dryland degradation, were used to justify strategies to control and modify traditional patterns of pastoralism in sub-Saharan Africa, with negative consequences on land access and livelihoods. Since our identification, twenty years ago, of empirically-supported pathways of land-use change (Lambin et al., 2001), land system science has made major advances in its understanding of land use as coupled human environment systems (Turner et al., 2021). This richer understanding proves essential to address current policy challenges related to land use and sustainability solutions. We briefly discuss four examples below.

Eric F. Lambin, B.L. Turner, Fridah Nyakundi

EfD Authors

Nyakundi, Fridah

Sustainable Development Goals

Life on Land