Explaining rural land use change and reforestation: A causal-historical approach

Research on human-environment interactions is bedeviled by two key analytical challenges: integrating natural and social science information and demonstrating causal connections between proximate and distant influences. These challenges can be met by adopting an event-focused, causal-historical approach to research methodology, referred to here as Abductive Causal Eventism (ACE). With ACE, researchers construct causal histories of interrelated social and/or biophysical events backward in time and outward or inward in space through a process of eliminative inference and reasoning from effects to causes, called abduction. ACE is contrasted with three leading approaches to human-environment research: Land Change Science (LCS), Socio-ecological Systems (SES), and Political Ecology (PE). For illustration, ACE is applied to a study of post-War environmental change in two rural watersheds in Saint Lucia, West Indies. Findings reveal that the most consequential change has been the widespread reforestation of lands abandoned from farming. This change occurred irrespective of the type of land tenure, but was especially commonplace on lands with steeper slopes and further from roads. Reforestation during the 1960s and 1970s was caused by a combination of commodity market challenges, abandonment of subsistence cultivation in response to smaller family sizes, and sizable out-migrations of younger adults overseas. The expansion of banana cultivation in the 1960s and then again in the 1980s slowed and in places reversed this trend. But an especially large wave of farmland abandonment swept the island from the mid-1990s to early-2000s because the banana export market collapsed as a result of preferential market access being eroded by a series of WTO trade rulings. These effects have been reinforced by a surge in investment from return migrants and the tourism industry which has drawn labour out of farming while also creating economic incentive and political support for protecting more forests on both private estates and public lands. Yet, the post-War trend in reforestation may have ended as agriculture displays signs of rebounding and residential and tourism development expands unabated into the countryside. This study demonstrates the advantages of using ACE where explanations entail diverse types of causes operating across space and over time.     

Understanding recurrent land use processes and long-term transitions in the dynamic south-central United States,c. 1800 to 2006

Forests have historically been under significant land use pressures that cause periods of degradation, clearance, and recovery. To understand these changes, studies are needed that place trends in a historical landscape context and also examine recent dynamics. Here, we use historical investigation (c. 1800) and an examination of land use and land cover change between 1973 and 2006 to establish a baseline trajectory of the forested system of the south-central United States (US) plains. The study culminates in a highly detailed accounting of the processes and causes of land change between 2001 and 2006. In the study region, the forest transitioned from early low-intensity use, to clearance for farming and timber, to widespread recovery from degradation beginning in the 1930s. By 1970, the region was transitioning from recovered woodlands to an intensive regime of recurrent timber harvest and replanting. The recurring cycle inherent in intensive silviculture has been the main cause of land change for the past several decades, accounting for more than 95% of the total extent of change between 2001 and 2006. The transition to forest recovery in the south-central US was an important historical occurrence. However, the dynamic post-transition landscape needs to be better understood.     

The trends in bioeconomy development in the European Union: Exploiting capacity and productivity measures based on the land footprint approach

Bioeconomy comprises a novel approach towards economic development in the European Union (EU). Its development should be confined by the planetary boundaries (biocapacity). We integrate the land footprint approach related to production and land biocapacity to assess the trends in capacity and productivity of bioeconomy in the EU countries throughout 1997–2013. Results show that the level of production-based land footprint and land biocapacity vary across the EU countries. However, Belgium is the sole case where production-based land footprint exceeds land biocapacity. The highest possibilities for development of the bioeconomy sector are observed for Slovenia, Croatia, Romania and Slovakia. Meanwhile, Estonia, Denmark and the United Kingdom have almost achieved the level of land biocapacity. Considering the catch up growth rate, almost all of the EU countries (with exception of Greece, France, Italy and Romania) show increasing footprint-to-biocapacity ratios with the highest values for Estonia and Latvia. The significant absolute decoupling between production-based land footprint and agricultural value added is observed in Denmark. Meanwhile, Italy, Lithuania and Spain show relative decoupling. Thus, these countries should pay particular attention to productivity improvements in forestry and agriculture. This study contributes to setting the targets for bioeconomy policy that can support the sustainable and efficient use of biological resources.