Ariane de Bremond | University of Maryland, College Park (original) (raw)

Papers by Ariane de Bremond

AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 1, 2018

BioScience, Dec 14, 2022

E cosystem restoration, as it was defined by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Bio... more E cosystem restoration, as it was defined by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES 2018), is "any intentional activity that initiates or accelerates the recovery of an ecosystem from a degraded state. " Further refinements to the term have been focused less on the presence of an ideal state and more on bringing the ecosystem onto a trajectory that improves ecological functionality with respect to the baseline degraded landscapes. It is hoped that by improving ecological functionality, different types of restoration can simultaneously enhance biodiversity, increase resilience to natural disasters, and promote the well-being of people living in or near degraded landscapes (Besseau et al. 2018). The potential of restoration as a multifaceted means of addressing multiple sustainability challenges has generated global enthusiasm, concurrent with a proliferation of global and regional restoration targets and commitments. The Bonn Challenge was the first major international restoration-focused initiative (established in 2011), and it pledged to restore 150 million hectares of land globally by 2020. This initiative was later endorsed by the New York Declaration of Forests, which aimed to bring 350 million hectares of land under restoration by 2030. When the Sustainable Development Goals were adopted in 2015, the importance of protecting and restoring forest ecosystems, among other sustainability measures, was articulated in goal 15, "Life on Land. " The One Trillion Trees Initiative was launched at the World Economic Forum in January 2020 with the aim to conserve, restore, and grow a trillion trees by 2030. June 2021 marked the beginning of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which is intended to catalyze restoration efforts globally. Most recently, the Glasgow Climate Pact emphasized the importance of protecting, conserving, and restoring ecosystems to meet the Paris Agreement temperature target (UNFCCC 2021). These large-scale policy pledges and the potential for restoration to yield carbon offsets has led to a growing interest from powerful financial actors in the Global North to fund restoration (Löfqvist and Ghazoul 2019), further catalyzing restoration initiatives globally. Global restoration targets are often primarily based on spatial and quantitative metrics derived using high-level,

AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 1, 2018

Land system changes generate many sustainability challenges. Identifying more sustainable landuse... more Land system changes generate many sustainability challenges. Identifying more sustainable landuse alternatives requires solid theoretical foundations on the causes of land-use/cover changes. Land system science is a maturing field that has produced a wealth of methodological innovations and empirical observations on land-cover and land-use change, from patterns and processes to causes. We take stock of this knowledge by reviewing and synthesizing the theories that explain the causal mechanisms of land-use change, including systemic linkages between distant land-use changes, with a focus on agriculture and forestry processes. We first review theories explaining changes in land-use extent, such as agricultural expansion, deforestation, frontier development, and land abandonment, and changes in land-use intensity, such as agricultural intensification and disintensification. We then synthesize theories of higher-level land system change processes, focusing on: (i) land-use spillovers, including land sparing and rebound effects with intensification, leakage, indirect land-use change, and land-use displacement, and (ii) land-use transitions, defined as structural non-linear changes in land systems, including forest transitions. Theories focusing on the causes of land system changes span theoretically and epistemologically disparate knowledge domains and build from deductive, abductive, and inductive approaches. A grand, integrated theory of land system change remains elusive. Yet, we show that middle-range theories-defined here as contextual generalizations that describe chains of causal mechanisms explaining a well-bounded range of phenomena, as well as the conditions that trigger, enable, or prevent these causal chains-, provide a path towards generalized knowledge of land systems. This knowledge can support progress towards sustainable social-ecological systems.

AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 1, 2019

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Jun 1, 2019

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Jun 1, 2019

Implementing the 2030 Agenda may well translate into competing claims on scarce land resources. T... more Implementing the 2030 Agenda may well translate into competing claims on scarce land resources. Thus, there is a call for a better linkage of science, policy, and practice to navigate development trade-offs and use co-benefits. We found that since 2015, scientists formally associated as members to the Global Land Programme (GLP) have mainly researched on topics that are relevant to the 2030 Agenda, but only half of the sampled publications actually address interactions between its targets. Of those, many are concentrating on the interactions between climate action, environmental targets, and food security, while interactions between land-related issues and poverty are addressed much less often. Our results point to opportunities for further strengthening GLP's capacity to engage in transdisciplinary dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration and respond to the knowledge needs of societal partners.

The Journal of Environment & Development, 1993

ABSTRACT The "Enterprise for the Americas Initiative" was designed to incorpora... more ABSTRACT The "Enterprise for the Americas Initiative" was designed to incorporate Latin America into a system of global trade while addressing the region's need for environmental protection. Will the goal of trade liberalization undermine the Initiative's ability to contribute to sustainable development? This paper discusses the concept of sustainability as it relates to future development strategy. It also examines two threats to the implementation of sustainable development: first, from globalization of trade institutionalized by the EAI, and second, from GATT measures designed to buttress policy programs such as the EAI and NAFTA. Using applied notions of sustainable development, the Initiative's provisions—international standardization of trade regulations, open investment, debt accompanied by conditionality, and the Environmental Fund—are reviewed on the basis of their impact on environmental and social stability.

Ecology and Society, 2022

Extensive land-use "regime shifts" have been observed as rapid transitions from natural land cove... more Extensive land-use "regime shifts" have been observed as rapid transitions from natural land cover or subsistence-oriented land use to intensified and/or expanded commodity production. However, it is often unclear whether these land-use changes are part of broader land system regime shifts in which pre-existing production systems and livelihood strategies are fundamentally transformed along with observable land-use changes rather than simply displaced or eliminated. This is a critical social-environment question given that regime shifts are often a desired and intended outcome of national rural development and market-liberalization policies but must also be attentive to environmental conservation and/or climate change mitigation goals. We investigated whether nationally extensive land-use changes implemented through large-scale land deals in Lao People's Democratic Republic resulted in full, partial, or no villageand landscape-level regime shifts in and around land deals. Overall, land deals triggered a wide variety of full, partial, and no regime shift outcomes. Land deals with both domestic and foreign investors produced positive and negative outcomes, although foreign land deals for the production of rubber led to significantly higher rates of indirect land-use change in impacted villages than domestic and/ or non-rubber land deals. Also, financial compensation alone was insufficient to improve community well-being because it could be reinvested to perpetuate previous land uses without the desired transformation in livelihoods and rural development. Land deals that exhibited greater social embeddedness (i.e., provided adequate compensation complemented by job-creation and improved access to infrastructure and/or services) were more likely to lead to positive regime shifts. Our findings demonstrate that any land system regime shift will produce both winners and losers, and thus it becomes necessary to critically analyze the localized distribution of social and environmental costs and benefits within broader-scale land-use regime shifts.

Third World Quarterly, Dec 1, 2007

... In El Salvador, a land-scarce, heavily settled country with the highest population density in... more ... In El Salvador, a land-scarce, heavily settled country with the highest population density in the Central American region, a key issue of the civil war had been the inequitable distribution of land. ... In this 'negotiated revolution' land reform was a political imperative, integral to the ...

Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Jan 30, 2014

ABSTRACT Climate change is rapidly undermining terrestrial ecosystem resilience and capacity to c... more ABSTRACT Climate change is rapidly undermining terrestrial ecosystem resilience and capacity to continue providing their services to the benefit of humanity and nature. Because of the importance of terrestrial ecosystems to human well-being and supporting services, decision makers throughout the world are busy creating policy responses that secure multiple development and conservation objectives— including that of supporting terrestrial ecosystem resilience in the context of climate change. This article aims to advance analyses on climate policy evaluation and planning in the area of terrestrial ecosystem resilience by discussing adaptation policy options within the ecology-economy-social nexus. The paper evaluates these decisions in the realm of terrestrial ecosystem resilience and evaluates the utility of a set of criteria, indicators, and assessment methods, proposed by a new conceptual multi-criteria framework for pro-development climate policy and planning developed by the United Nations Environment Programme. Potential applications of a multicriteria approach to climate policy vis-à-vis terrestrial ecosystems are then explored through two hypothetical case study examples. The paper closes with a brief discussion of the utility of the multi-criteria approach in the context of other climate policy evaluation approaches, considers lessons learned as a result efforts to evaluate climate policy in the realm of terrestrial ecosystems, and reiterates the role of ecosystem resilience in creating sound policies and actions that support the integration of climate change and development goals.

Environmental Science & Policy, Oct 1, 2014

Journal of Political Ecology, Dec 1, 2013

The dream of the neighboring communities of the forest is nothing less than to conserve, for alwa... more The dream of the neighboring communities of the forest is nothing less than to conserve, for always, for the present and future generations, our biological and historical riches inherited as a result of the armed conflict in which we were protagonists. (Associación de Reconstrucción y Desarollo Municipal de Cinquera 2004: 5) The expansion of 'peasant' claims from land as an economic asset to land as a component in a total ecosystem amounts to the redefinition of land as a primary economic value to land as but one kind of value within a larger panoply of generalized value.

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Jun 1, 2019

Abstract Global environmental change (GEC) and sustainability science (SS) communities’ science i... more Abstract Global environmental change (GEC) and sustainability science (SS) communities’ science is increasingly challenged to inform transformations to sustainability. Recognizing this, the Global Land Programme (GLP), a network of the international land system science community, is developing, testing, and launching new network infrastructures, science–policy interfaces, and co-production approaches. This paper charts the efforts of the GLP – since its 2015 joining of Future Earth, a 10-year initiative to advance global sustainability science – to support the land system science community as it endeavors to produce transformative research oriented toward sustainable development. Moving from incremental to transformational modes of knowledge co-production across scientific research networks – such as those represented under the umbrella of the Future Earth — requires that these work across multiple knowledge domains, scales, contexts, and regions, and in collaboration with a diversity of actors from global-level decisionmakers to national, regional, and local level civil society organizations as well as the private sector. Beyond the generation of fundamental science, GLP’s rich co-design tradition of working with land managers and linking case-study and field-based research to global synthesis situate it as a key institution and platform accelerating transformative research oriented toward sustainable development.

Ecology and Society

Land-use change (LUC) driven by commodity agriculture over the last 20 years has been particularl... more Land-use change (LUC) driven by commodity agriculture over the last 20 years has been particularly extensive in the Dry Chaco region of Argentina, which surpassed the Amazon during that time to become one of the top three global deforestation hotspots. Large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) have been cited as a key catalyst of deforestation and related LUC in commodity frontier expansion. However, it is unclear whether contemporary LSLAs that affected the Dry Chaco and other agricultural commodity frontiers globally differed in their mechanisms of LUC from conventional agricultural expansion processes. The diversity of domestic and foreign investors, commodity crops, and LUC dynamics observable in contemporary LSLAs in Argentina's Dry Chaco provide a focused lens, or "case set," through which to consider commodity frontier dynamics in the Salta Province since 2000. We integrated remote sensing analysis and classification of the timing and location of LUC within the boundaries of LSLA and non-LSLA agricultural parcels with survival analysis to draw conclusions about the dynamics of LSLA establishment (i.e., purchase/transfer of ownership/ title change) and LUC associated with production operations. Regionally, spatio-temporal patterns of agricultural expansion into increasingly marginal land were consistent between LSLA and non-LSLA parcels. However, parcel-based analysis revealed differing responsiveness to commodity prices and land-use constraints imposed by the National Forest Law, which translated into diverging LUC trajectories among LSLA and non-LSLA parcels. In particular, LUC on LSLA parcels was significantly slowed by Forest Law constraints, but continued on non-LSLA parcels and a small number of "recategorized" and/or illegally deforested LSLA parcels. Our findings demonstrate the importance of moving beyond large-scale, aggregate spatial assessments of LSLA outcomes that aim to inform policy yet 'black box" actors. Actor heterogeneity must be explicitly accounted for as part of the causal mechanisms that influence land acquisition and lead to differing LUC trajectories.

Las adquisiciones de tierras a gran escala o "Grandes Transacciones de Tierras" (GTT) i... more Las adquisiciones de tierras a gran escala o "Grandes Transacciones de Tierras" (GTT) informadas durante las últimas dos décadas en la región del "Chaco" en la provincia de Salta, al Norte de Argentina, contribuyen al fenómeno de la expansión de la "frontera agropecuaria", y también podrían interpretarse como un ejemplo más de la historia ambiental de la región en los dos últimos siglos. En este trabajo analizamos este caso utilizando un enfoque de investigación de métodos mixtos que combina herramientas empíricas y análisis de información cuantitativa dentro de un marco conceptual que se basa en la historia ambiental, los estudios agrarios críticos y la ecología política. Analizamos los datos recopilados por el Punto Focal América Latina (PFAL) de la Iniciativa Land Matrix (ILM) sobre las GTT que tuvieron lugar entre 2000 y 2020 en nuestra área de estudio, pero también en Argentina y en Latinoamérica y el Caribe (LAC). Las GTT en nuestra área de estudi...

BioScience

Ecosystem restoration is an important means to address global sustainability challenges. However,... more Ecosystem restoration is an important means to address global sustainability challenges. However, scientific and policy discourse often overlooks the social processes that influence the equity and effectiveness of restoration interventions. In the present article, we outline how social processes that are critical to restoration equity and effectiveness can be better incorporated in restoration science and policy. Drawing from existing case studies, we show how projects that align with local people's preferences and are implemented through inclusive governance are more likely to lead to improved social, ecological, and environmental outcomes. To underscore the importance of social considerations in restoration, we overlay existing global restoration priority maps, population, and the Human Development Index (HDI) to show that approximately 1.4 billion people, disproportionately belonging to groups with low HDI, live in areas identified by previous studies as being of high restora...

Global Sustainability

Non-technical summary We summarize what we assess as the past year's most important findings ... more Non-technical summary We summarize what we assess as the past year's most important findings within climate change research: limits to adaptation, vulnerability hotspots, new threats coming from the climate–health nexus, climate (im)mobility and security, sustainable practices for land use and finance, losses and damages, inclusive societal climate decisions and ways to overcome structural barriers to accelerate mitigation and limit global warming to below 2°C. Technical summary We synthesize 10 topics within climate research where there have been significant advances or emerging scientific consensus since January 2021. The selection of these insights was based on input from an international open call with broad disciplinary scope. Findings concern: (1) new aspects of soft and hard limits to adaptation; (2) the emergence of regional vulnerability hotspots from climate impacts and human vulnerability; (3) new threats on the climate–health horizon – some involving plants and anima...

AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 1, 2018

BioScience, Dec 14, 2022

E cosystem restoration, as it was defined by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Bio... more E cosystem restoration, as it was defined by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES 2018), is "any intentional activity that initiates or accelerates the recovery of an ecosystem from a degraded state. " Further refinements to the term have been focused less on the presence of an ideal state and more on bringing the ecosystem onto a trajectory that improves ecological functionality with respect to the baseline degraded landscapes. It is hoped that by improving ecological functionality, different types of restoration can simultaneously enhance biodiversity, increase resilience to natural disasters, and promote the well-being of people living in or near degraded landscapes (Besseau et al. 2018). The potential of restoration as a multifaceted means of addressing multiple sustainability challenges has generated global enthusiasm, concurrent with a proliferation of global and regional restoration targets and commitments. The Bonn Challenge was the first major international restoration-focused initiative (established in 2011), and it pledged to restore 150 million hectares of land globally by 2020. This initiative was later endorsed by the New York Declaration of Forests, which aimed to bring 350 million hectares of land under restoration by 2030. When the Sustainable Development Goals were adopted in 2015, the importance of protecting and restoring forest ecosystems, among other sustainability measures, was articulated in goal 15, "Life on Land. " The One Trillion Trees Initiative was launched at the World Economic Forum in January 2020 with the aim to conserve, restore, and grow a trillion trees by 2030. June 2021 marked the beginning of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which is intended to catalyze restoration efforts globally. Most recently, the Glasgow Climate Pact emphasized the importance of protecting, conserving, and restoring ecosystems to meet the Paris Agreement temperature target (UNFCCC 2021). These large-scale policy pledges and the potential for restoration to yield carbon offsets has led to a growing interest from powerful financial actors in the Global North to fund restoration (Löfqvist and Ghazoul 2019), further catalyzing restoration initiatives globally. Global restoration targets are often primarily based on spatial and quantitative metrics derived using high-level,

AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 1, 2018

Land system changes generate many sustainability challenges. Identifying more sustainable landuse... more Land system changes generate many sustainability challenges. Identifying more sustainable landuse alternatives requires solid theoretical foundations on the causes of land-use/cover changes. Land system science is a maturing field that has produced a wealth of methodological innovations and empirical observations on land-cover and land-use change, from patterns and processes to causes. We take stock of this knowledge by reviewing and synthesizing the theories that explain the causal mechanisms of land-use change, including systemic linkages between distant land-use changes, with a focus on agriculture and forestry processes. We first review theories explaining changes in land-use extent, such as agricultural expansion, deforestation, frontier development, and land abandonment, and changes in land-use intensity, such as agricultural intensification and disintensification. We then synthesize theories of higher-level land system change processes, focusing on: (i) land-use spillovers, including land sparing and rebound effects with intensification, leakage, indirect land-use change, and land-use displacement, and (ii) land-use transitions, defined as structural non-linear changes in land systems, including forest transitions. Theories focusing on the causes of land system changes span theoretically and epistemologically disparate knowledge domains and build from deductive, abductive, and inductive approaches. A grand, integrated theory of land system change remains elusive. Yet, we show that middle-range theories-defined here as contextual generalizations that describe chains of causal mechanisms explaining a well-bounded range of phenomena, as well as the conditions that trigger, enable, or prevent these causal chains-, provide a path towards generalized knowledge of land systems. This knowledge can support progress towards sustainable social-ecological systems.

AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 1, 2019

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Jun 1, 2019

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Jun 1, 2019

Implementing the 2030 Agenda may well translate into competing claims on scarce land resources. T... more Implementing the 2030 Agenda may well translate into competing claims on scarce land resources. Thus, there is a call for a better linkage of science, policy, and practice to navigate development trade-offs and use co-benefits. We found that since 2015, scientists formally associated as members to the Global Land Programme (GLP) have mainly researched on topics that are relevant to the 2030 Agenda, but only half of the sampled publications actually address interactions between its targets. Of those, many are concentrating on the interactions between climate action, environmental targets, and food security, while interactions between land-related issues and poverty are addressed much less often. Our results point to opportunities for further strengthening GLP's capacity to engage in transdisciplinary dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration and respond to the knowledge needs of societal partners.

The Journal of Environment & Development, 1993

ABSTRACT The "Enterprise for the Americas Initiative" was designed to incorpora... more ABSTRACT The "Enterprise for the Americas Initiative" was designed to incorporate Latin America into a system of global trade while addressing the region's need for environmental protection. Will the goal of trade liberalization undermine the Initiative's ability to contribute to sustainable development? This paper discusses the concept of sustainability as it relates to future development strategy. It also examines two threats to the implementation of sustainable development: first, from globalization of trade institutionalized by the EAI, and second, from GATT measures designed to buttress policy programs such as the EAI and NAFTA. Using applied notions of sustainable development, the Initiative's provisions—international standardization of trade regulations, open investment, debt accompanied by conditionality, and the Environmental Fund—are reviewed on the basis of their impact on environmental and social stability.

Ecology and Society, 2022

Extensive land-use "regime shifts" have been observed as rapid transitions from natural land cove... more Extensive land-use "regime shifts" have been observed as rapid transitions from natural land cover or subsistence-oriented land use to intensified and/or expanded commodity production. However, it is often unclear whether these land-use changes are part of broader land system regime shifts in which pre-existing production systems and livelihood strategies are fundamentally transformed along with observable land-use changes rather than simply displaced or eliminated. This is a critical social-environment question given that regime shifts are often a desired and intended outcome of national rural development and market-liberalization policies but must also be attentive to environmental conservation and/or climate change mitigation goals. We investigated whether nationally extensive land-use changes implemented through large-scale land deals in Lao People's Democratic Republic resulted in full, partial, or no villageand landscape-level regime shifts in and around land deals. Overall, land deals triggered a wide variety of full, partial, and no regime shift outcomes. Land deals with both domestic and foreign investors produced positive and negative outcomes, although foreign land deals for the production of rubber led to significantly higher rates of indirect land-use change in impacted villages than domestic and/ or non-rubber land deals. Also, financial compensation alone was insufficient to improve community well-being because it could be reinvested to perpetuate previous land uses without the desired transformation in livelihoods and rural development. Land deals that exhibited greater social embeddedness (i.e., provided adequate compensation complemented by job-creation and improved access to infrastructure and/or services) were more likely to lead to positive regime shifts. Our findings demonstrate that any land system regime shift will produce both winners and losers, and thus it becomes necessary to critically analyze the localized distribution of social and environmental costs and benefits within broader-scale land-use regime shifts.

Third World Quarterly, Dec 1, 2007

... In El Salvador, a land-scarce, heavily settled country with the highest population density in... more ... In El Salvador, a land-scarce, heavily settled country with the highest population density in the Central American region, a key issue of the civil war had been the inequitable distribution of land. ... In this 'negotiated revolution' land reform was a political imperative, integral to the ...

Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Jan 30, 2014

ABSTRACT Climate change is rapidly undermining terrestrial ecosystem resilience and capacity to c... more ABSTRACT Climate change is rapidly undermining terrestrial ecosystem resilience and capacity to continue providing their services to the benefit of humanity and nature. Because of the importance of terrestrial ecosystems to human well-being and supporting services, decision makers throughout the world are busy creating policy responses that secure multiple development and conservation objectives— including that of supporting terrestrial ecosystem resilience in the context of climate change. This article aims to advance analyses on climate policy evaluation and planning in the area of terrestrial ecosystem resilience by discussing adaptation policy options within the ecology-economy-social nexus. The paper evaluates these decisions in the realm of terrestrial ecosystem resilience and evaluates the utility of a set of criteria, indicators, and assessment methods, proposed by a new conceptual multi-criteria framework for pro-development climate policy and planning developed by the United Nations Environment Programme. Potential applications of a multicriteria approach to climate policy vis-à-vis terrestrial ecosystems are then explored through two hypothetical case study examples. The paper closes with a brief discussion of the utility of the multi-criteria approach in the context of other climate policy evaluation approaches, considers lessons learned as a result efforts to evaluate climate policy in the realm of terrestrial ecosystems, and reiterates the role of ecosystem resilience in creating sound policies and actions that support the integration of climate change and development goals.

Environmental Science & Policy, Oct 1, 2014

Journal of Political Ecology, Dec 1, 2013

The dream of the neighboring communities of the forest is nothing less than to conserve, for alwa... more The dream of the neighboring communities of the forest is nothing less than to conserve, for always, for the present and future generations, our biological and historical riches inherited as a result of the armed conflict in which we were protagonists. (Associación de Reconstrucción y Desarollo Municipal de Cinquera 2004: 5) The expansion of 'peasant' claims from land as an economic asset to land as a component in a total ecosystem amounts to the redefinition of land as a primary economic value to land as but one kind of value within a larger panoply of generalized value.

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Jun 1, 2019

Abstract Global environmental change (GEC) and sustainability science (SS) communities’ science i... more Abstract Global environmental change (GEC) and sustainability science (SS) communities’ science is increasingly challenged to inform transformations to sustainability. Recognizing this, the Global Land Programme (GLP), a network of the international land system science community, is developing, testing, and launching new network infrastructures, science–policy interfaces, and co-production approaches. This paper charts the efforts of the GLP – since its 2015 joining of Future Earth, a 10-year initiative to advance global sustainability science – to support the land system science community as it endeavors to produce transformative research oriented toward sustainable development. Moving from incremental to transformational modes of knowledge co-production across scientific research networks – such as those represented under the umbrella of the Future Earth — requires that these work across multiple knowledge domains, scales, contexts, and regions, and in collaboration with a diversity of actors from global-level decisionmakers to national, regional, and local level civil society organizations as well as the private sector. Beyond the generation of fundamental science, GLP’s rich co-design tradition of working with land managers and linking case-study and field-based research to global synthesis situate it as a key institution and platform accelerating transformative research oriented toward sustainable development.

Ecology and Society

Land-use change (LUC) driven by commodity agriculture over the last 20 years has been particularl... more Land-use change (LUC) driven by commodity agriculture over the last 20 years has been particularly extensive in the Dry Chaco region of Argentina, which surpassed the Amazon during that time to become one of the top three global deforestation hotspots. Large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) have been cited as a key catalyst of deforestation and related LUC in commodity frontier expansion. However, it is unclear whether contemporary LSLAs that affected the Dry Chaco and other agricultural commodity frontiers globally differed in their mechanisms of LUC from conventional agricultural expansion processes. The diversity of domestic and foreign investors, commodity crops, and LUC dynamics observable in contemporary LSLAs in Argentina's Dry Chaco provide a focused lens, or "case set," through which to consider commodity frontier dynamics in the Salta Province since 2000. We integrated remote sensing analysis and classification of the timing and location of LUC within the boundaries of LSLA and non-LSLA agricultural parcels with survival analysis to draw conclusions about the dynamics of LSLA establishment (i.e., purchase/transfer of ownership/ title change) and LUC associated with production operations. Regionally, spatio-temporal patterns of agricultural expansion into increasingly marginal land were consistent between LSLA and non-LSLA parcels. However, parcel-based analysis revealed differing responsiveness to commodity prices and land-use constraints imposed by the National Forest Law, which translated into diverging LUC trajectories among LSLA and non-LSLA parcels. In particular, LUC on LSLA parcels was significantly slowed by Forest Law constraints, but continued on non-LSLA parcels and a small number of "recategorized" and/or illegally deforested LSLA parcels. Our findings demonstrate the importance of moving beyond large-scale, aggregate spatial assessments of LSLA outcomes that aim to inform policy yet 'black box" actors. Actor heterogeneity must be explicitly accounted for as part of the causal mechanisms that influence land acquisition and lead to differing LUC trajectories.

Las adquisiciones de tierras a gran escala o "Grandes Transacciones de Tierras" (GTT) i... more Las adquisiciones de tierras a gran escala o "Grandes Transacciones de Tierras" (GTT) informadas durante las últimas dos décadas en la región del "Chaco" en la provincia de Salta, al Norte de Argentina, contribuyen al fenómeno de la expansión de la "frontera agropecuaria", y también podrían interpretarse como un ejemplo más de la historia ambiental de la región en los dos últimos siglos. En este trabajo analizamos este caso utilizando un enfoque de investigación de métodos mixtos que combina herramientas empíricas y análisis de información cuantitativa dentro de un marco conceptual que se basa en la historia ambiental, los estudios agrarios críticos y la ecología política. Analizamos los datos recopilados por el Punto Focal América Latina (PFAL) de la Iniciativa Land Matrix (ILM) sobre las GTT que tuvieron lugar entre 2000 y 2020 en nuestra área de estudio, pero también en Argentina y en Latinoamérica y el Caribe (LAC). Las GTT en nuestra área de estudi...

BioScience

Ecosystem restoration is an important means to address global sustainability challenges. However,... more Ecosystem restoration is an important means to address global sustainability challenges. However, scientific and policy discourse often overlooks the social processes that influence the equity and effectiveness of restoration interventions. In the present article, we outline how social processes that are critical to restoration equity and effectiveness can be better incorporated in restoration science and policy. Drawing from existing case studies, we show how projects that align with local people's preferences and are implemented through inclusive governance are more likely to lead to improved social, ecological, and environmental outcomes. To underscore the importance of social considerations in restoration, we overlay existing global restoration priority maps, population, and the Human Development Index (HDI) to show that approximately 1.4 billion people, disproportionately belonging to groups with low HDI, live in areas identified by previous studies as being of high restora...

Global Sustainability

Non-technical summary We summarize what we assess as the past year's most important findings ... more Non-technical summary We summarize what we assess as the past year's most important findings within climate change research: limits to adaptation, vulnerability hotspots, new threats coming from the climate–health nexus, climate (im)mobility and security, sustainable practices for land use and finance, losses and damages, inclusive societal climate decisions and ways to overcome structural barriers to accelerate mitigation and limit global warming to below 2°C. Technical summary We synthesize 10 topics within climate research where there have been significant advances or emerging scientific consensus since January 2021. The selection of these insights was based on input from an international open call with broad disciplinary scope. Findings concern: (1) new aspects of soft and hard limits to adaptation; (2) the emergence of regional vulnerability hotspots from climate impacts and human vulnerability; (3) new threats on the climate–health horizon – some involving plants and anima...